Five states — Alabama, Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee — allow minors to decide for themselves whether or not to get the experimental Covid-19 vaccine without parental consent, the East Bay Times reported. Additionally, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health last month issued an order allowing 12 years-old and up to receive the vaccine without parental consent. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would allow teens 14 and older to make the decision themselves.
Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized the emergency use of Pfizer/BioNTech’s coronavirus in 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended using the vaccine in that age group.
Parental consent requirements for vaccines vary from state-to-state.
“The federal government does not actually govern over what kind of consent or assent you need for these teenagers,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said earlier this month during a virtual event with The Economic Club of Washington, DC.
“Each person has to go to their state,” she said. “Many places will say, ‘Your parent doesn’t need to be there, but your parent needs to have information or your parent needs to have signed off.’ So it really does vary by state.”
In North Carolina, teens can consent for themselves for Covid-19 vaccines, “if they have the ability to understand and make decisions about their health,” Bailey Pennington, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, told CNN in an email.
“It is expected that in the majority of instances, communication is shared with parent and guardians and parent/guardian consent is obtained for COVID-19 vaccination for people under 18,” the email said in part, adding, “As part of normal development, most children are able to understand and make decisions about their health some point before the age of 18. There is no one age at which this always occurs; it varies from child to child. Some vaccine providers may ask for written consent for people under age 18 who are consenting on their own.”
In a couple of states CNN contacted, Alabama and Tennessee, teens 14 and older can be vaccinated without needing parental consent.
“The Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) requires consent for vaccines for persons up to 14 years of age. Of course, ADPH wants parents and guardians engaged in the healthcare of their children,” Dr. Karen Landers, a health officer within the department, wrote in an email to CNN.
In Oregon, children 15 and older may give consent without a parent or guardian. In Iowa, CNN was told that individual health care providers or health systems consult with their legal counsel regarding requirements and documentation needed to administer Covid-19 vaccines.
A number of medical experts have spoken out against administering experimental vaccines to young people because the virus poses little risk to them, and the vaccines have not been proven to be safe.
Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said on Fox News last week that there are concerning reports appearing in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS database of youths dying shortly after receiving the jab.
“Now we’ve started to see in the VAERS database 15-year-old children getting heart attacks, two-year-olds dying a day after the vaccination, a six month-old dying from her mother’s vaccination through breastmilk,” he said.
Data collected by VAERS shows an alarming number of young people being hospitalized with myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) after receiving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Roughly 125 cases of myocarditis have been reported to the VAERS database since January, Military .com reported. As of April 27, 17 patients in the DoD’s health system were reportedly being monitored for myocarditis.
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, a vaccine skeptic, hit back at the CDC claims that post-vaccination myocarditis cases are occurring at “normal background rates.”
“They are not telling the truth,” Berenson tweeted.
“In Connecticut, “18 cases were reported as of May 24 – all of whom were hospitalized. The state called them 16-34, but the hospitals reported them as under 30. Connecticut reported ~240,000 fully vaccinated people under 30 as of May 19,” Berenson wrote.
“If 1/2 of the vaccinated were men (who are far more likely to get this), that’s a rate of 1 in 6700 men, he added. “Now, you can play with the numbers to get the ratio down as low as 1 in 5,000 or as high as 1 in 15,000 if you like, but even 1 in 15K is far worse than background rate.”
2/ The best data we have come from Connecticut, where 18 cases were reported as of May 24 – all of whom were hospitalized. The state called them 16-34, but the hospitals reported them as under 30. Connecticut reported ~240,000 fully vaccinated people under 30 as of May 19…
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) May 26, 2021
4/ Finding good numbers is hard, but this peer-reviewed 2004 paper (which looked at myocarditis in soldiers following a smallpox vaccine), reports a background rate of 2.2 cases per month per 100,000 soldiers. The Connecticut rate is SEVEN TIMES that… pic.twitter.com/wK9brNY5zx
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) May 26, 2021
Israel is now considering giving children just one dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine, rather than the usual two, due to the reports of heart problems among some teenagers who received the immunization, according to the Times of Israel.
An Israeli Health Ministry examination into the side effects of the vaccine in April raised concerns of a possible link between the second shot and dozens of cases of myocarditis.
“The report said that 60 myocarditis patients were treated and released from the hospital in good condition,” the Times of Israel reported. “Two of the patients, who were reportedly healthy until receiving the vaccination, including a 22-year-old woman and a 35-year-old man, died.”