Why are we vaccinating children against Covid-19? | Hacker News Reader

Why are we vaccinating children against Covid-19?

sciencedirect.com

58 pointsycnews154 comments

It’s so strange to read these questions as if kids were living in isolation from adults.

Kids are in closer contact with each other and their parents than adults are with each other. It’s not even a close comparison. They may not get severe infections as often as adults, but ask any parent and they’ll let you know just how effective kids are at spreading infections.

It also feels deliberately disingenuous to bring up possible vaccine side effects without explaining that those same side effects occur with higher frequency and severity from the infection itself. It’s increasingly looking like exposure to Coronavirus is inevitable, so choosing the lower risk option of being vaccinated is obviously better than risking the worse side effects of the infection itself. Too many people are trying to treat this as a comparison between vaccinated or never being exposed to the virus ever, which is an increasingly unlikely possibility.

Yeah if a kid infects a parent, and that parent dies, that is an incredibly bad outcome for the kid.

presumably the parents would be vaccinated???

The science is murky on whether being vaccinated prevents being infectious. Others have pointed it out and are being flagged.

I took JNJ and boosted with Moderna I want people to choose to get vaxxed but as far as I can tell nobody is out there saying getting vaxxed will prevent you from spreading the disease.

The science is not murky at all. If you are vaccinated you can be infected. Have you been watching the news? We are on full lockdown again in my household, because vaccination isn't a guarantee to stop transmission.

That’s not the right question. The right question is: does a vaxxed person have a lower viral load that makes them likely to infect fewer people?

If the answer was yes, then vaxxing young kids makes more sense.

I disagree. IMO At this point the only tool that can effectively stop transmission is masking, testing,and isolation. In the good old USA we have none of those.

I understand that we originally believed the vaccine stopped transmission. It is time to let that go.

The vaccine is a tool to reduce the risk of hospitalization and mortality.

Whether or not Kids are Less infectious is not a good criteria to evaluate the worthiness of giving kids the vaccine. It protects them and the people around them.

Please don't conflate the lack of proper disease controls with evaluating vaccine effectiveness. We need better testing contact tracing and community outreach. We have really miss managed this.

The virus will be around forever. You obviously can't expect people to continue with masking and testing indefinitely.

Thank you are in for a big wake-up call

There are many places today in the middle of the pandemic that don’t care about masks.

I’m sure some people will choose to mask forever but the mandates will end.

> The science is murky on whether being vaccinated prevents being infectious. Others have pointed it out and are being flagged.

It’s because they’re being disingenuous.

Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread. Reduced infection length gives less time for transmissibility.

So even if you can still transmit the virus while vaccinated, there is value in reducing the amount of time you’re infectious and the amount of viral load you’re spreading into the air.

It’s not a binary thing, despite what some are trying to suggest.

I hear you but I would need to see that studied to believe it.

Possibly vaxxed people are more likely to be asymptomatic and more likely to go out to lunch or something and spread it. Hard to say right?

In life there are no guarantees. It reduces transmissibility by shortening the symptoms length and decreasing the viral load. There are studies that indicate exactly what you're looking for. Go find them.

> Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread. Reduced infection length gives less time for transmissibility.

At the same time, less severe cases would make ideal spreaders: you're not aware you're infectious and you're not hindered from going out by being sick. I don't think that's a compelling reason for "vaccination reduces spread". Portugal's also doesn't suggest that, currently peaking despite 88% with two vaccinations and 26% with three.

The issue here is not with the vaccine. We need better and cheaper test kits. I live in the USA and frankly the response has been a joke. If we had billions of these test kits that were effective and cheap, we would be able to reduce the spread with the latest developments.

The vaccine is tool. We need to pick the best tool for the job. Vaccines reduce severity and risk. Talking about Nations peaking, and only talking about the vaccine is like trying to build a house using nails and your bare hands. There is another tool that we need to be effective. It's called testing and I haven't seen 1 Western Country executes successfully on this.

I agree. It feels like bureaucrats and accountants focusing on the wrong issue at times. Germany had free tests, then stopped offering them for free for the unvaccinated (while the vaccinated no longer needed tests to go to restaurants etc ... which, yeah, let's not talk about it), citing costs (but probably mostly to increase the pressure to get vaccinated). Apparently it might have cost "up to 700mm Euro per month" (including significant sums being redirected via fraud). Germany's regular federal budget is ~550bn Euro per year. Paying for temporary leave of employees costs around 20bn per year. So they're saving 700mm per month (well... they did, for something like six weeks, they're back to free testing again), prolonging the time where they pay around 1500mm per month for furloughed employees and the economy suffers. But hey, costs for testing are down!

