Dr Val Fraser: About Safer to Wait

Dr Val Fraser is a former teacher, university teacher educator, and school inspector. She is interested in natural health and natural health for children.

In May of last year, Dr Fraser joined with other professionals in the fields of medicine, science, education, and law to launch, Safer to Wait, a campaign dedicated to providing information to parents for informed consent for children’s Covid injections.

This is an edited segment from the weekly live General Assembly meeting on March 28, 2022. The full General Assembly Meeting is available in our Video Library. A transcript of this presentation can be found below.

page 3 1Here’s what WCH members, staff, and coalition partners are saying about Dr Fraser’s presentation: 

“Great approach to reach out to the parents like this.” -Dr. Maria Hubmer-Mogg

“Excellent website, thank you.” -Terri Haydar

“Great project, the pediatricians aren’t listening, but the parents should…” -Stephan Becker

“Thank you Dr. Frazer, this is so inspiring!” -Paola Amaldi

“Such amazing creative tactics used here! Well done!” -Zoe Strickland

“Great webpage!!!” -Dr. Maria Hubmer-Mogg

“Thank you Val for your valuable contribution!” -Tess Lawrie

Transcript

Dr. Val Fraser === Dr. Katarina Lindley: [00:00:00] So our next speaker is Dr. Val Fraser. Dr. Val Fraser is a former teacher, university teacher educator and Ofsted school inspector. She continues in her current role as an education advisor for a local authority in the UK. As well as her specialism in education, she has had a long interest in natural health and in particular natural health for children. In may of last year, she joined with other professionals across the fields of medicine, science, education, and law to form a group which launched the Safer To Wait campaign. This is dedicated to providing information to parents for informed consent for children’s COVID vaccination. And at this time, especially in UK, this is more important than ever. So thank you, Dr. Fraser for joining us today. Dr. Valerie Fraser: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Okay So I’ve, I’ve structured this, presentation into a few parts, basically, what is Safter to Wait, which is the campaign. My [00:01:00] involvement alongside others, how it came about, what we did and continue to do and how successful it has been. And then obviously there’ll be some questions and answers. So we’ve got an introductory slide there and I’ve asked Zoe to do these slides for me. I should say that the slides coming up there aren’t very many of them, they may be a bit text-heavy, but I want to reassure you not to panic because they mostly serve as visual aids because everything I’m going to show you is really the structure of the website we’ve got and a few other things, and you can have a look at that in your leisure and read it. So there really isn’t a great deal of reading to do. And, if we could, remove the slide presentation for a while, I’ll just talk a little bit of background. The campaign was to provide information for parents, factual information, and it was designed to inform consent or lack of consent, but facts. And whilst I’m the face of this this evening, I should say, I work very closely with a small group of [00:02:00] people, three others, and we have been largely anonymous. In fact, this, we haven’t done any interviews. Uh, we haven’t. Um, in fact, this is the first time we’ve presented. I’ve presented to a wider audience, um, than just our closed communities. And there’s been a reason for that. We wanted to be anonymous. So, I mean, you know, we’re not trying to build ourselves up as some kind of, Banksy artist and the enigma that goes with him. If you know his work. We very much felt that the campaign needed to stand on for by itself. We wanted it to have its own authority. We didn’t want it to be, um, contaminated by personalities and characters. And particularly we didn’t want to be targeted because we had such important work to get information out to parents that we couldn’t risk that, we felt. Um, so I’m an educationalist that’s already been explained and it was almost like my two worlds collided really in my whole professional life, trying to help children become the best versions of themselves. Plus my interest in natural health, [00:03:00] just converged really into this campaign. There happened to be a group of professionals all around May time, 2021 in the UK who were alarmed when we were alerted that the government were going to roll the COVID vaccines out to children. And you’ve had Dr. Ross Jones, the retired pediatrician on here, she instigated a large group of scientists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, parents, and from the, and they informed the campaign. They gave us the evidence-base. They gave us the science and the references and the data. And then a small group of us worked on the Safer to Wait campaign, in terms of producing a leaflet for parents. Um, and we had a very, very conservative message, which was urging caution: it was safer to wait. Um, We didn’t go in. We don’t jab your kids or anything more dramatic than that. And it was deliberate because we needed, it was a political strategy really. We needed to [00:04:00] meet the parents where they already were. It wasn’t that we were just wanting parents who believed in that we, what we believed and all due respect to Loretta