"However, according to the EMA, the benefits of both mRNA shots in preventing COVID-19 continue to outweigh the risks, the regulator said, echoing similar views expressed by U.S. regulators and the World Health Organization."
"France's public health authority has recommended people under 30 be given Pfizer's Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine when available instead of Moderna Inc's Spikevax jab, which carried comparatively higher risks of heart-related problems."
"Researchers find a higher than expected risk of myocarditis in young men after full vaccination."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/health/researchers-find-a...
Particularly this one from article above:
"...Boys between 16 and 19 years of age had the highest incidence of myocarditis after the second dose, according to a second study in the journal. The risk of heart problems in boys of that age was about nine times higher than in unvaccinated boys of the same age..."
Edit: The article above has a quote that I find fascinating
"Myocarditis is among the concerns that may have led the Food and Drug Administration to ask Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to enroll more children in their vaccine trials. Potential side effects are likely to dominate the discussion when agency advisers meet next week to review the evidence for a vaccine in children aged 5 to 11 years."
What kind of person voluntarily enrolls their children in vaccine "trials"?
It isn't.
Even if it were an identical 1% and 1%, the answer to:
> which risk should I take?
would then involve other variables, like the fact "that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant are 63 per cent less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated". https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l...
"Viral loads of Delta-variant SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections after vaccination and booster with BNT162b2"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01575-4
"...By analyzing viral loads of over 16,000 infections during the current, Delta-variant-dominated pandemic wave in Israel, we found that BTIs in recently fully vaccinated individuals have lower viral loads than infections in unvaccinated individuals. However, this effect starts to decline 2 months after vaccination and ultimately vanishes 6 months or longer after vaccination..."
If vaccines and their boosters infer temporary immunity, there's a certain level of rapid vaccine production and administration that can leverage that temporary immunity. Whether we can reach it is somewhat of a political problem.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/covid-va...
"As of June 11, 2021, approximately 296 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the United States, with 52 million administered to persons aged 12–29 years; of these, 30 million were first and 22 million were second doses. Within the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) (4), the national vaccine safety passive monitoring system, 1,226 reports of myocarditis after mRNA vaccination were received during December 29, 2020–June 11, 2021."
Second, the risk of death is much lower:
"Of the 323 persons meeting CDC’s case definitions, 309 (96%) were hospitalized. Acute clinical courses were generally mild; among 304 hospitalized patients with known clinical outcomes, 95% had been discharged at time of review, and none had died."
(Many, but not all--from the EU data, IIRC, excess myocarditis events were in the range of about 1 in 100,000, not 1 in 10,000.)
I would then it would then look beyond the benefit to the self and take into account civic duty. If your own personal probability of mortality is exactly the same with the vaccine and without, then we need to ask, what is then best for the system within which I live? (Remember, never send to know for whom the bell tolls.)
myocarditis isn't contagious, but covid is, and if left unchecked, might (will?) mutate into something that might be a lot more than 1% deadly to you. So you expected value of taking the covid vaccine will be higher than not.
I really think we should encourage people to be willing to think objectively like this. There IS a set of efficacy and risk numbers that would make the vaccines not worth it. They're just obviously not the numbers we have (which make it very worth it). It's just unfortunate that such an astonishingly large portion of the populace apparently can't do the math right enough or objectively enough to come to the same conclusion.
People who want the pandemic to end and everyone’s children to be safe?
"We have something that might cause heart inflammation in children...Might be true or not. We would like to find out more as we have seen a few cases...Would you mind send your toddler in Monday morning please? We are going to give him this product"
We did so in part because my kids benefited from other people making that same decision years ago - to participate in clinical trials that might benefit future children like mine.
In the US, since the start of the pandemic, the total number of deaths "involving COVID-19" in children aged 17 or younger is 595. During the same period, total deaths in this age group amount to 61,523.[1]
The vaccine does not provide sterilizing immunity. Fully vaccinated individuals can become infected and transmit the virus to others.
Based on these facts, can you explain how vaccinating children will "end" the pandemic and make children significantly more safe?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
Children absolutely get flu shots. It's recommended annually for anyone over six months old.
I've come to believe that it's all political and ideological at this point. There is indeed a contingent of crazy people who don't think COVID is real, believe in wild conspiracy theories about COVID, oppose any preventative measure (be it masking, social distancing or vaccination), etc.
And then there is another, larger contingent of people who believe that if they acknowledge any limitations of the vaccines, the minimal utility of rushing to vaccinate children, etc., they are letting the crazies win.
So now we're stuck in a Twilight Zone where the vaccinated have to be protected from the unvaccinated, vaccinating the group least likely to be affected by COVID is promoted as the latest key to ending the pandemic, "natural immunity" has gone from being accepted as basic science to treated like pseudoscience, and everybody who is vaccinated will probably be pressured to boost every 6 months no matter how much protection they continue to be told they have against hospitalization and death.
Okay, I'll bite.
Exactly how do you propose demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine (or any drug) in children without running clinical trials where you test it on actual, you know, children?
"This Article explores the flaws inherent in this ethics of pediatric research. Specifically, it challenges the view from ethics that the law permits parents to consent to their children's inclusion in harmful or risky research to the extent that related invasions would meet legal maltreatment standards. More broadly, it challenges the movement to increase access to healthy children for harmful and risky research on the ground that it risks two important regressions: First, in its willingness to risk harm to individual children in the interests of the group, it threatens the progress the law has made in its development of the concept of the child as an individual worthy of respect in his or her own right, a concept that imagines parents as fiduciaries and that includes strong protections against invasions of bodily integrity. Second, in its failure to assure that the burdens of non-therapeutic research are not placed disproportionately on children of lower socioeconomic and minority status, it violates the antidiscrimination principle, which has only begun to make good on its promise of equal treatment for all children."
How do you vet a new therapy for use on children without actually trying it on children at some point?
At some point you do have to use it on an actual child, right?