Children shouldn't be getting coronavirus vaccination shots, as their immune systems are "very strong," and they don't suffer the serious effects of COVID-19 that adults suffer, and adults should not be forced into getting the shots, former President Donald Trump said Friday on Newsmax.
"I'm the vaccine person," Trump told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "I think people should have freedom in getting it. They can't be forced because they do have rights. But look, I'm the vaccine person."
Trump said he does think people should be getting their shots, "but I don't think young people, their immune systems are very strong ... you can look at, there's one area where 35,000 people died in a certain state, and they had nobody below the age of, I think, 16, died. They had one person, I think that had a serious condition, a precondition."
He later added that "I just feel the young people shouldn't get (a vaccine). They don't need it."
However, Trump insisted that the drug companies such as Pfizer "never got pushed like they did with me" when it comes to the development of the coronavirus vaccines.
Earlier this week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it will add a warning to the Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines about mild, rare cases of heart inflammation that are being seen in some teens and young adults after they get their shots. The second dose of the Pfizer vaccine was linked to about twice as many cases as the second dose of the vaccine made by Moderna.
"Pfizer, I don't want to use the word owns, but you know, essentially they are very close to the FDA," said Trump. "They couldn't stand me because I forced drug prices down."
But the vaccine makers "used to sit around for 12 years coming up with a vaccine. And vaccines take on average three to five years and they came in and they told me what their schedule was," said Trump. "I said, 'You've got to be kidding. We have people, millions of people dying,' and I pushed them ... We got that done in less than nine months."
Trump also pointed out that his administration "bought $12 billion worth of vaccine before we really knew it worked, but we thought, I thought, it was going to but based on knowledge. If we didn't do that, you wouldn't have been getting shots until October or November of this year, so there was nobody would have had this yet. It was risky and that included the bottles and the needles and all of the things that went with them."
Without that action, he added, "we were heading towards a 1917 Spanish flu ... I think it was one of the greatest bets made ever in history."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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