Why are we vaccinating children against Covid-19?(sciencedirect.com) |
Why are we vaccinating children against Covid-19?(sciencedirect.com) |
Kids are in closer contact with each other and their parents than adults are with each other. It’s not even a close comparison. They may not get severe infections as often as adults, but ask any parent and they’ll let you know just how effective kids are at spreading infections.
It also feels deliberately disingenuous to bring up possible vaccine side effects without explaining that those same side effects occur with higher frequency and severity from the infection itself. It’s increasingly looking like exposure to Coronavirus is inevitable, so choosing the lower risk option of being vaccinated is obviously better than risking the worse side effects of the infection itself. Too many people are trying to treat this as a comparison between vaccinated or never being exposed to the virus ever, which is an increasingly unlikely possibility.
I took JNJ and boosted with Moderna I want people to choose to get vaxxed but as far as I can tell nobody is out there saying getting vaxxed will prevent you from spreading the disease.
It’s because they’re being disingenuous.
Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread. Reduced infection length gives less time for transmissibility.
So even if you can still transmit the virus while vaccinated, there is value in reducing the amount of time you’re infectious and the amount of viral load you’re spreading into the air.
It’s not a binary thing, despite what some are trying to suggest.
Edit: nm, you should. https://www.cnet.com/health/johnson-and-johnson-covid-booste...
https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2021/myocarditis-in-boys-and-youn...
The vaccinated spread Omicron at high rates:
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
And we are really hard on "wash your hands" (my 3 years old washes her hands better than most adults), it's just that she gets infected, so we do too. It's way milder on us, sometimes we don't get it, but she brings everything at home.
Welcome to the COVID-19/anti-vax "debate." Sometimes it seems like it's more of a testing ground for developing the most effective misleading arguments to discourage people from taking sensible public health measures and create politically-exploitable controversy.
Just reading the appendix, the calculation they do for the dangers of dying by COVID or the vaccine are completely insane. They take the raw VAERS numbers (which are not designed for this purpose and represent deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it). They then multiply this by 100 to account for VAERS allegedly undercounting deaths. They then assume that only 6% of people dying from COVID died from COVID, everone else allegedly only died with COVID.
And then they claim that PCR tests are highly likely to be false positive, so many people that are tested positive don't actually have COVID. This is just a series of completely outlandish claims, you can arrive at any number you want if you add "corrections factors" of two orders of magnitude with no real justification, especially if you start from bad data to begin with.
That is not going to make you feel any better if it is your kid who is one of these "negligible" deaths.
If there is anything you can do as a parent to reduce the risk to your kids, of course you are going to do it (especially if it is a no-brainer quick simple low-risk and cheap like a vaccination). Kids get all sorts of vaccinations and injections starting for their first few weeks of life (and even minutes - they get a vitamin K shot immediately after birth in the UK) , why should covid be any different?
Why not ban cars then as well?
True, but that's not a good argument. There's not enough data on the vaccine yet to be rule out the possibility that kids could also die from the vaccine, in some very rare cases. The death rate for kids infected with Covid is so low that we need a lot more data in vaccination studies to determine whether Covid or the vaccine has a higher death rate.
(FWIW, my kids are vaccinated - but not because of the death rate, but because of long covid)
No you're not. Having your kid wear a helmet 24/7 would reduce their risk. But it will be reduced by such a tiny amount that it's really not worth the trouble.
It's like saying "Why fight forest fires? Very few people live in the forests." Because the fire will grow and burn down all the cities.
And also: because we can do both. All the elderly people (that are willing to take the safe and effective vaccine) are vaccinated. We have plenty of vaccines leftover. This isn't a matter of picking who gets it and who doesn't.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002...
(I bet you neither would have expected ammonium nitrate explosions getting mentioned in the article!)
> Expression of concern: Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?
