Why? Kids very rarely get seriously ill from COVID-19, and if everyone else is vaccinated they should be safe as well.
https://news.uthscsa.edu/post-covid-syndrome-severely-damage...
I don't know how likely either of these scenarios is. But it seems like leaving kids unvax'd allows a possible reservoir of virus that could resurface and affect people.
At this point there's a substantial chunk of the US population hellbent on demonstrating the lockdowns and vaccines and everything that's been done throughout 2020 was completely unnecessary, by simply continuing to do nothing. They will never take a vaccine, they'll risk getting sick and let the natural immunity unfold. They're more concerned with overturning the 2020 election results.
Schools can be considered continuous super-spreader events.
Kids weren’t even shown to be to be too infectious.
No vaccine is 100% safe, it’s very possible the risks of vaccinating kids outweighs the rewards.
Is the virus 100% safe? Weigh them against each other and account for who the kids could spread it to, how much vaccine uptake there is, immune compromised they could spread it to who can't be protected well from the vaccine, etc.
Where is the data to support this? Duke University released a peer reviewed study[1] in January that showed the opposite (when schools take appropriate measures).
> Duke and UNC researchers evaluated the secondary transmission of COVID-19 in 11 North Carolina school districts that held in-person instruction in the first nine weeks of the 2020-2021 school year and identified minimal COVID-19 transmission in the schools -- much lower than the rate of community spread.
The CDC have also published this[2] helpful overview about the susceptibility of children to the virus/disease (low) and the risk of transmission (also low).
I'd also urge you (or anyone) to read this very helpful article in the BMJ[3] about the risks of covid-19, but for those worried about their children it may help alleviate some concerns:
> The second row of table 2 shows that three deaths from covid-19 have been recorded among over 7 million schoolchildren aged 5 to 14 (around 1 in 2.4 million), an extremely low risk that represents only 2% of the average normal risk faced by this group. This amounts to around two days’ extra risk of dying during the 112 days of the epidemic. In the same period this age group experienced 138 deaths from other causes.
The CDC report gives a clue as to where the focus should be:
> Underlying medical conditions are also more commonly reported among children who are hospitalized or admitted to an ICU
In short, schools aren't providing super-spreader events.
[1] https://today.duke.edu/2021/01/duke-study-when-schools-take-...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...
We don’t go back to normal when the earth is a sterile disease free environment, we go back when the outsized risk of this particular disease reduces to the noise floor of everything else.
"When you get to hell, tell smallpox we said hello" - XKCD