I agree with almost everything you say, but calling people disingenuous is lame.

If it's your kid, you hug them, they touch everything, they drool on everything. It doesn't matter if they're slightly contagious or heavily contagious, you're going to get saturated by them regardless.

So without any "disingenousness", I claim vaccinations help slow the spread for normal interactions, but it probably doesn't help much to stop kids spreading it to their parents.

It's interesting that for almost two years now I've seen the same "common knowledge" repeated over and over. "Kids are germ factories" and variations on that theme. But watching the pandemic and how its effected children has actually made me reconsider that notion. With the caveat that Omicron data may change this, we have tons of data that clearly shows that small children spread COVID19 significantly less than teenagers and adults. It's hard to know if this is something specific to COVID or if other respiratory viruses are also spread less efficiently (but still spread) by kids than your co-workers, spouse, etc.

To speak specifically to your point, the data I've seen indicates that vaccinations are much more effective in preventing infection (and therefore spread) in younger people. That likely compounds with an adults vaccination, so a vaccinated kid is likely significantly less likely to bring an infection home and infect an adult.

I think it’s because kids are notorious flu spreaders. They pass it much easier than adults.

Heh, I guess all of reality has two sides nowadays. For every person who notices how parents of small children seem to show up to the office with pink eye and catch many more colds, there's a parent who's certain their little angels are germ-free.

I'm not sure "common knowledge" has meaning any more considering that every topic is now polarizing. Anyone will argue anything and then refer to some unspecified "data" they've seen. Moreover, I doubt parents can be objective about this considering there's an evolutionary advantage to not being repulsed by their offspring's illnesses.

> the data I've seen indicates that vaccinations are much more effective in preventing infection (and therefore spread)

I don't even disagree with that. All I'm saying is that parents have a much higher level of exposure to their own children than pretty much anyone else in the world. You could reduce transmission of children by 90%, but that doesn't mean much to the parents who have 100X the exposure to them. We can talk viral load all you want, but at some point they'll cough in your face and the virus is going to start replicating inside of you.

What are your thoughts on the new data released by Ontario[1]?

[1]https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0... (see graph 3 in particular)

(2nd attempt, realized the outlier spike is in "unvaccinated and 80+" category). Utter garbage data. Using the breakdown by age we note a huge outlier spike in unvaccinated cases in the 80+ age group, 800/100k vs. 5-10/100k. All other age groups show a decline in case rates for both vaccinated and unvaccinated, with a vaccinated case rate << unvaccinated case rate (5x-10x). I see no way to add up the breakdown by age case rate numbers into total case rate numbers showing vaccinated case rate taking over unvaccinated case rate.

Couple of related notes:

* Covid statistics without a breakdown by age / date / vaccination status are garbage. Possibly BMI and/or immunosuppressed status should also be added to the mix. The authorities failure to publish this data breakdown 2 years into the pandemic is going beyond incompetence.

* Focusing on "cases" beyond a coarse "going up or going down" is largely useless. Observed "cases" are more likely to indicate test penetration than actual case numbers, and test penetration may significantly vary between age groups, institutionalization settings, etc.

> Vaccination reduces infection severity and length. Reduced infection severity reduces coughing, which reduces spread.

In practice this shouldn't make a difference, because anyone with a cough should stay home, but it's be a problem in the US where you're not guaranteed paid sick days. In Europe not so much, although there are currently problems with a lot of people not working due to being at home with Omicron, but that's temporary.

All in all it's an excellent situation. The hospitals are a bit under pressure now due to everyone running for tests, but it'll subside - after January things should be more or less back to normal (relatively speaking), if people want it to be (which I doubt).

And since kids have never played any significant part in this, mandating vaccines for them just seems like an act of foolish desperation.

Give boosters to those who need them. Even the WHO said it's stupid to waste them on kids.

I thought if you got an mRNA-based shot like Moderna or Pfizer, you should boost with the same type, JNJ isn’t. Is mixing and matching between the two still effective? (Question directed to anyone)

Edit: nm, you should. https://www.cnet.com/health/johnson-and-johnson-covid-booste...