> The journal would like to alert readers to the fact that the Special Issue titled “COVID-19 Pandemic: Health impact and Novel research” including the article titled” Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” are being rereviewed post-publication by an independent Editor and a new set of reviewers, due to concerns raised regarding the validity and scientific soundness of the content. Further updates will be provided to readers once the investigations have concluded.
>While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases.
And again, this study was done long before omicron:
>As of this writing in mid-June 2021
Recent news story:
>The omicron-fueled surge that is sending COVID-19 cases rocketing in the U.S. is putting children in the hospital in record numbers, and experts lament that most of the youngsters are not vaccinated.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pande...
Furthermore why case counts are skyrocketing (literally the highest ever seen in the pandemic) hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7%.
For now. Let's see in three weeks from now, and let's hope that it stays that way. The differences in demographics between the populations that we have data on and the ones that are now affected are significant enough that I don't think we should party just yet.
Schools are very likely to become hyperspreaders with how little space there is between kids in class, and because the younger ones (grade 5 to 8) are still immature.
The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high.
> A study by the Helmholtz Centre Munich, for example, showed that the number of children with antibodies in their blood was six times higher than the cases reported by the Bavarian State Office for Health and Nutrition. [1]
I'm honestly baffled by how shortsighted the 'if it's not sick, it's not an issue' logic is. This does not work with Covid.
[1] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faq-sind-kinder-tatsaec...
I think this is not a good argument:
- Vaccines have been shown to be not very good at preventing infections, especially a few months after the last dose, and even more so with newer variants. - As far as I know, most virologists say that infection is inevitable. Vaccinating kids can delay the infection, but not prevent it.
A lot of things are 'likely'
• Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities.
• Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children.
• Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term.
• Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children.
• High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term)."
I am not qualified to evaluate the claims made here, directly. I am qualified to notice that there are a lot of prominent experts from big universities on TV telling us things that are not in keeping with some of the key claims of this paper.
If you are not qualified to evaluate these claims, how do you know they are prominent let alone “experts”? Why are you so willing to accept their opinions over a research articles conclusions?
I evaluate information about expertise partly based on social heuristics. For instance, long term reputation; and reputation networks such as are cultivated by mainstream (read responsible and accountable) journalism.
I accept their opinions because they are internally consistent, survive skeptical journalism over time, and based on the poor quality of criticism against them.
I am knowledgeable enough to detect many of the tricks and evasions of charlatans. And I review the work of watchdog organizations, too.
Finally, I believe that most people are decent. Most people are mediocre, yes, but they are decent. Conspiracies of evil cannot grow very large, because they collapse. Too many people are too good.
My level of acceptable risk is not the same as this paper argues it should be but I find the data suspect.
You are going to get it. Everyone is going to get it, probably repeatedly. France has vaccine passports out of the wazoo and 200k cases.
"Reducing the spread" of something implies that the spread is actually reduced at the macro level. It's irrelevant whether a single vaccinated person has a slightly reduced probability of transmitting the disease if _in aggregate_ everyone gets it anyway.
You may as well say that an umbrella helps prevent wet hair. Well yeah, but not in a blizzard. In a blizzard your hair is saturated anyway. No prevention has occurred.
"Vaccinate the world" doesn't solve covid. Vaccinated populations still get and transmit the virus. They're much better off of course because the individuals fight off the virus more effectively and their health systems function better.
But they still bloody get the virus, still provide a reservoir for mutations, etc.
If I had a quid for every totally nonsensical proclamation about "solving covid via xyz" I'd be a billionaire.
It's the same answer.
Actually a Dutch academic doctor (Diederik Gommers) stated this week that most people on IC in The Netherlands have one thing in common: they’re overweight. This doctor is part of the Outbreak Management Team in The Netherlands that deals with the COVID situation. Being overweight might be a be better indicator to see how likely one is to end up on IC compared to vaccination status. As such this doctor is not in favor of a 2G society (unlike the Dutch government that wants to push 2G).
This whole policy is lunacy.
