Vaccine for 5+

[NotTheBaby]

It’s on sky news now. Leaked document stating 5 year olds and above to be vaccinated from spring. I’m so hesitant to get my children done, when I couldn’t wait for mine. Why is this so much harder than it should be? Or am I just overthinking it?

I was already in two minds about vaccinating my DC, until my friend's teenage son ended up in hospital within a week of taking the jab. His symptoms were so severe that he had an urgent referral to GOSH (great ormond st) where he was diagnosed with an aggressive autoimmune condition triggered by the covid vaccine as explained by his consultant. Apparently, just in this last month, since the roll-out of vaccinating 12-15 yrs old, they've already seen nearly 30 children with symptoms similar to his after being jabbed. And this is only one hospital in the UK!!! I'd sooner base my decision on real facts like this than govt statistics coming out in the media.

The problem is, the vaccine is not preventing people from catching covid and being ill with it. It may reduce severe disease in most cases, but people are still becoming quite ill, despite vaccination.Vaccination also doesn't prevent transmission.

A spot of misinformation here. The vaccine mix we currently have prevent the majority of infections, compared to being unvaccinated (though it’s much lower thanks to waning and delta). We seem to be doing a little better on the waning effect than countries that had a smaller gap between doses. With boosters the protective effect is very high.

There is more mixed evidence on secondary transmission (transmission from an infected vaccinated person).

It is certainly true that large numbers of vaccinated people are becoming ill - you would expect that with the amount of virus we have circulating and the number vaccinated.

Unfortunately this ‘leak’ looks like planning for the event they are approved, rather than some kind of prior knowledge of which way MHRA and JCVI will go.

I hope they do approve it and enable parental choice.

@EasterIssland

I’ll vaccinate if mandatory for traveling. (My son is 3 so not yet) but if they only offer 1 jab like they have done for teenagers then my only reason to vaccinate him won’t make much sense. And I suspect many parents might do the same

This is my thought. DC were born in another country and we haven't seen family or friends in a long tome now. The country however requires double jabs so vaccinating dc singly won't make a difference anyway, therefore I won't be doing it.

Is there a point at which the gap between doses is too long, and so any second dose doesn’t “count” as being double vaccinated and so you need three doses? Do you lose effectiveness if you have two widely spaced doses?
I only ask because a concern I’d have vaccinating DD (and she is under 5 so this may be a way off anyway) with one dose is that if they don’t change their minds about a second dose for ages, would anyone who had their first dose 5/6+ months ago be able to count as fully vaccinated after a second dose so long after, would they get the full benefit of a standard gap double dose? And even if it counted in this country, would it count as vaccinated for travel to countries that never did this one dose thing and just vaccinated children as normal (which I think is all other countries).
Or is that just not a thing and any gap is fine?

I am generally very pro vax and am fully vaxxed but instinctively I am cautious on giving it to my primary school aged kids. So will want to look carefully at the data the JCVI provides if they recommend it to weigh it up for our family. I do largely trust the JCVI though.

@MamanSparkles

This is great news as long as it's a choice. Because:
- thousands of children are being hospitalised every month with covid

So I've seen a few posts stating this scaremongering misinformation over the past few days, could you provide a link to these statistics please? Because that is absolute bollocks according to the ONS.

Or is that just not a thing and any gap is fine?

Most countries just require X days (usually 14 or 21) after your second dose.

The three weeks was what the trials were based on, and most countries stuck to that. The UK and a few others took a gamble on a wider gap which seems to have paid off in better effectiveness/slightly slower waning. As we’ve seen with boosters a third dose sparks higher antibody production than we saw even at the best vaccine’s peak performance, and those antibody levels appear to be maintained for longer.

We don’t have a lot of comparative trials about different dosing intervals; I imagine it will become much more refined over time but for now the imperative has been first, to massively reduce hospitalisation and death as quickly as we can, and second to reduce transmission as much as possible as quickly as possible. As a result it’s been inevitably inexact.

There's no benefit to them in vaccinating kids but there is a risk of heart failure so why on earth would you risk it?

@scottishtablet23

I was already in two minds about vaccinating my DC, until my friend's teenage son ended up in hospital within a week of taking the jab. His symptoms were so severe that he had an urgent referral to GOSH (great ormond st) where he was diagnosed with an aggressive autoimmune condition triggered by the covid vaccine as explained by his consultant. Apparently, just in this last month, since the roll-out of vaccinating 12-15 yrs old, they've already seen nearly 30 children with symptoms similar to his after being jabbed. And this is only one hospital in the UK!!! I'd sooner base my decision on real facts like this than govt statistics coming out in the media.

I think you need to provide some sort of evidence for your claim

@Toty I went onto the ONS as a result of that post and found like you it was nonsense.

My DC will not be vaccinated.

thousands of children are being hospitalised every month with covid

I can’t find anything to support this for the UK. The Covid dashboard is annoying but shows ages of admissions by NHS region.

For example, for London, there have been about 2,500 admissions since the start of the pandemic - the admission rate is about 92 per 100,000 population for 5-17s (and abut double that in younger kids.)

@Mojoj

There's no benefit to them in vaccinating kids but there is a risk of heart failure so why on earth would you risk it?

Myocarditis is not heart failure, if that’s what you’re referring to?

@Mojoj

There's no benefit to them in vaccinating kids but there is a risk of heart failure so why on earth would you risk it?

Myo/percarditis is not "heart failure" @Mojoj

In the 12-15 age group, who I assume you're referring to, COVID infection is association with higher rates of this outcome than vaccination is.

