LA Times: It’s harder to justify COVID vaccine for children if pandemic’s end is near

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)By Melissa HealyStaff Writer 

 

If this were December 2020, or August 2021, the argument for vaccinating young children against COVID-19 would be easy to make.

With case counts surging and hospitals near capacity, giving young kids a jab would be counted on to slow transmission of a virus that’s killing thousands of Americans a day. The risk that inoculation could cause heart inflammation in young kids appears to be minuscule. Countering the coronavirus would clearly win out.

But it’s late October 2021, and the virus appears to be in retreat. New infections and deaths have both plunged more than 45% since a surge in September. And after multiple waves of infections, more than 1 in 4 U.S. residents have likely battled the coronavirus and gained some immunity as a result.

All that is good news, but it also means that widespread vaccination of the nation’s grade-school population offers less of an upside than it would have before.

That makes it harder to say there’s enough to be gained by the shot to offset the theoretical possibility of heart risks — a downside that’s not yet been measured.

These are the calculations experts are trying to make as they decide whether Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11 should be made available — and especially whether it should be recommended — for all 28 million U.S. children in this age group.

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Via https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-10-28/its-harder-to-justify-covid-vaccine-for-kids-if-pandemics-end-is-near