According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the reason for the push to vaccinate children is because emergency use authorization will be gone in March 2022 and if children get vaccinated before March then vaccine producers will not be liable for negative side-effects afterwards. I am not a lawyer so I can’t confirm if there’s truth in this statement.
Regardless, very few children will get negative side-effects from COVID, much more will get negative side-effects from mRNA vaccines (especially boys stand to get much more myocarditis cases).
I think our children are our future and I certainly won’t risk an experimental vaccine on my soon-to-be 5 year old, perfectly healthy, daughter. A vaccine that (from my POV) seems to be quite ineffective and for which we still don’t know if there will be any long-term (say 10+ years) negative effects.
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
Freedom and safety, story of the World
Please flag this terrible post.
> "But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID," Fauci continued. "And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, 'hospitalized with COVID,' as opposed to because of COVID."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/broken-...
https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/researchers-identify-tech...
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr
https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/e54
Some convalescent patients continue to test positive long after the infection is cleared and they are no longer contagious.
https://wi.mit.edu/news/new-research-reveals-why-some-patien...
Also, there aren't plenty of vaccines leftover worldwide. Vaccines would be going to poorer countries that have low vaccination rates if those vaccines weren't being used for children.
Among 12–17 year olds, the vaccines result in on the order 200x reduction in hospitalization. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a3.htm?s_cid=...
I know its hard for some people, but we can't learn the info for you. Please be an adult when you use freedom of speech. These things you do have a real impact when you yell them into the echo chamber called facebook.
Initial viral load of exposure is a variable in infection severity, though, so it’s not without value.
These things can’t be reduced to binary answers.
Am I living in 2020 or did I dream vaccines existing and being extremely effective? At this point, if you are vaccinated NO ONE is highly likely to die.
I agree with everything except this. On a world wide level there are millions of unvaccinated adults.
Given the vaccine refusal rate in some countries, I wouldn’t be surprised if half of the currently unvaccinated don’t ever get one.
Don't know at all if that holds up to COVID but if getting the virus develops stronger imunity than getting the vaccine, maybe spreading the vaccination to countries that are way behind might be the right priority.
As for "long COVID", the best evidence available suggests most cases are misattribution:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
Study from September:
>Up to one in seven (14%) children and young people who caught SARS-CoV-2 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later, suggest preliminary findings from the world’s largest study on long Covid in children, led by UCL and Public Health England researchers.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-la...
The trade off of either-this-US-kid-gets-it-or-that-Indian-adult-gets-it becomes less severe when availability of vaccines is going up everywhere rapidly.
Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose.
so, scarcity is certainly the case sometimes (like right now for Paxlovid) but not for general availability vaccines worldwide.
Pharmaceutical companies would invest more in finding ways around regional constraints if they didn't have a free profit square by selling their vaccines in the US.
Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to vaccine distribution. We could waste months or years trying to get all of the vaccines to the “right” people first, or we could start vaccinating as many people as possible in whatever order makes it fastest. The latter option produces significantly better outcomes compared to waiting to try to distribute it globally according to some specific order.
My wife and I are both vaxxed and boosted but why would I shoot a drug into her that only claims to prevent severe disease, which is a very rare occurrence in kids.
Believe what you want, but every bit of evidence suggests otherwise. So your conclusion that the policy is lunacy is based on a false premise.
Evidence and actual science says otherwise.
There's simply a tiny improvement of safety, too small to care. Of course, this changes if the child belongs to a risk group that has a much higher chance of getting seriously ill and dying. Much like it totally makes sense to make your kid wear a helmet while biking, because the risk is much, much higher at that time.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
- WHO
- measure the spread, hospitalizations and deaths before and after, though, absent a control (see: global) there will of course always be people that will argue that it wasn't the vaccines that did it.
