Florida became the first state Monday to recommend that healthy children not receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in revised guidance last month recommended that nearly all children age 5 and older get Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot that’s available through Emergency Use Authorization. It recommends that children ages 12 and older also get a booster shot.

But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and many physicians and epidemiologists disagree, arguing any COVID-19 vaccine mandates imposed on children are unethical. At a 90-minute roundtable discussion held in West Palm Beach, they discussed how politicians and “the medical establishment have continually ignored data, instead choosing to stoke fear and push for lockdowns and mask mandates in their fruitless attempts to ‘stop the spread.’”

“Over the past two years, the data has shown us what works and what doesn’t work. It is long past time to stop the ‘COVID theater,’” DeSantis said. “In Florida, we told the truth, we let the data drive our response, and we let Floridians make decisions for themselves and their children. As a result, Florida is in a better spot than states who used fear-mongering and mandates.”

Florida was the first state to lift mandates during the pandemic, and the state legislature passed a bill, which DeSantis signed into law, to ban COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates.

The state Health Department two weeks ago announced new COVID-19 guidelines to empower health care practitioners “to follow science, not [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s status quo.”

And last week, DeSantis called on the state legislature to pass a bill to protect healthcare workers’ freedom of speech and ability to offer COVID-19-related treatments.

Ladapo said Florida “has continued to stay ahead of the federal government by following sound science – not coercion. Scientific debate takes place in a public forum – it is not hidden in federal bureaucracy. We need to get back to living – not hiding in fear.”

One key speaker at the roundtable, the inventor of the mNRA technology used by Pfizer and Moderna in the COVID-19 shots, was Dr. Robert Malone.

“There is no justification for mandating vaccines for children, full stop,” Malone, who’s warned about the health effects the shots could pose, said. “We’re of the strong opinion that if there is risk, there must be choice. As far as we’re concerned, there is no medical emergency now, and there is therefore no justification for the declaration of medical emergency and the suspension of rights that has occurred with that reupping of the medical emergency by the executive branch.”

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, scientific director at the Brownstone Institute, added, “If you have had immunity, you don’t need vaccines, and that by itself sort of reduces any argument for having a vaccine mandate or vaccine passports. But for children who haven’t had COVID, the question was, we don’t know to what extent it helps, up against death and serious disease.

“Right now, … the benefits of vaccinating children are very small. We know that there’s a risk of myocarditis for young boys and young men, but also for girls. There might be other adverse reactions that we don’t know about yet. So, for children, the benefits we know are at best, very small and we don’t know what the risk benefit ratio is. I think under those circumstances, it’s unethical to mandate vaccinations for children.”

In response, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “Let me just note that we know the science. We know the data and what works and what is the most, what the most effective steps are protecting people of a range of ages from hospitalization and even death. It’s deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations, when it is our best tool against the virus and the best tool to prevent even teenagers from being hospitalized.”

Numerous studies also have shown the detrimental effects lockdowns have had on children.

Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, said, “Right from the start, everyone, all the powers that be were saying that these measures, lockdowns and other restrictions, will work. But the truth is we didn’t know whether they would work or indeed what the purpose would be, even if they did work, where was that taking us?

“The one thing we did know was that the measures we were proposing to implement lockdowns and other restrictions would have enormous cost,” he added. “That was the one thing we were certain about. And yet that’s what we went ahead and did.

“So we inverted the precautionary principle of trying to minimize harm by doing the one thing that we knew would cause harm. Now we can say the benefit of hindsight is that the measures, in fact, didn’t do very much to slow down the spread and what we do see very sadly is that what we knew right at the start that these measures would cause harm that has in fact unfolded in front of us.”

This article was originally posted on Florida recommends healthy children do not receive COVID-19 vaccine