Yes people that got jnj are advised in USA to boost with mRNA vax.

Norwegian health authorities recommend BioNTech instead of Moderna for children and adolescents:

https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2021/myocarditis-in-boys-and-youn...

The vaccinated spread Omicron at high rates:

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...

To give you credits, we have two kids and one goes to preschool. We have been sick-ish every other 2 weeks, starting from September. Mild throat ache, mild runny nose, mild cough, pick one!

And we are really hard on "wash your hands" (my 3 years old washes her hands better than most adults), it's just that she gets infected, so we do too. It's way milder on us, sometimes we don't get it, but she brings everything at home.

> It also feels deliberately disingenuous to bring up possible vaccine side effects without explaining that those same side effects occur with higher frequency and severity from the infection itself.

Welcome to the COVID-19/anti-vax "debate." Sometimes it seems like it's more of a testing ground for developing the most effective misleading arguments to discourage people from taking sensible public health measures and create politically-exploitable controversy.

The article already has an expression of concern from the editors, that's pretty rare and casts doubt on any peer-review this might have received.

Just reading the appendix, the calculation they do for the dangers of dying by COVID or the vaccine are completely insane. They take the raw VAERS numbers (which are not designed for this purpose and represent deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it). They then multiply this by 100 to account for VAERS allegedly undercounting deaths. They then assume that only 6% of people dying from COVID died from COVID, everone else allegedly only died with COVID.

And then they claim that PCR tests are highly likely to be false positive, so many people that are tested positive don't actually have COVID. This is just a series of completely outlandish claims, you can arrive at any number you want if you add "corrections factors" of two orders of magnitude with no real justification, especially if you start from bad data to begin with.

Your note on misuse of VAERS data caught my attention: "deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it". Apparently the same kind of sleigh of hand is widespread practice in mainstream epidemiological data collection, according to recent comments by none other than Dr. Fauci.

> "But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID," Fauci continued. "And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, 'hospitalized with COVID,' as opposed to because of COVID."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/broken-...

False positive PCR tests are rare but they do occur.

https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/researchers-identify-tech...

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr

https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/e54

Some convalescent patients continue to test positive long after the infection is cleared and they are no longer contagious.

https://wi.mit.edu/news/new-research-reveals-why-some-patien...

> Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children

That is not going to make you feel any better if it is your kid who is one of these "negligible" deaths.

If there is anything you can do as a parent to reduce the risk to your kids, of course you are going to do it (especially if it is a no-brainer quick simple low-risk and cheap like a vaccination). Kids get all sorts of vaccinations and injections starting for their first few weeks of life (and even minutes - they get a vitamin K shot immediately after birth in the UK) , why should covid be any different?

What if it doesn’t reduce risk though?

You need to leave and stop pushing your anti-vaccine misinformation. Every Post in here for you is a what if based on zero facts. You should know when to stop talking.

No. Clearly you don’t read my comments since I regularly note facts from around the world.

Researchers in England found in the first 12 months of COVID only 25 COVID deaths for under age 18. That is an incredibly small number. That level of risk is so low that any honest person would have to ask the question whether reducing risk is actually possible without worse side effects (and that’s not just for vaccines — I mean for any intervention including non-pharmaceutical interventions).

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w

I'm sorry, I must have misread your username when I posted that, I had meant to send that to jtdev.

No problem!

> If there is anything you can do as a parent to reduce the risk to your kids, of course you are going to do it

No you're not. Having your kid wear a helmet 24/7 would reduce their risk. But it will be reduced by such a tiny amount that it's really not worth the trouble.

There is not a global pandemic killing millions and which might kill your kid that can be prevented by wearing a helmet.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Don't bother with the helmet, the kid might die from Corona? Don't bother with Corona, the kid might get hit by a car (more likely than dying from Corona, actually).

There's simply a tiny improvement of safety, too small to care. Of course, this changes if the child belongs to a risk group that has a much higher chance of getting seriously ill and dying. Much like it totally makes sense to make your kid wear a helmet while biking, because the risk is much, much higher at that time.

youre really not getting it

> That is not going to make you feel any better if it is your kid who is one of these "negligible" deaths.

Why not ban cars then as well?

I would definitely get a vaccine against traffic accidents, if such existed.

There is a remedy, of course, but you may not appreciate the side-effects

> That is not going to make you feel any better if it is your kid who is one of these "negligible" deaths.

