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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Vaccination of children is not required to reduce the number of deaths from Covid-19 to a number asymptotically approaching zero.

> Focusing myopically on "transmission rate" misses the broader conversation about risk and benefit.

So does focussing myopically on deaths, which aren’t the only thing that costs Quality-Adjusted Life-Years.

> Giving tens/hundreds of thousands of kids an illness on par with the flu to marginally reduce the theoretical risk of illness in an unvaccinated stranger.

That’s not all the vaccine is for. Children have a much lower rate of dying of acute COVID symptoms, but do see more than enough long COVID effects, including MIS-C, to be worth protecting against.

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> So does focussing myopically on deaths, which aren’t the only thing that costs Quality-Adjusted Life-Years.

Now you're just fear-mongering.

> Children have a much lower rate of dying of acute COVID symptoms, but do see more than enough long COVID effects, including MIS-C, to be worth protecting against.

There have been 3200 cases of MIS-C in the US. 36 have died.

https://www.cdc.gov/mis-c/cases/index.html

The rate of MIS-C is exceptionally low -- possibly lower than the rate of severe adverse events for the vaccine itself: "Overall, MIS-C is a rare complication of SARS-CoV-2. A May 2020 systematic review from 26 countries reported a MIS-C incidence of 0.14% among all children with SARS-CoV-2 infection"

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n385

Give this vaccine to 1M children, and at a rate of 0.4% serious adverse (i.e. life-threatening) reactions, you would expect 4000. An unknowable portion of those will die. Moreover, there will be 20,000 reactions severe enough to put a child out of school for a few days. There are about 25M kids age 12-17 in the US.

Your sense of risk is seriously miscalibrated.

A serious adverse event doesn't have to be life threatening.[1] The difference between groups wasn't statistically significant. And there was no pattern either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114261

The definition:

"Serious adverse events are defined as: • Death; • A life-threatening adverse event; • Inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization; • A persistent or significant incapacity or substantial disruption of the ability to conduct normal life functions; • A congenital anomaly/birth defect; • An important medical event that based on appropriate medical judgement may jeopardize the individual and may require medical or surgical intervention to prevent one of the outcomes listed above."

So 4 out of the 6 criteria are, in fact, life-threatening, one is "your life is permanently altered, sorry", and the final one is irrelevant.

(and no, despite your link to the other thread, "persistent or significant incapacity" does not include "a sick day")

> And there was no pattern either.

They didn't release the raw data, so there's no way for you to know that.

>"persistent or significant incapacity" does not include "a sick day"

It does, actually. From the UI Medcom link: "symptoms that preclude patient from attending work, school or perform their typical daily activities"

I gave you the definition, from the approval document itself. This is the definitive answer, not some unrelated article about VAERS.

https://www.fda.gov/media/144413/download

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217737

The question is what substantial means. I believe hvac's credible source over your forceful assertion.

Serious adverse events have to be reported to VAERS. I think the FDA would notice if Pfizer lied about there being no pattern.

I quoted directly from the approval document on the FDA website. The other poster is linking to some unrelated thing about VAERS.

https://www.fda.gov/media/144413/download

You quoted the part of the fact sheet about reporting serious adverse events to VAERS. The University of Iowa page is about the same thing exactly. They quoted the same definition. The only differences were they abbreviated adverse event and gave examples.

"A persistent or significant incapacity or substantial disruption of the ability to conduct normal life functions; e.g. symptoms that preclude patient from attending work, school or perform their typical daily activities"

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