Fake vaccine consent forms are being handed out by anti-vaxxers gathering outside schools and sent to teachers via email, according to reports.
The documents claim to be “notices of liability” from the NHS. However, they’ve been exposed as completely fake.
Students aged 12 to 15-year-olds are now allowed to be vaccinated across the UK. Ministers have urged parents to get their children vaccinated against Covid-19 as soon as the vaccination programme comes to their school.
The plea comes after the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that around one in 15 children in school years 7 to 11 in England were estimated to have had coronavirus in the week ending October 2.
Although children tend to experience coronavirus with mild symptoms, health officials are recommending the vaccine in order to cut transmission and avoid further disruptions to education.
The false letter claims that there’s a “one in 29,389 chance of dying from the vaccine”, comparing that with children’s extremely low risk of death from the virus.
The figure seems to have been taken from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s Yellow Card scheme, for people to report any suspected side-effects after vaccination.
According to the BBC, around 49 million people have had at least one vaccine dose and about 1,600 deaths have been logged in the scheme so far. However, just because someone who is vaccinated has died, it doesn’t mean they’ve died because of the jab.
As the elderly population were prioritised for vaccination, it stands to reason that some people will have died after having their jab. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the two occurrences are linked.
Professor Robin Shattock, an immunologist based at Imperial College London, sought to explain why we should be confident about vaccines last year.
“I think we need to remember that vaccines, next to clean water, have been the single most effective public health implementation globally,” he said.
“They’ve saved more lives than any other medicines. People are concerned about this vaccine because they perceive that it’s been done too quickly, and actually we’ve done a disservice by saying ‘it takes 10 years to make a vaccine’.
“One thing that I think people completely forget is that a vaccine stimulates your immune system, it tricks it to see if it’s seen the virus, so you’re getting an aspect of the infection that’s so much minor than the real virus.
“So when you think about the risk-benefit, the risk of having a severe outcome from Covid-19 far outweighs any theoretical risk of a vaccine, and the problem is that vaccines are so successful that diseases go away and all you see are the side effects.”
