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When you answer these questions, it seems reasonable to not require boosters since the chances of death are low in this population as in the chance of hospitalization. However, the chances of heart damage, especially in males that would attend the school, is higher than the damage from the disease itself. The heart damage is permanent.
I'm not saying no one should get a vaccine, but rather we need to balance benefits and damages from the vaccine regiments. Is one shot enough to reduce the risk of Covid death/hospitalization while also keeping the risk of heart damage low? If yes, why require more shots?
Sadly the goal posts seem to have moved with the Covid in general and the vaccine in particular. People will still get Covid even with the vaccine. The original point of the vaccine is to reduce the risk of death, and the workload on the Hospitals. Now it seems that no one should ever get the disease. While laudable, it is unrealistic.
So it's reasonable to use Biontech instead of Moderna for young people, but the overall benefit of the vaccine still applies. The risks from COVID for young people are rare, but the side effect from the vaccine are even rarer.
There are countries that only use Biontech for younger people, which is a reasonable way to deal with this if you have plenty of vaccine available.
Yes.
> Looking only at one particular risk--which is extraordinarily rare for both covid and vaccine subjects--and ignoring the risk the vaccine protects against seems...like bad analysis?
We are just barely beginning to have enough data to do that analysis. "Compare all risks from covid to all risks of vaccine" is not an analysis that we can do yet (if I understand correctly).
Let us assume that 1) the more people who get vaccinated, the less the disease spreads through the population, 2) the old are at greater risk from the disease, 3) the young are at greater risk from the vaccine than they are from the disease. And 4), which is not an assumption, that the young have more to lose - if they die, they miss more of the life they could have had; if they have permanent damage, they have to live with the damage for longer.
Should we ask the young to take the risk? It depends on how much risk they face from the vaccine, and how much the vaccine reduces the spread (and therefore the risk to the old). Does the total damage (measured in "quality years of life lost" or some such) increase or decrease if we vaccinate the young? I don't know if we have the data to answer the question; I'm fairly certain that if we do have the data, it isn't solid yet (that is, it could significantly change as we get better data).
Should we force the young to take the risk? That's a similar question, but the standard for "forcing" should be significantly higher than the standard for "asking". (In the same way, we'll draft the young if the military situation is dire enough, but until then, we have a volunteer military.)
16 in 1,000,000 for two doses. For reference, your chance of being struck by lightning in any given year is 1 in 1,222,000.
Oh, and:
> This compares with an extra 40 (95% CI 38, 41) myocarditis events per 1 million patients in the 28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test.
Myocarditis is, while something that should be monitored, generally minor especially in otherwise healthy adults. The treatment for it "keep an eye on the patient until myocarditis goes away". Any kind of infection or virus can cause it, as can many most kinds of drugs, and it's rarely a major deal.