True, but that's not a good argument. There's not enough data on the vaccine yet to be rule out the possibility that kids could also die from the vaccine, in some very rare cases. The death rate for kids infected with Covid is so low that we need a lot more data in vaccination studies to determine whether Covid or the vaccine has a higher death rate.

(FWIW, my kids are vaccinated - but not because of the death rate, but because of long covid)

A: Because children pass COVID-19 on to older people who are highly likely to die.

It's like saying "Why fight forest fires? Very few people live in the forests." Because the fire will grow and burn down all the cities.

And also: because we can do both. All the elderly people (that are willing to take the safe and effective vaccine) are vaccinated. We have plenty of vaccines leftover. This isn't a matter of picking who gets it and who doesn't.

That's a very poor answer since giving any medicine to a child with risks exceeding the benefits so that someone else could benefit would violate the Hippocratic Oath.

Also, there aren't plenty of vaccines leftover worldwide. Vaccines would be going to poorer countries that have low vaccination rates if those vaccines weren't being used for children.

The risk to 5–11 year olds of the mRNA Covid vaccines is ~0, orders of magnitude lower than the (still very low compared to older adults) risk of Covid. These are incredibly safe vaccines. Out of ~9 million vaccinations, there have been ~100 "serious" adverse effects reported, most of those fever or vomiting but also e.g. 5 experiencing new-onset seizures and 11 with (recovered or recovering) myocarditis. 2 girls (5 and 6) with "complicated medical histories" in "fragile health" died after vaccination, and their deaths are being investigated but are not believed to be caused by the vaccine https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a1.htm?s_cid=...

Among 12–17 year olds, the vaccines result in on the order 200x reduction in hospitalization. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a3.htm?s_cid=...

How many kids have been exposed to covid? Almost all over the last 2 years with virtually no deaths. How many kids have received the vaccine? Very few over the last month with some reported complications like myocarditis for example.

Vaccines do not prevent transmission, so what benefit is there for children (and their families) getting this vaccine when the risk of the disease is virtually zero?

Hundreds of children have died of Covid in the USA out of tens of millions infected. This is obviously much lower than the risk to the unvaccinated elderly (like 3+ orders of magnitude lower), but every dead child is still a tragedy. A larger number of children (still relatively low compared to adults) experience chronic post-viral sequelae significantly harming their quality of life. Covid is among the riskiest diseases faced this year by young children in developed countries.

As I mentioned (see linked CDC document), as far as we can tell zero children 5–11 have died from the vaccine out of ~9 million vaccinated. There were 11 cases of myocarditis, all recovered or recovering. As far as anyone can tell the vaccine has caused no long-term harm to any young child. This is a truly remarkable safety record, better than many vaccines we mandate for all children for diseases less dangerous than Covid.

Vaccines do partially prevent transmission, both for a vaccinated index infected person (viral load goes down faster and course of infection is shortened) and when their contacts are vaccinated (reduces likelihood of being infected at all).

But it’s not perfect, especially with the omicron variant which partially evades antibodies (but does not evade T cell immunity).

> what benefit is there for children (and their families)

The benefits are:

(a) There is some protection against initial infection (very effective with the original and alpha/beta variants, very effective after a booster for delta, only partially effective for omicron; perhaps in the future there will be a variant-agnostic booster), which should get still more effective after a mild Covid infection. Eventually almost every person on the planet will be vaccinated and/or infected multiple times by Covid, and this population immunity is the only way out of the pandemic.

(b) Vaccination decreases risk of hospitalization and death vs. current Covid variants across all age groups including children by 2+ orders of magnitude. The adaptive immune system is extremely effective but it takes a while to learn to recognize new pathogens, making diseases much more dangerous to the immunologically naïve. Vaccines induce this learning up-front without the need for an accompanying high-risk infection.

(c) The omicron variant is putting more children in hospitals than previous variants, and an even more risky-to-children variant might become dominant in the future. T cell immunity induced by vaccines should continue to offer strong protection vs. future variants, because there is limited evolutionary pressure on the virus to evade it (whereas there is significant evolutionary pressure to evade antibodies).

(d) Children eventually grow up, and Covid is going to be circulating forever. An immunologically naïve person who encounters it at some later time (maybe decades in the future) is going to be hit much harder. An immunization for everyone now is a great insurance policy for the future.

