UK's Chief Medical Officers Caught with Their Pants Down—Child Covid Vaccination FOI Reveal

New FOI response details crucial minutes from meeting on decision to Covid-vaccinate young teenagers.

UK’s CMOs from left to right: Sir Gregor Smith, Sir Chris Whitty, Sir Frank Atherton, and Sir Michael McBride

The decision to vaccinate children aged 12 to 15 against Covid during the autumn of 2021 remains one of the most contentious chapters in the UK’s Covid response.

Despite statistics showing minimal risk to children, long-term safety concerns, and the UK’s own Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advising against the move, the country’s four Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) broke all precedent. Overruling the JCVI’s recommendation for the first known time, they green lit mass vaccination for young teens.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Molly Kingsley and children advocacy group Us For Them, the minutes from the pivotal September 7th 2021 meeting have finally come to light, offering insight into how and why they justified such a controversial and illogical decision.

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Unethical Suppression and Questionable Justifications

Professor David Paton

The meeting minutes reveal that the CMOs’ primary justification for vaccinating was to reduce school disruptions, a rationale criticised by experts, including Professor David Paton, a prominent economist. Paton and others pointed out that even the CMOs’ own modelling suggested minimal benefits to prevent school absences.

Worse still, the minutes point to the troubling suppression of expert input. The UK’s Moral and Ethical Advisory Group (MEAG), a specialist ethics committee tasked with addressing the invasiveness and irreversibility of such medical interventions, was notably absent from the decision-making process.

Scheduled discussions about vaccinating children were abruptly cancelled, and MEAG was not reconvened until the day after the CMOs had already finalised their decision. Even then, the committee was explicitly instructed not to address vaccination, sidelining ethical concerns entirely.

Speaking on the minute’s release, Dr Clare Craig implied the omission of certain subjects from the minutes was just as telling as the weak justifications. She posted this graphic to her X account after Kingsley’s publication:

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Conflicts of Interest

Headquarters of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Euston Square, London.

Conflicts of interest appear to have played a significant but overlooked role in the decision to vaccinate young teens. Existing guidelines outline advisors are required to disclose any conflicts before participating in discussions. However, the minutes detail no such disclosures.

One notable example stands out, as Kinglsey discovered. The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP)—the professional membership body for family doctors and vocal supporter of the vaccination rollout—received a £102,820 donation from Pfizer in 2021. Larger sums followed this in subsequent years, totalling over £500,000 by 2023.

Note Pfizer obviously manufactured the vaccine under consideration.

Put plainly, an “expert body” that provided “impartial” advice to the UK’s CMOs (not that the CMO were very capable of seeing the risk/benefits just didn’t stack up on their own) accepted donations from the very company whose products were under consideration.

The close financial relationships between pharmaceutical companies—particularly the major vaccine manufacturers—and the UK's health ecosystem are both extensive and well-documented. I published some exclusives on it earlier this year:

Government Advisers Too Accepted Payments From Covid Vaccine And Treatment Manufacturers

It's Not Been A Good Month For Our "Impartial" Celebrity TV Doctors...

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Uninformed Consent

While the CMOs touched on informed consent in their deliberations, subsequent public messaging failed to deliver on it. For example, the CMO of Scotland voiced concerns about negligible school absence benefits and the incidence rate of myocarditis in healthy children.

(This was before that same CMO, Sir Gregor Smith—knighted in 2021—changed his tuned and supported mass vaccination, citing “educational benefits” as a major contributing factor.)

Less than two weeks later, however, official statements from the NHS and the Department of Education described the vaccine as “safe and effective,” with no mention of potential risks, evidence of superiority of natural immunity, or the JCVI’s earlier reservations—citing “considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of potential harms.”

Other public messaging also oversimplified the issue. Kingsley recalled a press release made on September 20th quoting a child calling Covid vaccination “quick, easy, and painless,” almost trivialising dangers linked with the product.

For context, Us For Them polling conducted in late 2021 highlighted just how oblivious some parents were to the objective facts:

• Only 23% of parents surveyed were aware that the JCVI had declined to recommend the Covid vaccine to young teens.

• Just 32% of parents stated they would have consented to vaccination if they had been fully informed of the context.

Kingsley revealed that Us for Them offered nearly every print media outlet their polling data, but “no one wanted to publish it”.

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Thoughts

The lack of enforcement around conflicts of interest, failing to provide informed consent, and ostracising an ethics committee evidence serious systemic issues that many of us already know about—and all too well.

Public health decisions that prioritise expediency over ethics will always damage trust. For context, various studies have documented that because of Covid vaccination, children experienced heart scarring, myocarditis or pericarditis severe enough to visit the hospital, and reported aggressive cancers.

It’s something we’re already seeing. In September, the policy group Future Health’s analysis of official data showed that 230,000 fewer people in England received flu vaccinations in 2023/24. Uptake fell in every area. Trust has vanished.

While we can be sure our authorities will blame “misinformation” and crack down on social media companies, we can also be sure they’ll never admit allowing Big Pharma—and the darker forces behind—to corrupt our health institutions, industry, and infrastructure might, just might, be the root cause.

They’re too busy cashing in those donations and pay cheques after all.

If you want to see Kingsley video breakdown, you can do so here—highly recommended.

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