Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Children Aged 5–11 Years – US, Nov 3–Dec 19, 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Children Aged 5–11 Years – US, Nov 3–Dec 19, 2021

cdc.gov

24 pointssohkamyung27 comments

It's interesting how science-like yt video channels like https://youtu.be/vpwSYQelMEg?t=176 make the case that endocarditis is unusually high (let's say 14 of 7.14million), and saying "we don't know what the baseline is but..."

when you can easily look back a few years and look up stats (took me 10 seconds): https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.116.005306 where baseline is 1/50k^ Any comment to this effect is deleted/unapproved. I can only assume this is the new kind of anti-vax propaganda, to get around yt rules.

^While the instances of vaccine-related endocarditis are relatively high for the 20s to 40s male groups, for children there's nothing to suggest endocarditis is a specific side-effect, afaik.

That's 1 in 50k person years

> That's 1 in 50k person years

You are correct. That was helpful clarity.

Maybe divide 7.14million by (50000 * 6 year average age or whatever), and you might find a statistical baseline from that? Probably a bad idea.

The information is freely available from studies, was more to the point.

WHO: "As a matter of global equity, as long as many parts of the world are facing extreme vaccine shortages, countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage in their high-risk populations should prioritize global sharing of COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX facility before proceeding to vaccination of children and adolescents who are at low risk for severe disease."

- https://www.who.int/news/item/24-11-2021-interim-statement-o...

Germany: "Since children and adolescents have a relatively low risk of getting seriously ill with COVID-19, the risk-benefit assessment of illness or vaccination is different than for adults. Therefore, the STIKO has not issued a general recommendation to vaccinate all children from the age of 12, but recommends that children and adolescents with certain underlying conditions who are particularly at risk get the coronavirus vaccination"

- https://www.zusammengegencorona.de/en/corona-schutzimpfung-a...

France: "In the light of these elements and taking into account the evolution of the epidemic, the HAS considers that the individual benefit of the vaccination has been established for children aged 5 to 11 years with comorbidities and who are at risk of severe forms of Covid-19 and death. In total, this concerns a little over 360,000 children in France."

- https://www.has-sante.fr/jcms/p_3302411/fr/covid-19-la-has-r...

It is funny how the VAERS data is only reliable when thought convenient

Although looking at the high number of reports it is apparent that children suffer way more from the vaccine than covid. In the short term, long term is impossible to know the consequences of both

This is based on VAERS and also v-safe data, and the CDC has done some review. They don’t seem to be trying to estimate rates from this data, which is one of the more common errors made when looking at VAERS data

Also, it’s a bit more than 4k reported adverse, and only 100 serious ones, for a population of 8.9 million. That’s not a large number of reports; the number of serious adverse events is less than the number of children that died of Covid in the US since the start of the pandemic.

Finally, I don’t think there’s any a priori reason to think the long term effects of this vaccine will be any different than for previous vaccines.

Previous vaccines didn’t hijack your cell to produce the antigen.

Saying « there’s no reason to think » would be better phrased in a more honest way as « we have no idea, but let’s hope so, since we don’t have a choice anyway »

Obviously we don’t know everything, and we may never know with 100% certainty, but I disagree that we have “no idea”. We have prior knowledge from established vaccines about when to expect side effects, and what kinds are likely. Most known vaccine side effects are triggered by the immune response itself in the first few weeks, and we already have solid evidence on that time scale.

That doesn’t mean that novel side effects or delayed side effects are not possible, but I think without a plausible hypothesis it is reasonable to believe the risk is low, especially compared to a definite risk from infection.

You just described the only part that’s not new, aka: triggering the immune system. that’s the most important part regarding the prevention of covid sickness, however that’s clearly not all the story about this technology.

It always amazes me how people can not realize side-effects happens almost by definition outside of the model used to design the system, or make the plan. There’s a reason we usually require something closer to 10 years before deciding to authorize mass use of new drugs on a whole population. We want to be safer regarding « unknown unknowns ».

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