Infecting children to protect adults - yay or nay?

[PrincessNutNuts]

"There is an argument for allowing the virus to circulate amongst children
which could provide broader immunity to the children and boost immunity in
adults.”

From the JCVI minutes.

What about you?

Are you in favour of a policy of infecting children to protect adults?

Ok with children suffering illness, going to hospital and dying to protect adults?

Yay or nay?

@Watapalava

Wax

I’d save it

Ruth, Noble and princess are obsessed with covid doom and gloom

They ah e to fill their wfh days somehow

Resorting to personal insults is unlikely to convince anyone that your arguments are valid, you know.

It's designed to provoke/minimise. Best ignored.

It's a bit like the people who only go on to certain boards to say 'yawn' / not interested or bothered by the subject etc. I struggle with that too as I wouldn't bother going on to a board I had no interest in. Comments along the lines of 'too busy living my life to think about it' on e.g. covid boards whilst devoting time commenting to various posters within such posts. Just designed to detract/minimise etc.

“ Mosky
It's not chicken pox which as far as I know has no lasting effects on anyone who gets it as a child.
Covid can cause serious complications in a minority of children.
There are around 20 deaths per year in the UK from chickenpox.
Source: Oxford Vaccine Centre
vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/chickenpox-varicella

There were 25 confirmed deaths from covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic
Source BBC - link to original article in text
www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57766717.amp

So pretty similar actually.”

Actually 101 children have now died from Covid in the U.K.

… continued… more than 20 children have died since schools opened THIS September and as it takes time for deaths to be careful investigated and counted this info is actually behind.

Lot more than 20a year

We had mitigations in the first year of the pandemic and schools were closed twice. You can’t compare that to normal times chickenpox. At all.

Children are dying at a much faster rate mow.

Aren’t we already doing this by stopping school bubbles and saying if one child is positive send the other to school? At least it feels like it!

12 cases in my daughters class in 10 days! And my daughter brought it home and spread it through the entire family.

I think the government are already sneakily going for herd immunity using children.

Herd immunity is not a good policy for an illness that can be caught repeatedly. I know of people who’ve had it twice now.

Also all the people who die or suffer long term damage. Including over one hundred children.

Most definitely not. I don’t want my baby grandsons catching this horrific virus thank you very much. Horrifying even to consider them having it.

We should be clear that the government policy is very clearly to infect children - state school children at least. And that parent's have no choice.

Also that it's a fact, proven during this pandemic in Manaus Brazil, that herd immunity does not work. High infection rates are much more likely to lead to vaccine evading variants than herd immunity.

Parents have NO CHOICE if they want their kids to be educated. They have to send them into schools which are operating in a way to maximise covid exposure and viral dose (higher viral dose = more severe disease).

I have had to send my daughter in this morning. I have begged her to wear a mask but she 'doesn't want to stand out as no-one will talk to me' and 'the teachers aren't which means it's not allowed'. Also 'all the disabled kids are wearing masks and it makes it even harder for them to fit in'. So all this faux concern for vulnerable kids during the lockdowns has well and truly evaporated.

Why is the answer to expect a shy 11 year old to be braver than the adults responsible for them?

I am so angry at the government and I'm angry at the SLT in my daughter's school too. Their values include 'kindness' and 'integrity' but they're throwing CEV families under the bus which is the opposite of both these things. Parents have overwhelmingly said they want masks, and yet they resist.

I know the DfE is telling them not to mask or to encourage isolation of family contacts but all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people do do nothing.

Deliberate infection of a whole generation with a novel virus that can have serious, lifelong consequences, without taking the most minor completely non-invasive methods to prevent disease (ventilation) is evil.

@Lalalablahblahblah

I really can't get my head around the lack of anger from society at the deliberate infection of children. I mean people were (rightly) up in arms at the government's decision to send untested elderly people back into care homes causing a huge rise in infections and deaths. I don't really see how that is morally any different to insisting parents send their children into school when there are covid cases in the household. Sure children are statistically very unlikely to die but if they all get ill then SOME WILL. I'm not OK with that. And a government that is OK with letting kids get sick to 'protect' adults is morally bankrupt in my opinion. (Not that it actually protects anyone anyway since higher infection rates just mean more breakthrough cases) and if we're using chicken pox as an example, no I'm not OK with my kids getting ill and potentially (even if the chance is infinitesimally small) dying to help protect elderly people from shingles. Especially when thre is a shingles vax available. So they've been vaccinated. And since people can just catch covid again anyway it's completely pointless as a strategy. And all you dickheads spoying the false dichotomy that you'd rather your kid caught covid than stayed locked up forever. There is another option. It's called vaccines. We were quite happy as adults to accept that option

100% agree.

13 kids dead in half a term from a largely avoidable illness (if they had filtration, ventilation and masks)

If 13 kids died in half a term from fires in schools the media would be all over it.

Journalists are complicit in this too.

@theemperorhasnoclothes

Can anyone tell me why Dingwall who is a sociologist was providing advice about the best way for children to get immunity and the relative merits of natural vs vaccine-induced infection?.

As far as I'm aware he has no medical or public health expertise at all.

Was he a friend with a Tory minister or something?

This is what irritates me.

He was brought onto the JCVI due to his expertise as a sociologist, fair enough and important to consider non-medical factors regarding vaccination.