This post is 100% wrong. Benefits outweigh the risks, and vaccine acceptance is a very big problem even in countries like south Africa.

I know its hard for some people, but we can't learn the info for you. Please be an adult when you use freedom of speech. These things you do have a real impact when you yell them into the echo chamber called facebook.

> This isn't a matter of picking who gets it and who doesn't.

I agree with everything except this. On a world wide level there are millions of unvaccinated adults.

4.49 billion people including children.

Given the vaccine refusal rate in some countries, I wouldn’t be surprised if half of the currently unvaccinated don’t ever get one.

It seems that many are missing the point that vaccines do not appear to mitigate transmissibility of covid, only severity.

Reducing length of infection (via vaccination) reduces the amount of time someone is contagious. This reduces the number of people they infect.

Initial viral load of exposure is a variable in infection severity, though, so it’s not without value.

These things can’t be reduced to binary answers.

Then why are vaccination rates correlated only to a reduction in COVID deaths and not a reduction in cases?

Because an increase in total number of vaccinations have coincided with an increase in transmissibility of the virus due to emerging variants.

Do you see evidence that cases are increasing in the unvaccinated much faster than in vaccinated? I'm not finding anything that supports that assertion. If you can point me in the right direction, I will look with an open mind.

That's not at all what I just wrote. Read it again.

My point was, if transmissibility has increased to a degree that cases are increasing vaccinated populations, isn't it logical to conclude that cases in the unvaccinated would have increased to a much greater degree?

Yes just take New York as one example: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-breakthrough-data

Almost all cases now are a wildly more infectious variant than before. The virus isn’t a static target.

Symptoms for vaccinated are less severe and possibly even asymptomatic, so vaccinated are less likely to quarantine when they contract Covid. This could infect more people not less.

Also, vaccinated are supposed to wait longer before testing for covid after exposure since they are more susceptible to false negative results. This also could infect more people and have a counter result.

If vaccinated people are highly infections for 15 minutes less than unvaccinated, that's mitigation. Your statement is extreme (of course my example is silly, but your statement is almost certainly wrong in a meaningful way).

What is extreme about my statement? If you see evidence to the contrary, please share it.

There's blatant evidence all over the place. Vaccinated people are sick for less time, that provides mitigation of transmission.

Many studies have shown that the vaccines reduce infection and transmission. Less so for Omicron but it does reduce it.

Well, there are some arguments that forest fires are getting worse and worse because we're never allowing natural smaller fires to occur.

Don't know at all if that holds up to COVID but if getting the virus develops stronger imunity than getting the vaccine, maybe spreading the vaccination to countries that are way behind might be the right priority.

Please go do research instead of speculating

Do the vaccines reduce infections, esp. omicron?

I think collecting data around this specific question namely infections rather than hospitalizations or deaths would be very difficult if not impossible. I think you can draw your own conclusions but as far as the data goes it's up for interpretation.

So child sacrifice to save the old and sick?

> A: Because children pass COVID-19 on to older people who are highly likely to die.

Am I living in 2020 or did I dream vaccines existing and being extremely effective? At this point, if you are vaccinated NO ONE is highly likely to die.

Go read the summary in section 5, the style is pretty weird...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002...

(I bet you neither would have expected ammonium nitrate explosions getting mentioned in the article!)

So many mentions of VAERS too...

>While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases.

I'm definitely not someone who reads these types of articles often but this part definitely stood out to me. Are these analogies common? It seemed odd.

No, these are clearly very marginal academics ("independent consultants", seriously?) doing bad science.

No, this article has a number of dog whistles and other verbiage that is meant to appeal to anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists. It’s not good scientific work. It’s an agenda-pushing piece disguised as a journal article.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002...

> Expression of concern: Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?

> The journal would like to alert readers to the fact that the Special Issue titled “COVID-19 Pandemic: Health impact and Novel research” including the article titled” Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” are being rereviewed post-publication by an independent Editor and a new set of reviewers, due to concerns raised regarding the validity and scientific soundness of the content. Further updates will be provided to readers once the investigations have concluded.

This topic was discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739963

And again, this study was done long before omicron:

>As of this writing in mid-June 2021

Recent news story:

>The omicron-fueled surge that is sending COVID-19 cases rocketing in the U.S. is putting children in the hospital in record numbers, and experts lament that most of the youngsters are not vaccinated.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pande...