who’s pointed out, you know, the, um, the, the harms in vaccines in general. I mean, that’s, that’s where I come from with my children being 30 and 27. They’ve not been vaccinated, but we couldn’t produce a message to parents that assumed that. We didn’t want to be judging their past decisions. So we actually had a line in our leaflet, the addressed to parents we’ve said, as we know, children’s vaccines are safe and effective. And that was a compromise on, on all our parts. And especially me, I’ll take ownership for, for that writing or lots of input from others. Um, but we needed to meet them where they were. And we needed to say, yes, you’ve been a good parent. You know, you’ve done what you’ve done, but please, please pause before you consider that this is being a good parent, you know, this, [00:05:00] this, you might want to have another think about. So that is where we were. Now, subliminally, there was also the Safer To Wait in a state of huge panic and fear across the country about illness, the Safer To Wait served that purpose. Um, I mean, I have to say it was probably even subliminal to us because we only reflected on that later, but, but nevertheless, um, we realized that that was part of the drawing. Okay. So this is the leaflet that we produce. And Zoe, if we could show my second slide. Okay. So that was, that was the address. You don’t need to read it, you’ll find the updated version of this on our website. It was like a letter to parents and it was, and I’m quite used to writing letters to parents, you know, in my role as an educator. And so it was on the day, the mainstream media, announced this to the general public, that the government were going to roll it out that I wrote that it’s gone through various versions and had lots of input from others. And then, the next slide, this is the input, this is the [00:06:00] evidence, the data, the arguments that our doctors and our scientists, that we’re indebted to. And so, that’s what we produced and that was ready to go in June the following month. All credit to my, my coworkers on all of that. So we knew that we could send it around on social media, but we also were aware that is, could be an echo chamber and we needed it to reach a wider audience. So we wanted hard copies and we wanted them through letterboxes. That’s where my work came in really. I took some responsibility for how it was distributed. We have a movement in the UK, which, is called a stand in the park. It particularly took off in the UK, but it’s over the world. And we had 600 parks across the UK where people meet face to face, advertised on websites, where their park is and strangers meet, but who are aligned with the countering the COVID narrative. I was so fortunate that stand in the park wanted to work with me and support this. [00:07:00] So we did work together. The organization took place face-to-face and via social media and those parks across the UK organize themselves, distributed leaflets locally. I was also able to work with the Workers of England Union who were on our side, who offered all the printing at cost. What I also did is, again, we got most people involved because they could be anonymous, because it was just posting through letterboxes and they didn’t have to talk to people. However, I did construct a code of conduct, which was basically just giving them a few hints about if they did have interactions and, you know, a few scenarios and what they might say, but I also wanted to appeal to them that we come from a mind of compassion and a heart of compassion. We’re not there to be angry at parents. I asked them to consider that we need to behave like the elders of a tribe who can hear the danger coming, but our [00:08:00] tribes people can’t. And so we’re going to try and alert them to the danger. And if we have to go into protective mode, then this leaflet is about protecting the tribe from the bottom up with the, with the youngest, with the children. Then we produced our websites and that had more detail and more resources. So this is our website. Now just a really interesting fact. Our leaflet proceeded this, there was a little bit of a lag and we didn’t realize, but we had a rival organization, a counter opposing force in pounce position. From the minute we launched our website, they popped up, they only had one page. They were discrediting us and they were suggesting that this was a professional outfit no doubt with lots of money involved in launching it. Oh, how we laughed. There was no such thing, we’re all working on our kitchen tables, I can tell you. But the annoying thing is, theirs is called safertowait.org and it’s Google [00:09:00] that finds that one, it doesn’t find ours. So we really have to spell out the website in order to get people to it. So it worked for their point of view. They’ve never updated it. They never needed to. So we have this landing page and this landing page is breaking news or the latest news and we try to update that whenever there’s a relevant issue to do a children’s COVID vaccines. And that’s the graph that goes with it, so it’s a whole page and split into two for these slide purposes. And then we have these 10 tiles and these are aspects of the COVID vaccines as they affect children. So we’ve got things like a tile which says, low risk. We’ve got another, which says they’re not drivers. We’ve got another one that says , vaccines are new, no long-term