Fortunately, for both it generally tends to be self limiting.

There’s also a risk of myocarditis and Long COVID from COVID.

One poster said there was absolutely no risk to her child from COVID. That is not true, it might be a small risk but there is certainly not ‘no’ risk

@AtLeastPretendToCare

I am generally very pro vax and am fully vaxxed but instinctively I am cautious on giving it to my primary school aged kids. So will want to look carefully at the data the JCVI provides if they recommend it to weigh it up for our family. I do largely trust the JCVI though.

Unfortunately I’m the opposite! I have really limited trust in the JCVI after the absolute meal they’ve made on chicken pox vaccines and the knots they’ve tied themselves in to avoid looking at evidence from other countries. The report they did on adolescent Covid vaccine was also a bit of a mess, particularly around how harms were modelled and which were/weren’t included and weighted.

I have a lot more faith in the MHRA and I’ll be looking at what happens elsewhere, of course, before deciding whether to vaccinate mine.

I lean towards it for a couple of reasons:

• Children’s immune responses are generally stronger and longer lasting than adults’ - that’s why I got my children vaccinated in childhood. I’d rather they have very strong protection than a vaccine that is significantly less effective.

• we don’t know what variants may arise in future, but I would prefer them not to be immunologically naive if they meet a variant more harmful to children in the future

• the risks currently look extremely low, but as I say I’ll be watching extremely closely

• I have potential personal harms to consider that others do not, including the emotional harm of not being able to see one side of their family unless they are vaccinated. This causes my eldest in particular quite a bit of distress. This will obviously colour my decision making if the situation arises, but others won’t have that extra layer. However even without that I think I would lean towards vaccinating if the data out of the US and Israel continues to be favourable.

Im concerned about 0-4s. The latest hospitalisation figures on the ONS dashboard are 3.54 per 100,000 for 0-4, and 1.37 per 100,000 for 5-14. This compares to 1.91 per 100,000 and 0.55 per 100,000 for the same age groups in February. So given that there's an estimated 3.78 million children aged between 0 and 4 in England alone, that's a significant rise in the number hospitalised, and we can all do the maths to see how many times 100,000 goes into 3.78 million and how many 3.54 x that would be. If even a part of that is due to Covid (and I suspect a chunky majority of it is) then we need to do whatever we can to protect those very young children, who can't be vaccinated and who seem to be taking a hit. Wouldn't vaccinating their school aged siblings help here?

Since when did our governments care this much about our welfare that they are prepared to pump billions into the health service just on the off chance we might get ill with flu. I just don't buy this bullshit. Clearly vested interests, I,e pharmaceutical companies are pulling the strings.

..an aggressive autoimmune condition triggered by the covid vaccine as explained by his consultant. Apparently, just in this last month, since the roll-out of vaccinating 12-15 yrs old, they've already seen nearly 30 children with symptoms similar to his after being jabbed. And this is only one hospital in the UK!!!

I think you need to provide some sort of evidence for your claim

Well that's the thing about anecdotes of SM @BungleandGeorge, no one needs to provide any proof at all it happend.

@scottishtablet23 What was exactly was the "aggressive autoimmmune disease"?

Would want to look into this, as far as I know there have not been higher signals of any AI diseases due to vaccination, in any age group. I know T1DM was being looked into as a consequence of coronavirus itself though.

@bigvig

Since when did our governments care this much about our welfare that they are prepared to pump billions into the health service just on the off chance we might get ill with flu. I just don't buy this bullshit. Clearly vested interests, I,e pharmaceutical companies are pulling the strings.

Er, because it's much cheaper to vaccinate people against flu than to treat them for it in hospital, @bigvig ?

Someone should really tell big pharma that they need to stop making vaccines as there's lots more money to be made on people once they're actually in a hospital bed, as they'll need more complex drugs 🤔

@bigvig

Since when did our governments care this much about our welfare that they are prepared to pump billions into the health service just on the off chance we might get ill with flu. I just don't buy this bullshit. Clearly vested interests, I,e pharmaceutical companies are pulling the strings.

Every year?

Most years, millions are vaccinated against flu (including children.)

They’ve increased coverage during the pandemic due to concerns about the NHS over winter - they want to keep flu low as well as Covid for that reason. Hospitalisations are considerably more expensive than vaccines, and if hospitals become full of flu and/or Covid cases then it’s obviously not a good thing.

@lunar1

Mine will have it when he can, my 13 year old already did.

Same here.

Also it was fairly obvious that this was on the cards.

Also obvious it would be spring. A few weeks ago, the FDA announced that they have approved vaccine for 5-12 year olds. Meaning Britain would likely follow suit 6 months later - which is Spring.

I will not have my two vaccinated - aged 7 and 10. They've had covid it was nothing for them, just made them tired a few days.
The vaccine risks are way too high. I could not risk heart damage at this age, however "mild".

I’m so torn on this. I am so pro vax. Have had 3 jabs without any hesitation and got them as soon as I was eligible.

DD (8) has covid at the moment. She is fine. 1 day of heavy cold symptoms and now no more than very mild cold symptoms. She is barely unwell.

Given how little covid has affected her, and that she will now have anribodies anyway, I am reluctant to get her vaccinated at this stage. Yes, in the future when a bit more is known, but not right now.

@BungleandGeorge rather insensitive, don't you think? What would satisfy you? Maybe the tel number of my friend?
Or here's a thought, perhaps you'd like to do a call to all UK hospitals and make an enquiry under the freedom of information act?!