But then they state they're not taking into account these factors when it came to their decision anyway (direct medical benefits to the child only), and somehow he's weighing in with epidemiological and immunological knowledge that he does not have. There are far better qualified people than he to be informing this aspect of it.

This is why I get so cross about his comments about herd immunity, the vaccine being "toxic", and "peaceful COVID deaths". He hasn't got a a clue!

[quote Waxonwaxoff0]@rrhuth not a Covid minimiser at all. I'm just not scared of it on a personal level. Not sure what scientific fact that is going against. I'm not denying the severity of it for some people. All I've said is that I'm not bothered about catching it myself.[/quote]
I'm also not too worried COVID on a perosonal level, but that doesn't mean I don't have concerns about how it will impact me/my family indirectly.

The JCVI have been complete opaque and it looks their decision to not offer vaccination to 12-15 was not made in an unbiased way. Herd immunity by infection has been absolutely, throroughly, debunked as a terrible idea. This faffing about means that teens could have gone to school with a level of protection, but they didn't due to the delays and faffing around (along with the scaremongering it has caused about vaccines). Now we see unecessary illness, disrupted schooling, and rising cases which will impact the wider community.

It's extremely problematic and I'm not sure why posters don't seem to be concerned.

Dingwall should be forced to go, in full PPE of course, and assist (cleaning perhaps?) on a covid ICU bay for a week and then see if he stands by his comments about deaths from covid.

How anyone so ill informed could influence government decision making is beyond me.

Iirc this was point 57 in a very long list of considerations by the JCVI. The ‘broader immunity’ is mentioned as a benefit to the children themselves and yes, exposure to circulating viruses boosts our immunity to them. I think this is being deliberately taken out of context to cause outrage. It’s not a case of wanting to ‘infect children to protect adults’.

@PokemonGoGoGo I’m not sure where Samuel McConkey is getting his information from but there are several studies showing that immunity after infection lasts 9+ months in the majority of people and the ONS shows that reinfection is very rare (and serious cases of reinfection are even rarer).

@bumbleymummy

Iirc this was point 57 in a very long list of considerations by the JCVI. The ‘broader immunity’ is mentioned as a benefit to the children themselves and yes, exposure to circulating viruses boosts our immunity to them. I think this is being deliberately taken out of context to cause outrage. It’s not a case of wanting to ‘infect children to protect adults’.

Deliberately infecting children is the action that is being taken, since September, in state schools.

It's plain as day. Maybe the JCVI were influential in that decision, maybe they weren't. The fact that they were even discussing it is abhorrent.

It's even more abhorrent that it's happening here alone whilst other countries protect their children by non-invasive measures that are beneficial for educational attainment and overall child health (not just covid) - ventilation and air filtration.

Why are you saying ‘deliberate’? I think it’s pretty much accepted now that infection is inevitable.

Why shouldn’t they be discussing it? It was clearly only one point among several others. They said there was ‘an argument to be made’ for the benefit of broader immunity for children and the ‘boost’ that would offer to adult immunity - not that it was definitely what they should do. Personally, I’d much rather know that all options were being taken into consideration and were properly discussed. I’m not sure that only selecting one statement and focussing on it alone does anything more than cause outrage and resentment. Was that the OP’s intention? Perhaps she should have linked to the full document so that people can read all the other points that were discussed too?

@theemperorhasnoclothes I agree. Of course it's deliberate. It may be policy that it's 'inevitable' here, but that's doesn't mean it's 'acceptable', nor should it be.

Adults aren't being protected though are they?

It's currently in our house. Either brought in by me or my child from our respective schools. Whichever of us has it, has given it to my 70 year old inlaws who were visiting over half term (despite everyone having negative LFTs), and now my partner has it and is pretty ill. He's CV.

@RuleWithAWoodenFoot well, they are protected as much as they can be by being vaccinated. The vaccines may not be performing as well as hoped in relation to preventing people from contracting the virus at all, but they are holding up well against serious illness/death. If you’re thinking that vaccinating children would have stopped the virus being brought home, you should look at countries, like Ireland, where teens were vaccinated, but they have still seen an increase in cases, hospitalisations and deaths.

I think the best way to protect adults at the moment (particularly those who older and/or immunocompromised) is to focus on rolling out the boosters.

mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1454980187976871941

mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1454946017275748353

@bumbleymummy

Why are you saying ‘deliberate’? I think it’s pretty much accepted now that infection is inevitable.

Why shouldn’t they be discussing it? It was clearly only one point among several others. They said there was ‘an argument to be made’ for the benefit of broader immunity for children and the ‘boost’ that would offer to adult immunity - not that it was definitely what they should do. Personally, I’d much rather know that all options were being taken into consideration and were properly discussed. I’m not sure that only selecting one statement and focussing on it alone does anything more than cause outrage and resentment. Was that the OP’s intention? Perhaps she should have linked to the full document so that people can read all the other points that were discussed too?

In other countries they take basic protective measures.

Our government is choosing not to take basic measures to protect children - leading to greater rates of infection than countries where protective measures in place. And greater viral dose too, probably. And more missed education too for those who are unlucky enough to get very ill.

A riposte to the “everyone will be infected multiple times in their lifetime” argument:

twitter.com/merylswanlake/status/1454480784195297288?s=21

www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2641

Quite a lot of leading scientists are speaking up to say what is being done to children is wrong.