Vinay Prasad memo said at least 10 children had died from Covid vaccination – but offered scant evidence for claim
America’s top vaccines official promised, in a long and argumentative memo to staff on Friday, to revamp vaccine regulation after claiming that at least 10 children died from Covid vaccination – but he offered no evidence for that allegation and scant details on the new approach.
The top-down changes, without input from outside advisers or publication of data, worries experts who fear vaccines such as the flu shot may quickly disappear and that public trust will take a major hit.
“The ultimate outcome will be fewer vaccines and more vaccine-preventable illness,” said Dan Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases until this year.
The 10 child deaths were among children aged seven to 16 in 2021 to 2024 and reported in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a crowdsourced database to which anyone may submit reports, according to Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the chief medical and scientific officer at the US Food and Drug Administration.
