The vaccine is not important for people under 18.
Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]
Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19. [1]
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/09/teenage-boys-ris...
Where is the comparison between myocarditis induced by vaccination vs natural infection?
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...
“Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.”
https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1437876328640876544
Better breakdowns by age and gender show a risk of myocarditis after two doses as high as 1 in 3000:
https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1437067899089219589
This number has been steadily increasing, as time passes. Current consensus seems to be that one dose is the optimal tradeoff between risk and reward for young children.
> Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?
Yes. It is not an assumption. Myocarditis is not a mild condition, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
> With or without treatment, the "clinical course appears mild"
> Patients commonly received NSAIDs, steroids, and colchicine for treatment of vaccine-associated myocarditis.
These are.. not comparable to typical COVID hospitalization outcomes, are they?
The (very) few kids who end up hospitalized for Covid have serious co-morbidities that are easy to pre-screen (e.g. severe obesity). For these children, a full vaccination is recommended. Nobody is arguing about that. For healthy kids, it's very different.
It's great that most kids with myocarditis don't end up in the ICU, but being put in the hospital to get hooked up to an IV and an MRI scan is not a good outcome for an otherwise healthy kid who would would have -- at most -- a head cold from SARS-CoV2.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-ant...
How many avoided death because they had good health care?
One of my pet peeves about this pandemic is how death metrics keep being pushed around, as if it was not a big deal.
If this pandemic had hit before we had modern health care facilities, it would have been comparable to the great pandemics in history.
Besides, what happened to the children that didn't die? What sort of issues this could cause that may affect their development? We don't know, so we should play it safe.
> from the vaccine
There isn't just one vaccine. There are several. If one is potentially causing issues, use another.
Also, what about heart problems from Covid-19, even among those not hospitalized?
I can't read your paywalled article, but I've found another link. The 'heart problems' are myocarditis, which in most cases is mild and _resolves_ by itself.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
If you are going play that game, you also need to ask how many died between March - June 2020 because of panicked doctors intubating everyone left and right with no one around to advocate for the patients.
Not sure what this is implying, or what kind of advocacy would have made a better call. Doctors intubated people (despite a shortage of ventilators and the difficulty of triage) because the patients were struggling to breathe, and given available data the medical profession though it would help those patients recover. They've since learned more about the outcomes from this particular disease and when a ventilator is appropriate. Your comment makes it sound as though any idiot off the street could tell who should be on a ventilator and who should not.
Edit: I'm not going to respond to every comment below that points out that it's extremely rare, other than to ask that you compare that chance to the chance of hospitalization due to covid, which according to the link above is less likely.
It’s still considered extremely rare post vaccination.
This is comparing rates of myocarditis vs rates of hospitalization, which is two different things.
We would need to see rates of myocarditis due to vaccination vs rates of myocarditis due to natural infection.
Heart inflammation is not typical in children or adolescents. This is not based on self-reporting.
Are you aware that UK regulators have not approved the vaccine for 12-15 year-olds (or any children younger), based on this risk, specifically?
So there’s a preprint stating that COVID-19 causes myocarditis at a higher rate than via vaccination. So it’s not quite clear to me whether or not, if looking at it from a risk of myocarditis, that not getting vaccinated is the better choice.
And according to the JCVI, it still is marginally beneficial to get vaccinated over not getting vaccinated. So it’s not like they are advising that natural infection is safer than vaccination.
“For otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year old children, their risk of severe COVID-19 disease is small and therefore the potential for benefit from COVID-19 vaccination is also small. The JCVI’s view is that overall, the health benefits from COVID-19 vaccination to healthy children aged 12 to 15 years are marginally greater than the potential harms.” [1]
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...
"The medium- to long-term effects are unknown and long-term follow-up is being conducted.
Given the very low risk of serious COVID-19 disease in otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced and a precautionary approach was agreed." [1]
As a concerned parent, this is how I will be approaching vaccination for my sons.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...
EDIT: speling
The vast majority of people who visit a doctor are diagnosed with no hospitalization and the recommended course for most myocarditis cases is not hospitalization. If the recommendation were hospitalization then many more infected young males would be hospitalized based on myocarditis diagnosis.
In this case experts have pointed out that the analysis is wrong because it doesn't compare mycardius in the control group even through we know covid also causes that. Nor do they consider harm, despite vaccine caused mycardious being mild.
These are severe enough cases to require medical attention.
Journalists from the same publication (Rolling Stone) were responsible for the whole fabricated "A Rape On Campus" article as well. I would not give them the respectable journalist moniker anymore except in jest.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...
Kill pathogens more quickly, you'll be infectious for less time, and whoever do you infect will have a lower viral load.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
The usually bandied figure is 80% immunity to stop the pandemic.
Without the teenagers vaccinated, that's never going to get hit.
Wait until winter hits and the cases spike, then it's suddenly going to become "necessary", but if they'd made that hard decision 3 months ago this would already be over.
If you mean something else, you're a victim of fake news.
That was pre-Delta. The higher the R0, the more mitigation we need to do. The question is what gets RE below zero.
At this point, with Delta's R0 and the vaccine's effectiveness, it looks like mere vaccination without masks is going to be insufficient in large groups (e.g. at a giant concert, a big play). But, since all the precautions have a multiplier, that's fine. It means we can keep doing those things as long as we take precautions while we do it and not assume vaccine = ignore COVID.
Good thing children never transmit viruses to adults.
Good thing reservoirs of disease never allow for novel mutations.
Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare projections in one case to actual results in the other.
Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare one rate in the general population to a rate in an already selected group.
Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare self-reported issues to actually verified cases.
Good thing your source[1] didn't make a big deal about the huge multiplier difference between two exceedingly small numbers (0.01622% vs 0.00261%)
Good thing your source[1] didn't falsely imply "hospitalization" and "myocarditis " as equivalently severe, ignoring that the myocarditis responded well and quickly to treatment[2] whereas COVID does not, leading to long hospital stays and/or ventilation and/or death.
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...
Oh, and sorry.
The thing about comments like that is that they polarize the discussion even further, because those who agree with you will become intensified in their agreement while those who disagree with you will react the way people react when someone hammers them repeatedly. This kind of polarization makes curious conversation impossible, because curious conversation has to do with maintaining connection across differences.
That 412 number is "covid involved", not "covid caused".
This could be that the death was not at all due to covid, but the cadaver tested positive. They were in a car accident, for example.
This could be actually caused by covid primarily.
This could be covid tipped someone over the edge who was already very ill.
EDIT: also hospitalizations for children are rare
That's not how "covid involved" is defined, no.
EDIT: please post a url or something.
I did this. This is quite convincing to me that the "COVID involved" deaths are not mis-categorized and they actually are related to COVID unless CDC is straight up fabricating death numbers on a massive scale. The stories about the COVID death categorizations being overstated are pure FUD.
> Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid.
> Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities
> Six had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years - though researchers caution some illnesses may have been missed
Were the children with complex neuro-disabilities pushed over the edge by covid? Quite possibly. Is that a reason for parents of healthy children to worry? Unlikely.
What use is it to compare two different things? Those heart problems aren't all hospitalizations. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to have heart problems than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Many young men have died of COVID-19, and none have died of the vaccine.
> Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]
More than twice as many died in August as in July or as in August of last year. With Delta and school in session, expect this number to go up for September.