Even Anthony Fauci, hardly a COVID denier, recently explained on MSNBC that many of those hospitalizations of kids are incidentally COVID positive while the child is actually in the hospital for (his examples) things link appendicitis and a broken leg.

Furthermore why case counts are skyrocketing (literally the highest ever seen in the pandemic) hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7%.

https://www.air.tv/watch?v=99n-gANuSf6pHQ8A_QQy1Q

> hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7%

For now. Let's see in three weeks from now, and let's hope that it stays that way. The differences in demographics between the populations that we have data on and the ones that are now affected are significant enough that I don't think we should party just yet.

Beyond that, deaths lag behind hospitalizations by several weeks for obvious reasons -- most people who get sick enough to die from the virus will end up going to the hospital first.

Working at a school, this is an awful and dangerous article.

Schools are very likely to become hyperspreaders with how little space there is between kids in class, and because the younger ones (grade 5 to 8) are still immature.

The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high.

> A study by the Helmholtz Centre Munich, for example, showed that the number of children with antibodies in their blood was six times higher than the cases reported by the Bavarian State Office for Health and Nutrition. [1]

I'm honestly baffled by how shortsighted the 'if it's not sick, it's not an issue' logic is. This does not work with Covid.

[1] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faq-sind-kinder-tatsaec...

How come we don't have data about spread from schools etc? Its been 2 years

A lot of things are 'likely'

> The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high.

I think this is not a good argument:

- Vaccines have been shown to be not very good at preventing infections, especially a few months after the last dose, and even more so with newer variants. - As far as I know, most virologists say that infection is inevitable. Vaccinating kids can delay the infection, but not prevent it.

Why are we flagging scientific articles on HN? What happened to having a normal civilized discussion and argument exchange?

This science article is dodge.

FTA: "Highlights

• Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities.

• Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children.

• Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term.

• Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children.

• High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term)."

Over here the main reason for vaccinating children is to reduce the infections carried over by children. Not necessarily to spare them from symptoms as most children will just have mild symptoms and less long covid. I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children. They would also be impacted the longest and strongest so if that can be prevented with vaccinations without worse side effects that seems fine to me.

I haven’t seen formal studies, but the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen is that children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults, but in absolute terms the symptoms are less severe as they start at higher baseline levels of energy, health, etc. but relative to their peers, the effects can still be quite significant.

> children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults

It's harder to find than what imagined, but the closest data I found is https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

The Table 1 compare the number of death related to covid-19 with the total number of death

* 0-17 years: 678/66,234 ~= 1.0%

* 85 years and over: 212,658/1,897,245 ~= 11.2%

So the risk of dying by covid-19 compared with all the other risk is much smaller for kids than old people. It would be interesting to compare with the total population of each age, but the difference will be bigger.

The problem is that traditional media a social media have a strong sampling bias. A dead of a kid is unusual and it will get more coverage than the dead of a 90 year old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog

Hmm.. typo in my original comment. Was meant to say "long covid" not "lost by covid". I agree there's a lot fewer kids dying.

>I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children.

Study from September:

>Up to one in seven (14%) children and young people who caught SARS-CoV-2 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later, suggest preliminary findings from the world’s largest study on long Covid in children, led by UCL and Public Health England researchers.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-la...

The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

Herd immunity cannot be established with the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines, due to high transmissibity amongst the vaccinated, and without herd immunity, every one contracting COVID-19 is inevitable, so I don't see a basis in the 'vaccinate to protect others' argument.

As for "long COVID", the best evidence available suggests most cases are misattribution:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.

When the CDC or WHO tells us that there is merit to this work, I will know to give it credit. As long as they don’t, the paper is asking us to believe that public health institutions are somehow stupid or corrupt.

I am not qualified to evaluate the claims made here, directly. I am qualified to notice that there are a lot of prominent experts from big universities on TV telling us things that are not in keeping with some of the key claims of this paper.

“prominent experts from big universities”

If you are not qualified to evaluate these claims, how do you know they are prominent let alone “experts”? Why are you so willing to accept their opinions over a research articles conclusions?

Because that’s what it means to BE civilized. It means that we learn how to trust each other. I’m willing to trust experts for the same reason that you trust them to build roads and buildings and grow the food you eat and when you are sick with covid you go and beg those experts to save you instead having the courage of your skeptical convictions and dying alone in a forest.

