Child sacrifice: Japan to strengthen its recommendation for Covid shots for kids

Because Japanese parents haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about jabbing their 5-11 year old kids…

Covid vaccination rates by age group: 1st dose blue; 2nd dose yellow.

…the experts at the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (MHLW) want to strengthen the recommendation for parents to have their kids shot. Sorry, have their kids get Covid shots.

5-11 Covid vaccine to be made a non-binding obligation for parents

Although Japan can’t mandate vaccines, it has different strengths of recommendation. The government has given only a basic recommendation (推奨 suisho) up to now for 5-11 jabs [1], but will probably strengthen it to a non-binding obligation (NBO, 努力義務 doryoku gimu, literally “effort obligation”) the same as for the jabs for those aged 12 and over. This means parents will be called to actively consider the jabs for their kids and presumably have more social and media pressure put on them.

The reason for initially only giving a basic recommendation rather than a NBO was that there wasn’t sufficient data on vaccine effectiveness (VE) against Omicron previously, but apparently there is now. So let’s look at the evidence that convinced the experts, shall we? (The full file of the expert panel’s slides can be found here.)

One study they cite is Fleming-Dutra et al., who found VE for the Pfizer jab among American 5-11 year olds dropped to 28.9% 5-8 weeks after the second dose. Er, that’s shit.

But not as shitty as VE for 12-15 year olds, which turned negative at 4.5 months and dropped to -20% after 7.

So does Pfizer’s VE for 5-11 year olds go negative after four months too? Conveniently, none of the studies cited by the experts covers a period longer than 3 months after dose 2. But a recent preprint from Qatar does. Its results are…exactly what you’d expect: -9% after 4 months, although with wide CIs.

So what justification is there for Japan giving the kid jabs any recommendation, let alone a stronger one? Well, another cited paper (Sacco et at.) found Pfizer’s VE dropped to a negligible 21.2% 43-84 days after dose 2 in Italy, but there was a 41.1% reduction in severe disease!

That may almost sound semi-beneficial until you notice the severity rate of the unvaccinated is less than 0.01% (510 severe cases out of 562,083 confirmed infections). So the main result is a short-term 40% reduction in something that is already next to nothing.

But the key study upon which the MHLW’s eminent experts seem to have based their decision is Tan et al. Although Pfizer’s VE against infection was again poor (25.6% 60 days after the second dose), VE against hospitalisation was a whooping 80.4% 30-59 days after dose 2 for Singaporean 5-11 year olds!

So you might think Singapore’s pediatric ICUs would be overflowing if not for the wonders of mRNA technology. But then if you actually read the study…

Over the 17.9 million person-days at risk, there were 53,429 infections, of which 5342 (10.0%) were PCR-confirmed infections (Table 2). Over the 16.4 million person-days at risk for the hospitalization outcome, there were 288 hospitalizations. Among hospitalized children, only five received supplemental oxygen, four of whom were admitted to the intensive care unit. Of these five children, one was unvaccinated, two were partially vaccinated, and two were fully vaccinated. No deaths attributable to Covid-19 (as determined by the cause of death reported to the Ministry of Health) were observed during the study period.

Yep. Four out of the five moderate-to-severe cases were jabbed (there were 16,909 unvaccinated cases vs 36,520 partially/fully vaccinated cases). So the pharma shills can’t escape to their last refuge of claiming that the jabs protect against severe disease in this case.

As for vaccine safety, there’s obviously no long-term data, but the MHLW’s experts cite a CDC slide to show the immediate side-effects of the Pfizer jab for 5-11 year olds aren’t as nasty as those for their older siblings. But they’ve still got an approximately 10% chance of being too ill to attend school. They also have a 1% chance of requiring medical care after either jab, which isn’t much different from getting Covid.

The experts also cite another CDC slide showing that 5-11 years have a lower risk of myocarditis after the Pfizer jab than 12-17 year olds. “Lower risk” doesn’t mean “safe” though, does it?

And this is data from a passive reporting system, so it doesn’t show the true rates. For example, a new preprint involving active monitoring of adverse events after 2 doses of the Pfizer jab in 301 Thai 13-18 year olds (202 males; 99 females) finds 1 case of myopericarditis, 2 cases of pericarditis, and 4 cases of sub-clinical myocarditis (all male). The myopericarditis case entered an ICU.

This is a shockingly high rate: 1 in every 29 double-jabbed males. Now compare that to the VAERS numbers above, which are unlikely to include any sub-clinical cases. But Japan is one of the only countries to allow the even riskier Moderna shot for 12-17 year olds, so it certainly has a high tolerance for myocarditis in young males, as the MHLW’s own recent pamphlet shows.

Reported post-vaccination cases of myocarditis per million people after the 1st (pink), 2nd (blue), and 3rd (green) doses in males aged 12 to 29 for Pfizer (left, purple) and Moderna (right, red).

In conclusion, the experts didn’t give the pediatric jabs an NBO initially because there wasn’t enough data on effectiveness against Omicron. But now there’s lots of data showing the jabs to be ineffective and harmful, they’ve decided to strengthen their recommendation to pressure reluctant parents. I guess Japan’s experts are like the vaccine makers: they take orders from the government.

[1] I looked at the MHLW’s less than convincing information for parents back in March.

A critical look at the Japanese govt's information about Covid vaccination for 5-11 year olds