Under ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr, federal health officials are working to link COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to the deaths of 25 children, and may further restrict access to the shots, possibly recommending them for people aged 75 and up, instead of 65 and up, according to The Washington Post.
Four unnamed sources close to the situation told the Post that Trump administration health officials appear to be using information from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to make the claim that COVID-19 vaccines have killed children. VAERS is a system in which anyone can report anything they think is an adverse event related to a vaccination. The reports are completely unverified upon submission, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff follow up on serious reports to try to substantiate claims and assess if they were actually caused by a vaccine. They rarely are.
Vaccine safety
Federal health experts continuously monitor VAERS and other safety surveillance systems, exhaustively assessing the safety of vaccines. After billions of COVID-19 doses have been administered worldwide, they—like other governments, health organizations, and academic researchers around the world—have found the shots to be remarkably safe. While they have been linked to a risk of myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart and surrounding tissue, respectively), that risk is low and the cases are generally mild. During the 2023–2024 COVID-19 season, the incidence rate of heart conditions was 27 cases per million doses for males aged 12 to 24, who have the highest risk of any group. The shots have not been linked to deaths or heart transplants, according to data presented by staff experts at the CDC.