I evaluate information about expertise partly based on social heuristics. For instance, long term reputation; and reputation networks such as are cultivated by mainstream (read responsible and accountable) journalism.

I accept their opinions because they are internally consistent, survive skeptical journalism over time, and based on the poor quality of criticism against them.

I am knowledgeable enough to detect many of the tricks and evasions of charlatans. And I review the work of watchdog organizations, too.

Finally, I believe that most people are decent. Most people are mediocre, yes, but they are decent. Conspiracies of evil cannot grow very large, because they collapse. Too many people are too good.

I have one kid. The trick of long term issues due to COVID is non zero. The risk of death is non zero. Many people have decided that science is subjective. VAERS data is unreliable at best, since it's unverifiable. (Anyone can submit anything and there was a spike in reporting of side effects and death early on.)

My level of acceptable risk is not the same as this paper argues it should be but I find the data suspect.

"Reducing the spread of covid 19" is not a thing in the vaccine context.

You are going to get it. Everyone is going to get it, probably repeatedly. France has vaccine passports out of the wazoo and 200k cases.

"Reducing the spread" of something implies that the spread is actually reduced at the macro level. It's irrelevant whether a single vaccinated person has a slightly reduced probability of transmitting the disease if _in aggregate_ everyone gets it anyway.

You may as well say that an umbrella helps prevent wet hair. Well yeah, but not in a blizzard. In a blizzard your hair is saturated anyway. No prevention has occurred.

"Vaccinate the world" doesn't solve covid. Vaccinated populations still get and transmit the virus. They're much better off of course because the individuals fight off the virus more effectively and their health systems function better.

But they still bloody get the virus, still provide a reservoir for mutations, etc.

If I had a quid for every totally nonsensical proclamation about "solving covid via xyz" I'd be a billionaire.

For the same reason we vaccinate boys against HPV. Protects the ones they love.

"Why are we vaccinating children against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus... etc. etc. etc."

It's the same answer.

One element I never see discussed is even if the vaccine had no side effects for children, since there is a limited supply of vaccines, inoculating a child in the USA means someone (probably older, less healthy) somewhere else is not getting it. It's totally understandable for US politicians to value the life of a US resident higher than that in another country, but we should discuss how much more valuable that life is.

Perfect vaccine distribution across the entire world isn’t realistic.

Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to vaccine distribution. We could waste months or years trying to get all of the vaccines to the “right” people first, or we could start vaccinating as many people as possible in whatever order makes it fastest. The latter option produces significantly better outcomes compared to waiting to try to distribute it globally according to some specific order.

And in the same line of thinking that vaccination is a world the more the virus spreads through people that cannot fight it (naturally or via vaccines) the more the change of mutations apearing and spreading.

i think you see this rarely discussed because its an issue that is rapidly declining in importance over time.

The trade off of either-this-US-kid-gets-it-or-that-Indian-adult-gets-it becomes less severe when availability of vaccines is going up everywhere rapidly.

Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose.

so, scarcity is certainly the case sometimes (like right now for Paxlovid) but not for general availability vaccines worldwide.

> Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose.

Pharmaceutical companies would invest more in finding ways around regional constraints if they didn't have a free profit square by selling their vaccines in the US.

You are touching on an important subject: COVID-19 is a global problem, not a set of disjoint local problems, and only a global plan of attack has any realistic chance of success. As long as things are bad in just one country and assuming normal connectivity between that one country and the rest of the world the next mutation is almost a sure thing. But even a global plan of attack is getting harder to implement every day. Yesterday the world saw almost 1.9 million new confirmed cases. Each of those is a potential breeding ground for new mutations.

What would a global plan of attack look like? Who coordinates it and who decides when they've been successful?

- synchronized vaccination drive

- WHO

- measure the spread, hospitalizations and deaths before and after, though, absent a control (see: global) there will of course always be people that will argue that it wasn't the vaccines that did it.

For a member of the US there is no limit as to how much more valuable a US resident life should be. If the choice is between saving a US citizen or a resident of another country, you must choose the US citizen.

Why?

I might get downvoted but I want to answer you honestly:

It’s part of American folklore and culture, we do not always live up to our higher ideals but as Americans we take care of our own.

Yes possibly it’s national narcissism but there you have it.

Thank you. For me if I had the choice between a fellow country person and some other random individual in the world I'd first look at their relative ages and if the difference is significant I'd pick the younger one.

