Florida will be the first US state not to provide state programs to administer Covid-19 vaccinations for toddlers or infants, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis underscored on Thursday ahead of federal vaccine regulators’ long-awaited, expected authorization.
Rallying against providing COVID vaccines to young children, DeSantis said at the press conference in Miami that it’s not something that they think is appropriate, so they’re not utilizing the resources there.
The Republican senator believes that the risks outweigh the benefits of vaccinating young children since COVID jabs, in his opinion, haven’t gone through enough testing and clinical trials to establish that they are safe and effective.
He also added that children are least likely to suffer serious health consequences from Covid, reiterating Florida is affirmatively against the Covid vaccine for young kids.
The Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine the US Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all confirmed that the Covid-19 vaccine is safe, and FDA allowed two Covid vaccines to be administered to children under 5 years old.
The Sunshine State’s decision was made to pacify parents’ fears about the virus that were stoked by the media, DeSantis told reporters, pointing out that doing an emergency-use authorization for a six-month-old or a one-year-old simply to placate anxiety is not the standard.
Since Florida is not ordering fresh doses of the vaccine after the FDA’s approval fast tracks the jabs for distribution and kids could start receiving shots as soon as Tuesday, that means parents in Florida will find it harder to access vaccines for their children, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed.
Headed by the outspoken critic of the vaccine, the state Surgeon General Joe Ladapo, the Florida Department of Health, has also issued a statement confirming it did not place an order for the jab with the federal government because it did not advise that all children become vaccinated.
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