Trump administration planning to link COVID vaccine shots to child deaths in controversial anti-vax push

The Donald Trump administration in the US is planning a presentation linking COVID-19 vaccine shots to children’s deaths, according to various local media organisations. The vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet next week to review and make recommendations in this regard.

According to the Washington Post, the presentation will focus on reports of 25 child deaths that have been gathered from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database open to public and maintained by the FDA and the CDC. The data includes unverified reports from various sources, including ones taken from various social media platforms.

Though unverified, the health agencies use the data as a guide to investigate further. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clearly states that any report in the system does not imply that a vaccine caused an adverse event or a report can be made based on it.

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“To identify causation to a vaccine you need to show that the cause of death was something the vaccine caused, and by itself, a VAERS report would not show that — you need larger studies comparing incidents of the harm with or without the vaccine,” said Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California Law, San Francisco to NBC.

Another report published by CNN that cites sources said, the US Food and Drug Administration officials are scanning through data to check for reports, cases of congenital deformities in babies after their mothers received the Covid-19 vaccine while pregnant.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary while speaking to the media house last week said the agency ( US Food and Drug Administration) was looking into deaths of healthy children from the COVID-19 vaccine.