It's harder to find than what imagined, but the closest data I found is https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
The Table 1 compare the number of death related to covid-19 with the total number of death
* 0-17 years: 678/66,234 ~= 1.0%
* 85 years and over: 212,658/1,897,245 ~= 11.2%
So the risk of dying by covid-19 compared with all the other risk is much smaller for kids than old people. It would be interesting to compare with the total population of each age, but the difference will be bigger.
The problem is that traditional media a social media have a strong sampling bias. A dead of a kid is unusual and it will get more coverage than the dead of a 90 year old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
Researchers in England found in the first 12 months of COVID only 25 COVID deaths for under age 18. That is an incredibly small number. That level of risk is so low that any honest person would have to ask the question whether reducing risk is actually possible without worse side effects (and that’s not just for vaccines — I mean for any intervention including non-pharmaceutical interventions).
If the answer was yes, then vaxxing young kids makes more sense.
I understand that we originally believed the vaccine stopped transmission. It is time to let that go.
The vaccine is a tool to reduce the risk of hospitalization and mortality.
Whether or not Kids are Less infectious is not a good criteria to evaluate the worthiness of giving kids the vaccine. It protects them and the people around them.
Please don't conflate the lack of proper disease controls with evaluating vaccine effectiveness. We need better testing contact tracing and community outreach. We have really miss managed this.
To me it’s quite simple: does the risk of side effects outweigh the risk of serious disease?
For adults, no way, take the vax it’s safe and effective.
For kids: they are at much lower risk of severe disease so I would like public health authorities to show me the numbers please.
My understanding is that this analysis assumed the observed myocarditis risk of the 12-15 age group would also apply here, but IIRC more recent data shows no myocarditis cases at all for the younger group.
There's a theory that links the occurrence of myocarditis to high testosterone levels, but that hasn't been proven yet. Existing data shows that the increased myocarditis risk (more or less) only applies to boys/young males.
Vaccines do not prevent transmission, so what benefit is there for children (and their families) getting this vaccine when the risk of the disease is virtually zero?
As I mentioned (see linked CDC document), as far as we can tell zero children 5–11 have died from the vaccine out of ~9 million vaccinated. There were 11 cases of myocarditis, all recovered or recovering. As far as anyone can tell the vaccine has caused no long-term harm to any young child. This is a truly remarkable safety record, better than many vaccines we mandate for all children for diseases less dangerous than Covid.
Vaccines do partially prevent transmission, both for a vaccinated index infected person (viral load goes down faster and course of infection is shortened) and when their contacts are vaccinated (reduces likelihood of being infected at all).
But it’s not perfect, especially with the omicron variant which partially evades antibodies (but does not evade T cell immunity).
> what benefit is there for children (and their families)
The benefits are:
(a) There is some protection against initial infection (very effective with the original and alpha/beta variants, very effective after a booster for delta, only partially effective for omicron; perhaps in the future there will be a variant-agnostic booster), which should get still more effective after a mild Covid infection. Eventually almost every person on the planet will be vaccinated and/or infected multiple times by Covid, and this population immunity is the only way out of the pandemic.
(b) Vaccination decreases risk of hospitalization and death vs. current Covid variants across all age groups including children by 2+ orders of magnitude. The adaptive immune system is extremely effective but it takes a while to learn to recognize new pathogens, making diseases much more dangerous to the immunologically naïve. Vaccines induce this learning up-front without the need for an accompanying high-risk infection.
(c) The omicron variant is putting more children in hospitals than previous variants, and an even more risky-to-children variant might become dominant in the future. T cell immunity induced by vaccines should continue to offer strong protection vs. future variants, because there is limited evolutionary pressure on the virus to evade it (whereas there is significant evolutionary pressure to evade antibodies).
(d) Children eventually grow up, and Covid is going to be circulating forever. An immunologically naïve person who encounters it at some later time (maybe decades in the future) is going to be hit much harder. An immunization for everyone now is a great insurance policy for the future.
What benefit does your continued existence, or some random farmer in India, or some random taxi driver in Chile confer the US vs some overweight middle manager who pays fat taxes on his 200k income and does his part to keep a local liquor store in business?
