@Schmetterling1
Why not vaccinate the vulnerable, protect the NHS (isn't that what it was about?) and then live our lives knowing that children get and spread viruses and it's a bit unpleasant but no more than that?
I've already posted on this exact question a few times up thread, but it's a long thread so I'll try to recap here. No doubt others will join and not RTFT.
First, it's often way worse than "a bit unpleasant". If you find one of @Lupinhere37's posts and click on "See all" you'll find her posts about what her daughter has been through. Children can have serious sequalae after the acute infection resolves.
While serious cases are quite rare, they are not unknown.
Children now account for 22 percent of new U.S. COVID cases. Why is that?
There's no paywall. Here's an excerpt:
Now, the part where that conversation about severity gets a little bit more complicated is yes, it is absolutely true that it's less severe in kids than it is in adults, and particularly older adults. But it's also not true to say that it's completely benign in kids. Fortunately, pediatric death is a fairly rare event. But when you look at the top 10 causes of death, on an annual basis, this year, we've had, depending on whose numbers you use, somewhere between 300 and 600 pediatric deaths from COVID-19 so far. That's probably an undercount. And that would fit it somewhere in the top 10, somewhere between like number 6 and number 9 in terms of causes of death for children.
So the point I'm making there is that yes, it's less severe, but it's still potentially a very severe disease. We've seen tens of thousands of hospitalizations already. So we do need a vaccine for children, not just to protect, not just to achieve herd immunity, but also to protect the children themselves.
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So in the US we've had hundreds of children die and thousands have been hospitalized with covid. It's not much on a per capita basis, unless of course your kid is one of them. On a relative risk basis, I think it's really unlikely that the Pfizer or Moderna basis is going to kill hundreds of children or put thousands of them in the hospital.
This article speaks more directly to the reason for vaccinating teenagers and children.
When Will Kids Get COVID Vaccines? - Pharmaceutical companies are starting clinical trials in young children and adolescents, but they must balance speed and safety
Here's part of the article:
Given that most kids are at low risk for complications from COVID, the need for a pediatric vaccine for the disease may not seem pressing. But scientists say the pandemic may never be fully controlled until kids are inoculated. When we only vaccinate adults, we leave vulnerable “an enormous, immunologically naive population,” says James H. Conway, a pediatrician and associate director for health sciences at the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Without a pediatric vaccine, “the disease, even if our kids don't get super sick with it, is going to be there and continue to circulate routinely.”
Indeed, recent research suggests infections among kids are more common than public health authorities realized. In a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paper published earlier this month, researchers tested blood samples routinely collected from people younger than 18 in Mississippi between May and September 2020. Although the state had only received reports of about 9,000 COVID infections in kids through September, analyses of coronavirus antibodies in the blood suggested that roughly 114,000 of them had actually had the pathogen—meaning the virus had infected nearly 13 times more children and adolescents than the state had recorded.
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Finally, consider that the public health authorities in the US, Canada, and Germany have all indicated that they will make the pediatric vaccines available. The fact that their epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, and pediatric medicine consultants collectively have decided that having these vaccines available for children is on balance a good thing is to me a strong indication that it's not a crazy idea.