Juno News - November 22, 2021


Parents have a right to make an informed decision on vaccinating their kids


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

183.14456

Word count

636

Sentence count

20


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Health Canada has approved the rollout of a new series of pediatric vaccines for 5-11 year olds in Canada. In this episode, Dr. Kelly reviews the documents presented by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) regarding the new program.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I'm very concerned about the very shallow and somewhat misinformed way we're talking about
00:00:09.840 vaccines for 5 to 11 year olds in Canada right now, just days after Health Canada has approved
00:00:15.720 the beginning of a vaccine rollout for that age category. And if there is one piece of advice,
00:00:21.520 one recommendation I would have for Canadian parents, it's very simple. Go and read the
00:00:26.180 Health Canada documents approving the vaccines for this age cohort for yourself. The documents
00:00:32.520 presented by NACI, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, they've presented two documents,
00:00:38.920 one a six-page summary, another a 24-page detailed document, more detailed document,
00:00:44.160 outlining questions about the vaccine, concerns about the vaccine, and explaining why they have
00:00:49.680 approved it. It's a very interesting document and it presents, I would say, a more nuanced picture of
00:00:55.240 the conversation than we're getting from a lot of the exuberance about the vaccine we are hearing
00:01:00.080 on social media, or hearing in the media, or even from some doctors and specialists talking about it
00:01:05.700 on television, on the radio. I'm not here to tell you what choice to make for yourself, for your
00:01:10.820 families, and so forth. There's a lot of people very excited to get this vaccine for their children.
00:01:15.220 There's a lot of people who have some questions and concerns. But I think if we want to talk about
00:01:19.520 listening to the experts, if we want to talk about, you know, being informed, having the facts,
00:01:23.940 and so forth, I don't think that anything can be hurt by people actually reading these documents
00:01:29.260 that have been produced by this National Advisory Committee, the one that did ultimately give the
00:01:34.360 thumbs up to this. I will say there is one very interesting point that they make multiple times
00:01:39.800 in this document, which is that they say, due to the nature of this issue and some of the unanswered
00:01:45.800 questions around pediatric vaccinations, parents and kids should be respected and supported
00:01:50.520 for whatever decision they make, whether to vaccinate or to not vaccinate, and they should not be
00:01:56.380 stigmatized because of that decision. So I think one of the more concerning things I've seen of late
00:02:01.820 is a news story saying that 70% of Canadians responded to a poll and said that they would support
00:02:07.180 expanding vaccine mandates, vaccine passport throughout Canada, to 5 to 11 year olds, meaning
00:02:12.960 that if they soon do not get the vaccine, they should be excluded by society.
00:02:16.640 It's a de facto mandatory vaccine, as we have pretty much seen the vaccine passports play out
00:02:22.540 for older age cohorts. And I would encourage everybody who is trending towards that line of
00:02:27.880 thinking to just read these documents, because some of these lines from that advisory committee,
00:02:33.120 basically saying one should not be stigmatized for deciding not to get the vaccine,
00:02:37.800 well, that's basically them clearly saying, look, some folks are not going to get it
00:02:41.980 for, you know, whatever reason, and you need to be respectful of that. So that is clearly not calling
00:02:47.980 for the ostracizing of individuals who don't get the pediatric vaccine. One other thing I'll say
00:02:52.740 that they say in this report that's been presented is that negative side effects that appear greater than
00:02:59.900 one in 1,000 have not been picked up by any clinical trials or studies. So they do not yet know
00:03:07.000 about anything that may be of a greater incidence rate than one in 1,000. But like I said, all I'm
00:03:12.280 really trying to communicate here is go out, read this document for yourself. Do not take my word
00:03:17.580 for it. You can find it online. I've tweeted it out, the government's own advisory committee report
00:03:22.400 up on the Health Canada website about their thoughts and what they have to say about the pediatric vaccine.