Article published yesterday. Constructive feedback welcome. ** 01/22/21 By Brian Hooker, Ph.D, P.E. The CDC must open its Vaccine Safety Datalink to the public so we can better understand the link between fewer childhood vaccines during the pandemic and the drop in reports of adverse events, including infant mortality. One of the unintended consequences of COVID-19 lockdown and quarantine measures in the U.S. is seen in childhood vaccination rates. Overall, these rates plummeted when the first emergency measures took place in March 2020. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a drop of more than 2 million in the number of doses of non-influenza vaccines ordered from late March to early April. Orders for measles-containing vaccines alone dropped by more than 300,000 doses. Children were simply not getting their shots because all routine medical visits were being cancelled. Another CDC report indicates that the percentage of 5-month-olds who were up-to-date on their vaccinations in May 2020 was at 49.7% as compared with previous years when the rate was north of 66%. According to an article by Scientific American, New York City health officials cited that vaccination rates for children under 2 were down by 63% during the first two month of lockdown as compared to previous years. Concomitant with this drop in infant vaccination is an overall drop in reports of infant vaccine adverse events on the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is a “passive surveillance” system used by the CDC to monitor any potential vaccine injury from shots administered in the U.S. Where the number of reports of adverse events (AEs) for infants 2 and under was consistently above 4,000 for 2016 to 2019, in 2020, it dropped to just 2,303 — approximately half the number seen in previous years. Interestingly, there has been a precipitous drop in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) reports as well, as seen in the figure below. Where the rate of reporting of SIDS between 2014 and 2019 is approximately 20, in 2020, it drops by 75% to just 5 reports. This is by far the lowest yearly number recorded in the history of VAERS, where the second-lowest was 13 incidents recorded in both 2008 and 2009. An overall drop in infant mortality (i.e., children below one year of age) was also reported by Becker and Blaxill in June 2020. Their report, based on data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, showed a steep drop in mortality between February and May 2020. The rate has continued to drop through September 1, 2020 with an overall reduction in mortality of approximately 50 children per week, or 12.5%. Additionally, a drop in spontaneous abortions was observed for 2020 using the VAERS database. Where the rate had been between 31 to 47 reports between 2014 and 2019, in 2020, the number dropped to just 20, as shown in the figure below. This is the lowest number of spontaneous abortion reports since 2005, which is just after the CDC’s recommendation for the flu shot for pregnant women in any trimester of pregnancy. This may be due to a drop in vaccinations overall in the U.S. population, which would include pregnant women receiving the influenza and Tdap vaccines. ** Full article here: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-lockdown-vaccine-rates-dropped-so-did-sids-deaths/
