What about the higher risks of viral myocarditis, MIS-C, hospitalization to the children?
Not to mention the quarantines and loss of school / social life that happen when you are sick with covid because you’re a danger to others.
Not to mention the quarantines and loss of school / social life that happen when you are sick with covid because you’re a danger to others.
One more note. The vaccines effectiveness agains infection fades over time, going even in negative territory. There is the US veteran 6 months study (55% Pfizer, -3% J&J). There is the UK PHE data showing negative VE against infection (up to -50% for certain age groups), but there were some arguments about the denominator. A preprint of a Swedish total population study just dropped, and VE against symptomatic infection after 9 months is in negative territory (-15%). Everybody that quotes VE against infection is quoting outdated data, either original trials or studies with a cutoff <6 months since vaccination. Worse, VE against severe disease also significantly drops over time, the Swedish study looks bad :(
(Not happy about any of this, btw)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.13.21264966v...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It’s not their job to do that, though. They have passed the standards of the FDA. It sounds like what you actually want is for the FDA to increase their standards and require more than they have for past vaccines.
There are multiple studies from outside Pfizer showing MIS-C, hospitalization, and illness in general affecting children as a result of COVID-19. If the vaccine can reasonably be believed to prevent illness then it follows that it will prevent or reduce all three of those.
Vaccine waning is a bit of a different story, but keep in mind the studies you’ve linked are only part of the picture. Other studies claim the vaccines remain effective at some % after 6 months. Personally, I just got a booster to deal with the issue.
Can you please quote a single VE longitudinal study with at least 6 months duration that shows stable VE? Even VE against severe infection is declining by about 10% around from 92% to 82%. UK PHE VE reports, which is as close to a real-time VE indicator as we'll ever have (short of FDA/CDC actually doing their jobs) show a steady decline week after week. The trouble is that VE against symptomatic infection drops off a cliff around the 6 months point, so it's entirely rational to wonder if VE against severe infection doesn't also fall off a cliff, only a few months delayed. We don't have data at 9/12/etc months, so we have to wait. Looks like you are indeed concerned about this very problem and decided to boost. Good for you. Myself, I really wish the vaccines perform well over time. But can't help notice that the (meager) data we have so far doesn't support the wish, and being faced with medicine that lost its effectiveness over a long period of time earlier in life to the point of being a wash, I'm less enthused about boosting on a regular basis.
In the context of kid vaccinations though, the whole situation is ridiculous. Covid health risks for kids are minimal. Pfizer own admitted unscientific application (aka we can p-hack whatever metrics we want to prop our side of the argument) estimates they might save only one life in a million, and hospitalization in low hundreds in a million, same order of magnitude as myocarditis adverse effects. That means one million kids need to be jabbed to see any positive effect. Given that there are longterm risks with any novel intervention that we don't know about yet, this is an entirely unnecessary medical intervention that borders on criminal negligence.
As a philosophic note, life has risks, even for kids: https://www.vox.com/22699019/covid-19-children-kids-risk-hos... We fundamentally can't eliminate all risk, we have to learn to live with risk. What other risks than myocarditis, you may ask. An excerpt from a 2011 paper summarizing why dengue vaccines failed:
"Original antigenic sin has the advantage that a response can be rapidly mobilized from memory. However, the downside is that in some cases, such as dengue, the response is dominated by inferior-quality antibody. In influenza, original antigenic sin has been shown to reduce the effectiveness of vaccination (13, 34, 51). In dengue, the effect of original antigenic sin has considerable bearing on vaccine strategies. Once a response has been established, it is unlikely that repeat boosting will be able to change its scope, meaning that balanced responses against the four virus serotypes will need to be established with the first vaccine dose."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3014204
PS. Whomever feels the urge to retort that kids taking the vaccines somehow saves grandma, please stop. Besides being creepy (we don't put kids at risk to save elders, ever) and nasty (quite the guilt load on young shoulders being thrown around), it doesn't. By now there is multiple evidence showing that VE against infection fading to irrelevancy after 6-9 months. Unless there is a credible longitudinal study showing the contrary, this particular matter is closed.
I didn’t say they were irrelevant. They’re relevant to your argument that vaccination has only downsides. Pfizer doesn’t need to do independent research on this, the committee was already aware and discussing the known risks of covid to children as part of their evaluation of this application.
The rest of your post seems to be mostly speculation about VE against severe infection waning relatively rapidly in the future despite it not having done so yet.
> being faced with medicine that lost its effectiveness over a long period of time earlier in life to the point of being a wash, I'm less enthused about boosting on a regular basis.
Meanwhile I’ve got a flu shot every year for a decade. No side effects and I’ve been protected from flu without issue. So far it’s looking like we won’t need such frequent boosters for coronavirus though.
Perhaps some ethical systems would argue that anti vax adults have made their choice and should be exposed to the virus without care though. Personally if I was sick with covid I wouldn’t take that approach and would stay home though…