data. And you can click on any one of those and it’ll take you to more resources. So if we go to the next slide, That will show you the serious and fatal adverse reactions, which have been reported, that’s just [00:10:00] one aspect of it. Our attempt was to be authoritative, august. We wanted it evidence-based, we knew that readership was lay mostly, but we wanted it to be therefore reader-friendly, but informed. We wanted parents to know that they could trust our evidence. So we have the arguments here, we then have the visuals, so they can actually see it. We were appealing to all different types of readers, you know the visual learners and readers as well. We want you to show them exactly where that secure evidence base, where all the references to the arguments that we’re making, we wanted it to be academic. We wanted it to be authoritative. They could trust us if you like. And this was where we had all the help from all our doctors and scientists who are working on these issues. And we didn’t set out to inform adults on adult vaccines, but actually when you’re [00:11:00] talking about some of this, you know, new vaccines, no long-term data, it, of course it does inform adults about their own choices. And, we’ve got some evidence that actually, this also lowered the uptake for adults. Something like relative versus absolute risk. It was a real educative tool that the scientists and doctors gave us, which we could then put there so that parents could understand it for children. So basically what are we doing now? We are updating our website. We’re putting up new resources. We’re putting updated references on there all the time. I say we I’ve had zero to do with this as I’ve already explained, I was involved in the distribution of the leaflet and of course I contribute to it but the website itself is two other colleagues. I kind of think of myself as being the Amazon driver really of this, but my creatives, my two colleagues have done wonders I think. We’ve got new projects planned, we’ve got a video Tik Tok with boards a bit like the[00:12:00] Bob Dylan, subterranean blues, er, a child discarding boards with messages on them. We’ve got a singing project, children in train where children are singing ‘stop in the name of love’, but obviously we’ve reworked the lyrics. We’ve also got a five to 11 leaflet planned because 1st of April, which is only later this week, that’s when our government are targeting the younger children. So I guess the last part really of the Safer to Wait thing is how successful have we been? Well, we had a vigorous uptake of the adult population and the children 12 to 16 has been on average 50%. So, in many ways, yes, it’s still a lowish take-up. Our success criteria wasn’t to produce a good leaflet, it was to try to reduce uptake. So we have been looking at that as carefully as we can. [00:13:00] We knew that the jab uptake was highest in the highest socioeconomic areas. And there is also some evidence that where the campaign coverage was highest, that’s when the jab uptake was lowest in children. So I took my own area because obviously I was very invested in looking at the uptake figures and in Nottinghamshire which is the county that I live in, in UK, 50,000 leaflets were delivered through letterboxes. And we had an uptake of 37%. And that was the lowest outside London and the 10th lowest in the country. So we know that when we do this, it reduces uptake or at least it would suggest it does, let’s put it that way. And we also coincidentally… Well, is it a coincidence? When I looked at the adult third dose booster, as it was called, then until we got the fourth It was also 37% and we were the 10th, same statistics, 10th lowest in the [00:14:00] country, lowest outside London. So we think there has been some wash back effect. We’ve had some evidence from Northern Ireland who have rolled out the jab four or five weeks earlier than us, they have had a 2% uptake. So here’s hoping that the message is getting across. Now, of course we haven’t done all of that because the vaccine itself has done a terrible PR job, hasn’t it, in terms of what we’re hearing reported and parents are reading those news reports and other things and their own experiences. And then I’m just going to finish with two examples of where my local Stand (in the Park) just took things a little bit more creatively, if you like and got very enthusiastic. They raised funds and we got an ad van. So this is a Bob Moran cartoon. If you don’t know the work of Bob Moran, please look him up. He’s a marvelous artist and he’s got this [00:15:00] monster, holding a jab. We’ve got the mama bear as Terry would say, and her child behind and ‘stand firm’. They hired this van for eight hours to travel across the whole of our county in shopping centers, in car parks, in busy areas for people to see that. And then they also organized for a sky banner to go across when the premiership and championship football teams were playing on a Saturday afternoon. And we joined up with Yorkshire and we did most of Nottinghamshire and most of south Yorkshire as well. And that was flying in the sky and you could see it says, ‘Hey Pfizer, leave our kids alone’. That actually is not down to me, that was a Yorkshire member who thought of that. Our website, Twitter and Instagram, contact details Dr. Katarina Lindley: Dr. Fraser thank you so much. It’s an incredibly important