Children more likely to be hospitalized after COVID shots than natural infection, German health data shows

Are parents being given adequate information to make a risk versus benefit choice when deciding to vaccinate their young children against an infection that is mostly benign in this age group?

Data continues to be collected that shows the controversially authorized COVID-19 mRNA injections are risky, especially to children, as per German health data.

In a retrospective study, the authors compared electronically collected post-vaccination adverse events of Pfizer’s BNT162b2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with other, traditionally approved childhood vaccines in children younger than five years of age.

The observational study was neither planned nor initiated before vaccination and collected data based on a German electronic registration database.

It used online authentication to validate and gauge responses from 7,806 children who received at least one off-label dose of the injection. Of those, 7102 children received at least two doses and 846 received at least three doses of off-label Pfizer COVID shots.

They were followed for an average of 39 days post-injection.

10 of the children followed required hospitalization post-injection, while two of the children had symptoms that lasted longer than the data cutoff date.

40 of the children had symptoms ongoing longer than the three-month threshold and were “thus of unknown significance.”

As analyzed by the Daily Skeptic, children were 62% more likely to experience adverse event symptoms after the COVID-19 mRNA injections than other childhood vaccinations. They found that those under the age of five were further susceptible to a 155% higher chance of experiencing musculoskeletal symptoms, 118% more likely to experience dermatological symptoms, and an astonishing 537% increase in ear, nose and throat irritations.

The study found that mRNA dosing amounts correlated with the side effects reported. In the most severe cases, symptoms appeared in children given Pfizer’s mRNA shot off-label at doses of 5 or 10 micrograms.

As per Health Canada, the Pfizer mRNA shot is currently authorized in this demographic at a 3-microgram dose. For context, Moderna’s shot is authorized at a 25-microgram dose.

The study is limited in that there is recall bias where parents/guardians/caregivers may not accurately remember symptoms or their onset. It is also limited in that it is retrospective and self-reported by parental memory.

This recall bias also creates the potential for previous vaccine adverse events after non-COVID-19 injections to be memory-holed by parents/guardians.

The gold standard of safety testing is randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials, which this study is not. It merely compares COVID-19-vaccinated children to traditionally vaccinated children using generic data collection.

When sourcing other German data, it’s clear that the same age group of children, those under the age of five, are at very little risk of hospitalization due to natural COVID-19 infection. A now-published study in the European Journal of Pediatrics shows that out of nearly 14 million children, and nearly 1.5 million who tested positive for COVID-19, there were a maximum of 2,421 hospitalized with the infection from March 2020 to May 2021. That’s the first 18 months of the pandemic.

The flow chart shows the stark difference in numbers between the DGPI survey (the German Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases, denoted by the nd) and the ns (the numbers coming from the German national public health institute, RKI).

Under ICU admissions in the <5-year-olds, for instance, they use the actual reported numbers and then nd denotes the number corrected for using an under-reporting rate of 2.49.

What would happen if they adjusted for underreporting rates in vaccine reactions?

For reference, to date there has only been one analysis comparing traditional childhood vaccines, looking at completely unvaccinated children and the health outcomes of their vaccinated counterparts. It found a stark difference that favoured unvaccinated children.

Are parents adequately weighing the risk of these injections with the perceived benefit? And is the information being presented in a clear, accurate and reliable manner?