They shouldn’t be passed out at all. they are being used off label, in an uncontrolled way, with no justification in terms of risk : benefit. There is going to be a huge population who suffer awful effects from this down the line - it’s going to be a scandal of epic proportions.
I am a scientist and I now work in drug trials - there is absolutely no way that we could dose a child with these drugs. None. Absolutely none. Or anything even close to the side effects they have. No ethics committee in the world would do it, and I personally would refuse to work on such a trial (which wouldn’t happen anyway , due to the rules on testing stuff on kids.)
It’s so hard to include children in trials as it is - I’ve run a couple of paediatric trials and the rules are rightly incredibly strict. And those were both for paediatric cancer indications, so kids who would probably die unless treated.
To give a healthy child these drugs is just mind boggling to me. This entire population of children are taking part in an experiment with no ethics oversight, and no medical oversight.
The rules for drug research were drawn up in the wake of some horrific human rights abuses - the neuremberg trials started the process and it was refined with things like thalidomide, and tunguskee. I would encourage you to read up on the sort of stuff that happened to make these rules necessary- be warned, it’s disturbing.
Like our child safeguarding framework, every one of those pedantic, strict rules was brought in because someone did something awful to another human being.
To see that ethical framework discarded like this makes me feel very disturbed indeed. I feel like I’m shouting into the void, watching a terrible accident happening in slow motion and unable to do anything about it.