SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — On Jan. 20, California lawmakers introduced a bill allowing children aged 12 years and older to receive any FDA-approved vaccine, including the recent COVID-19 vaccine, without consent. parents.
The Teenage Vaccine Choices Act, or Senate Bill 866, builds on current state law that allows minors 12 years of age or older to receive both hepatitis B and human papillomavirus vaccines.
“Enabling young people to self-sustain life-saving vaccines, regardless of their parents’ beliefs or work schedules, is essential to their physical and mental health,” Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said in a statement.
Viner, who co-sponsored the bill with eight other Democratic lawmakers, said parents and guardians who refuse to vaccinate their children are preventing them from playing sports, extracurricular activities or spending time with friends.
According to the statement, unvaccinated people are about 20 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people, and about 28 percent of the target age group, according to Weiner, have remained unvaccinated since the FDA approved the vaccine for children five to five years. older.
Health professionals, students, and nonprofits across the state who campaigned for Wiener’s proposal called it a step in the right direction for teens to learn to take responsibility for public health and safety.
Neela, a 7th grade student from San Francisco, quotes Wiener as saying, “I can’t think of a good reason why laws shouldn’t allow people my age to reduce their risk of serious illness. And vaccines not only make us safer, they also keep our friends and family safe.”
Of the more than 77,000 COVID-19-related deaths reported in California since March 2020, 47 were under the age of 17, or less than 0.0001 percent, as of Jan. 19, according to the state Department of Public Health.
Robert Crane, a California parent who opposes the law, said giving minors the freedom to decide whether they get the COVID-19 vaccine violates parental rights and is a small step towards allowing the state to enforce vaccinations.
“Most kids don’t make the decisions that adults make because they don’t do all the research that exists,” Crane said in an interview with NTD News, sister publication of The Epoch Times.
Crane, among other concerned parents and healthcare professionals, is turning to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to identify side effects and deaths associated with the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to the reporting system, more than 2,100 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis have been reported in the past two years out of 529 million COVID-19 vaccines administered.
To date, about 11,500 vaccine deaths have been reported into the system – 0.0022 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which stated that “adverse events … following a vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused health problems.
The promulgation of the law also comes at a time when a recent CDC study found that natural immunity gained from a previous infection is much stronger against the delta variant than immunity gained from vaccination.
According to a CDC study released Jan. 19, vaccinated people without natural immunity are three times more likely to test positive than unvaccinated people with natural immunity in California.
“This law is absolutely bizarre, unconstitutional, and child abuse,” Dr. Masha Rechkunova-Goodson, a member of the California Association of Naturopathic Physicians, told The Epoch Times. “The vaccine is so new that we don’t know what will happen to them in the future.”
Brad Dakus, president and founder of the Pacific Justice Institute, a parental rights legal nonprofit founded in 1997, told The Epoch Times that the Teenage Vaccine Act is “alarming.”
He added that if the bill passes, many parents will withdraw their children from state-funded California schools and redirect them to private education alternatives.
Dakus said the US Supreme Court has consistently held that parents have a fundamental right to the health, education, provision and well-being of their child over the past century.
“A big part of that right is the ability for them to make medical decisions and health decisions for their child,” he said. “This law suggests that masses of California parents are willing to give up their child’s well-being to the state for a medical vaccine that can be very harmful and dangerous.”
Viner, a co-sponsor of the bill, also mentioned that under California law, children over 12 also have the right to consent to access contraceptives, abortion, or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
Dakus, however, called the comparison “a flagrant violation of parental rights”, which does not add to the credibility of this argument.
If the law on the choice of vaccines for teenagers is passed, it could come into force early next year. California will then join Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. in allowing children as young as 12 to receive vaccinations without parental or guardian permission.
Wiener’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
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Brandon Dray is a California correspondent for The Epoch Times.
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