campaign as a mom of five. [00:16:00] I really am grateful for what you guys are doing. And this poster, like you said, it’s so powerful. And they say until they came after the children, people were standing by, trying to understand what’s going on, but now mama bears, like you said, and papa bears are coming and saying, that’s it, you know, don’t go after our children and the poster is incredible. Thank you so much for all your work in this field. Dr. Valerie Fraser: Thank you. Dr. Katarina Lindley: And Maria, if you could ask some questions from our chat room please. Dr. Maria Hubmer-Mogg: Yes. Thank you for the great presentation and for sharing that important information with us. we have a question from Stephan Becker. He asks ‘is there an age limit in the UK where children or teens can choose to get the jab without the consent of at least one parent that’s a big issue in some countries?’ Dr. Valerie Fraser: Oh, what a great question and it’s a big issue here as well. So we have something called Gillick competence. Now I’m old enough to remember [00:17:00] when Victoria Gillick, a mother, wouldn’t let her child have contraception. She was nearly 16 and actually the doctor wasn’t prosecuted for giving her that medicine because it was decided that she was competent to make her own decision that became known in law Gillick competence. It’s never been applied to vaccines ever, but we have had that law apply to our children from 13, they’ve said, actually it’s not in law, but they said they could apply it to anybody 13 and over. Coincidentally, they decided all that when they wanted to roll it out to 12 to 15. However, we do know of random cases where children have been vaccinated and the parents didn’t know about it, but very random. It does seem as though most or authorities, because it took place in schools largely, the head teachers and so on have been very reluctant to use that without having consent from the parents. So, yes, sorry it’s a complicated answer, but it’s been a very [00:18:00] complicated issue for us in the UK. Certainly they could not apply that to lower than 13. So we feel we’re on safe ground when it comes to the next rollout of the next age group. Dr. Katarina Lindley: Thank you. Another question from Paola Almadi, ‘Were you represented at the rally in London on Saturday 19th?’ We haven’t done that. As I say we’ve largely flown under the radar, believing our interfaces with parents and we haven’t sought to attract anything to us as individuals. Dr. Valerie Fraser: So we haven’t done that. I do go to a lot of the marches in London, personally and individually, but, but not as a representative of Safer to Wait. Dr. Katarina Lindley: We do have a question from the newsroom from Mike Austin, he’s asking what about the COVID 19 risk to children? One child age five to 15 of 7.3 million in England and Wales died with only COVID 19 on the death certificate after December, 2021. [00:19:00] So he’s just saying, even having that one registered, what do you think about the risk of the actual vaccine? Dr. Valerie Fraser: I have to rely on all the doctors who keep me informed because whilst I am a doctor, I’m not a medic. So I have to take advice from my colleagues on that. I know the risk is very, very low and therefore I’m a advocate for children not having the vaccine. I should say, I do speak out on education. How schools should never been closed. Children should never be masked. I could wax lyrical on how much masking stops learning. Nevermind all the health, but he stops learning. Dr. Katarina Lindley: Well, I have to share something with you because I recently gave a testimony to Australian Senate, and that was my testimony. What the masks have done to our children when it comes to speech therapy needs, or them not to be able to understand the emotions and the development of emotions behind the words. And then, immunity, like you talked about, we have so many studies that showed that [00:20:00] immunity children is so good. So I appreciate you actually saying those words because it’s incredibly important. Dr. Valerie Fraser: Just very quickly, what doesn’t seem to be getting across is the fact that children cannot move from learning and knowledge to understanding if they don’t get to talk about their learning. They have to be talking in groups, they have to access the higher order thinking skills in order to process the learning, so it becomes what we call a flexible knowledge, where they can apply outside of that context. Otherwise it’s just knowledge and facts, which they can do a limited amount with, and that is something that I feel is just not getting the kind of traction, but anyway, we’ve gone off topic, I’m sorry about that. Um, Safer To Wait, yeah. Dr. Katarina Lindley: Well thank you so much for the campaign and just want to let you know if you have a chance to look at the chat later on, there’s so many great, positive messages coming there from you, and we all appreciate the work you’re doing. [00:21:00] So thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for listening everyone.

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One Comment

  1. A great initiative by Val and her team – delivering a more than significant postive impact on the lives of fellow humans. If a small group of like-minded people can achieve this – what could a million of us do?
    Change the world for the BETTER – I know it.