But I've lived outside of my country for quite a big chunk of my life and don't really have a strong connection to our 'national identity', I don't have a flag and I don't care about our royal family.

There is also the benefit of knowing that if you are a US citizen, other US citizens would prioritize saving you vs foreign aliens, no matter what.

Every nation strives to protect its own first and foremost (obviously there are exceptions where the leaders were bad or their interests diverged too much but in general it holds). People are valuable. Every institution in the US runs on them and their productive output.

What benefit does your continued existence, or some random farmer in India, or some random taxi driver in Chile confer the US vs some overweight middle manager who pays fat taxes on his 200k income and does his part to keep a local liquor store in business?

It might not pass western morals but the game theory side seems pretty obvious to me.

There's a surplus of vaccine right now. You need to go get on a high horse so you can see.

Because COVID is less transmissible amongst the vaccinated, I assume.

I don’t believe it is. Vaccinated and unvaccinated spread COVID just as easily. Currently the narrative is that vaccinated people are better protected from the negative effects of COVID and hence less likely to land on IC.

Actually a Dutch academic doctor (Diederik Gommers) stated this week that most people on IC in The Netherlands have one thing in common: they’re overweight. This doctor is part of the Outbreak Management Team in The Netherlands that deals with the COVID situation. Being overweight might be a be better indicator to see how likely one is to end up on IC compared to vaccination status. As such this doctor is not in favor of a 2G society (unlike the Dutch government that wants to push 2G).

This whole policy is lunacy.

According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the reason for the push to vaccinate children is because emergency use authorization will be gone in March 2022 and if children get vaccinated before March then vaccine producers will not be liable for negative side-effects afterwards. I am not a lawyer so I can’t confirm if there’s truth in this statement.

Regardless, very few children will get negative side-effects from COVID, much more will get negative side-effects from mRNA vaccines (especially boys stand to get much more myocarditis cases).

I think our children are our future and I certainly won’t risk an experimental vaccine on my soon-to-be 5 year old, perfectly healthy, daughter. A vaccine that (from my POV) seems to be quite ineffective and for which we still don’t know if there will be any long-term (say 10+ years) negative effects.

Same. Four year old daughter. I have no intention of getting her a Covid vax and I’ll move school districts if my liberal city (Berkeley) tries to mandate it.

My wife and I are both vaxxed and boosted but why would I shoot a drug into her that only claims to prevent severe disease, which is a very rare occurrence in kids.

Because it would offer you more protection and it would prevent the child from being hospitalized.

You might be right and I’m open to seeing the evidence.

To me it’s quite simple: does the risk of side effects outweigh the risk of serious disease?

For adults, no way, take the vax it’s safe and effective.

For kids: they are at much lower risk of severe disease so I would like public health authorities to show me the numbers please.

Public health authorities regularly perform that kind of risk-benefit analysis. Here's one by the FDA looking at the 5-11 age group: https://www.fda.gov/media/153507/download

My understanding is that this analysis assumed the observed myocarditis risk of the 12-15 age group would also apply here, but IIRC more recent data shows no myocarditis cases at all for the younger group.

There's a theory that links the occurrence of myocarditis to high testosterone levels, but that hasn't been proven yet. Existing data shows that the increased myocarditis risk (more or less) only applies to boys/young males.

Thanks for flagging this. This data to me looks pretty murky in places.

Look at the outcome for young boys. They would expect 67 icu stays for Covid, 57 icu stays due to the vaccine. And there are a lot of assumptions baked in there.

(Numbers for girls are better)

With numbers that tight, why introduce a drug that might for children have non-obvious long term effects?

> I don’t believe it is.

Believe what you want, but every bit of evidence suggests otherwise. So your conclusion that the policy is lunacy is based on a false premise.

> I don’t believe it is. Vaccinated and unvaccinated spread COVID just as easily.

Evidence and actual science says otherwise.

After age and vaccination status, obesity is the key risk factor for severe COVID-19. It's disappointing that public health officials have put so little emphasis on this issue.

https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...

2 years on, still going strong with the BS.

Freedom and safety, story of the World

Anyone who's read even a handful of scientific articles in the biomed space can easily tell that this is a garbage paper in a garbage journal: https://retractionwatch.com/2021/12/19/elsevier-subjects-ent...

Please flag this terrible post.

Why can't we ask the question?

Did I say that the question can't be asked? Do you understand that there's a linked webpage attached to the title of this submission?

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