Dr Ros Jones is retired NHS consultant paediatrician, who in February 2021 was shocked to hear an item on the early evening news inviting children aged 6-15 to join a trial of the AstraZeneca viral-vector-DNA covid-19 vaccine. This was at a time when the low impact of SARS-CoV-2 infections in children was already well established and when there was no medium-term let alone long-term safety data for this vaccine in adults. She wrote immediately to the trial organisers who agreed they didn’t know the drug was safe for children!
Within the next 2 months, PfizerBioNTech had applied to the MHRA for approval for their gene-based mRNA vaccine for 12-15s and it was clear there was an urgent need to act. She got together a group of senior academics and experienced health professionals and they wrote a fully referenced letter to the MHRA highlighting the recklessness of approving these products for children. The result of this first letter was that all the authors were referred by the Professor Chris Whitty’s office (Chief Medical Officer) to the Counter Disinformation Unit at the Cabinet Office.
Undeterred, they continued to write to regulators and politicians, presenting letters to Downing Street. She set up the Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council (CCVAC) and spoke widely, ensuring that even if politicians and regulators were deaf to common sense or ethics, that at least parents were aware the official SAFE AND EFFECTIVE view was not shared by all. Informed consent without information is not informed consent at all.
She, like the other authors in this series of statements, applied for core participant status as representing the only UK group specifically looking at the covid vaccines for children. Although this was refused, she was glad to be invited to submit a Rule 9 witness statement. This involved a fair amount of work uploading all 241 exhibits to a rather clunky government portal (the legal team initially lost about 60 of her references). It also involved responding to a request to clarify a section with additional references and a request to share her statement with Professor heidi Larson, one of the Inquiry’s expert witnesses. It was thus particularly galling to be told that her statement was “not sufficiently relevant” to warrant publication on the Inquiry website. So here it is below for readers to judge.
Witness Name: Dr Rosamond Jones on behalf of:
Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council (CCVAC)
Statement No: 1
Exhibits: 241
Dated: 08-5-2024
