Controversy Erupts Over Claims of COVID Vaccine-Related Child Deaths

A major scientific dispute has erupted over claims that COVID-19 vaccines have caused the deaths of children, pitting federal health officials against each other and highlighting the increasingly politicized nature of vaccine safety discussions.

The controversy began when Vinay Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, claimed in an internal FDA memo dated November 28 that “no fewer than 10” children had died from COVID-19 vaccines. The memo, which was subsequently leaked to the press, stated this represented “a profound revelation” and would mark “the first time the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”

Prasad’s memo quickly drew criticism from the scientific community, who questioned both the methodology and the conclusions. Most notably, 12 former FDA commissioners published a perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine challenging the basis for concluding the vaccines were responsible for these deaths.

“Any death that could be related to vaccination is tragic and warrants extensive investigation,” the former commissioners wrote. “The memo offered no explanation of the process and analyses that were used to reach the new retrospective judgment, nor did it indicate why that assessment should justify wholesale rewriting of vaccine regulation.”

A key point of contention was Prasad’s reliance on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which collects unverified reports of events occurring after vaccination. As the former commissioners noted, “VAERS reports, by themselves, cannot be used to determine whether a vaccine caused a particular event. The system’s primary purpose is to flag potential safety signals that must then be evaluated in carefully designed investigations.”

In a significant development that has received limited media attention, Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, published what he described as a “scoop” in his Substack newsletter. According to Faust, a December 5 post-marketing safety memo prepared by FDA scientists concluded “that the actual number of deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccines in the United States is somewhere between zero and seven.”

Faust reports that according to FDA employees familiar with the situation, the memo states that using an established WHO framework, zero deaths were deemed “certain” to have been caused by COVID-19 vaccines, two were judged “probable/likely,” and five were classified as “possible,” meaning the vaccines were, at most, equally likely to have caused those deaths as other factors.

When asked for comment, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told Faust, “The FDA’s investigation into deaths caused by Covid vaccines is still ongoing and there’s no final count yet of those deaths.”

This controversy comes against the backdrop of a larger debate about vaccine safety. Just last week, a large French study of 22.7 million vaccinated subjects versus 5.9 million unvaccinated controls with a median follow-up of 45 months concluded that COVID-19 vaccines were associated with a 25% lower mortality rate from any cause and a 74% lower death rate from severe COVID-19. However, that study focused on adults aged 18-59, not children.

The debate over vaccine safety highlights the tension between scientific evidence and political considerations. While hundreds of young children have died from COVID-19 during the pandemic, assessing the risk-benefit ratio of vaccines for children requires valid evidence rather than emotionally or politically biased considerations.

France, a scientific powerhouse on par with the United States, has contributed significantly to vaccine research, contradicting dismissive attitudes about international research that sometimes appear in domestic debates.

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter turned COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, has amplified Prasad’s claims despite questions about their validity. Berenson has previously made numerous demonstrably false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines.

The controversy underscores the importance of distinguishing between legitimate scientific inquiry into vaccine safety and politically motivated attacks on public health measures. The most common serious side effect of mRNA vaccines, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), occurs at a much lower rate after vaccination than after COVID-19 infection itself.

As the debate continues, experts emphasize that both vaccine safety concerns and COVID-19 risks must be evaluated using rigorous scientific methods rather than allowing political considerations to dictate public health decisions.