It might not pass western morals but the game theory side seems pretty obvious to me.
It’s part of American folklore and culture, we do not always live up to our higher ideals but as Americans we take care of our own.
Yes possibly it’s national narcissism but there you have it.
But I've lived outside of my country for quite a big chunk of my life and don't really have a strong connection to our 'national identity', I don't have a flag and I don't care about our royal family.
Also, vaccinated are supposed to wait longer before testing for covid after exposure since they are more susceptible to false negative results. This also could infect more people and have a counter result.
Look at the outcome for young boys. They would expect 67 icu stays for Covid, 57 icu stays due to the vaccine. And there are a lot of assumptions baked in there.
(Numbers for girls are better)
With numbers that tight, why introduce a drug that might for children have non-obvious long term effects?
I’m sure some people will choose to mask forever but the mandates will end.
Possibly vaxxed people are more likely to be asymptomatic and more likely to go out to lunch or something and spread it. Hard to say right?
In practice this shouldn't make a difference, because anyone with a cough should stay home, but it's be a problem in the US where you're not guaranteed paid sick days. In Europe not so much, although there are currently problems with a lot of people not working due to being at home with Omicron, but that's temporary.
All in all it's an excellent situation. The hospitals are a bit under pressure now due to everyone running for tests, but it'll subside - after January things should be more or less back to normal (relatively speaking), if people want it to be (which I doubt).
And since kids have never played any significant part in this, mandating vaccines for them just seems like an act of foolish desperation.
Give boosters to those who need them. Even the WHO said it's stupid to waste them on kids.
At the same time, less severe cases would make ideal spreaders: you're not aware you're infectious and you're not hindered from going out by being sick. I don't think that's a compelling reason for "vaccination reduces spread". Portugal's also doesn't suggest that, currently peaking despite 88% with two vaccinations and 26% with three.
The vaccine is tool. We need to pick the best tool for the job. Vaccines reduce severity and risk. Talking about Nations peaking, and only talking about the vaccine is like trying to build a house using nails and your bare hands. There is another tool that we need to be effective. It's called testing and I haven't seen 1 Western Country executes successfully on this.
If it's your kid, you hug them, they touch everything, they drool on everything. It doesn't matter if they're slightly contagious or heavily contagious, you're going to get saturated by them regardless.
So without any "disingenousness", I claim vaccinations help slow the spread for normal interactions, but it probably doesn't help much to stop kids spreading it to their parents.
To speak specifically to your point, the data I've seen indicates that vaccinations are much more effective in preventing infection (and therefore spread) in younger people. That likely compounds with an adults vaccination, so a vaccinated kid is likely significantly less likely to bring an infection home and infect an adult.
I'm not sure "common knowledge" has meaning any more considering that every topic is now polarizing. Anyone will argue anything and then refer to some unspecified "data" they've seen. Moreover, I doubt parents can be objective about this considering there's an evolutionary advantage to not being repulsed by their offspring's illnesses.
> the data I've seen indicates that vaccinations are much more effective in preventing infection (and therefore spread)
I don't even disagree with that. All I'm saying is that parents have a much higher level of exposure to their own children than pretty much anyone else in the world. You could reduce transmission of children by 90%, but that doesn't mean much to the parents who have 100X the exposure to them. We can talk viral load all you want, but at some point they'll cough in your face and the virus is going to start replicating inside of you.
[1]https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0... (see graph 3 in particular)
Couple of related notes:
* Covid statistics without a breakdown by age / date / vaccination status are garbage. Possibly BMI and/or immunosuppressed status should also be added to the mix. The authorities failure to publish this data breakdown 2 years into the pandemic is going beyond incompetence.
* Focusing on "cases" beyond a coarse "going up or going down" is largely useless. Observed "cases" are more likely to indicate test penetration than actual case numbers, and test penetration may significantly vary between age groups, institutionalization settings, etc.