The Covid-19 vaccines famously are not sterilizing, and Covid-19 itself does not pose any sort of significant risk to otherwise healthy children.
The flu is more dangerous to kids (see slide #17 here https://www.fda.gov/media/153508/download) and it has "long" symptoms too. It's not unusual.
Driving them to and from school is 10x more dangerous.
An unvaccinated kid has risks lower than a vaccinated adult. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-i...
Besides, many (most?) kids have already had Covid anyway.
I'm tired of the fear mongering and acting as though Covid is the only risk in the real world. Or as though you're going to hide from it forever. It's endemic and we have the vaccines for those at risk. Go back to normal and quit pushing your neurosis on kids. Please. We've disrupted their lives far too much already.
Do you have data to back that up? Genuine question. A lot of people pull numbers out of thin air when the topic is touchy.
Approx 38k people killed in cars in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in..., lets assume the same for 2021 so 76k dead.
Approx 850k people killed by covid https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
So covid killed more than 10x as many Americans as cars did (not including pedestrians). That doesn't take into account age though. CDC shows only 727 dead in the 0-17 age range.
For cars, it seems that at least in 2006, about 2000-2500 children 16 and under were killed in cars: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Seems like cars are a few times more deadly for kids than covid, but covid killed way more Americans of all ages. Not a great analysis, but it's as good a job as I'm going to do.
As of last week, a total of 727 children 0-17 have died from Covid since the pandemic started, and that's including the children with comorbidities.
And some more: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
There is a real risk of myocarditis for children after receiving the vaccine. Many cases of this require a hospital visit.
There is a cost/benefit analysis on the vaccine for children that looks very different than the cost/benefit to adults. Where there is a risk, there should be a choice.
Regarding the effects of "long covid", it seems to be pure speculation. The data is changing on this all the time, and not enough time has passed since the beginning of the pandemic to really nail down long-term effects of infection.
Using death as the only negative outcome will produce completely incorrect conclusions.
We know the death rate is low for children, assuming prompt access to ICUs when necessary.
That doesn’t mean it’s harmless.
This is a point in favor of vaccination no? Especially when the topic is children.
The relative risk that the vaccine has some unknown long term side effect is far smaller than a virus, especially when you consider that the vaccines are composed of non-replicating parts of the virus.
Same thing applies to the flu w.r.t. to children and yet it’s not mandated for kids. CDC says 188 kids died of the flu in 2019 [0], which is not nothing but apparently small enough that no one is terribly concerned about sending their kids to school or the possibility that less than 100% of children have the flu vaccine (link says only 21% were vaccinated). Also on that page, the H1N1 pandemic resulted in 358 child deaths. And again, no one was terribly concerned about children.
“Ah,” you’re thinking, “but what about the number of Covid deaths in children?” A link I found indicates about 700 deaths over two years [1]. So maybe a little worse than the H1N1 pandemic that no one lost their minds over w.r.t. to kids and schooling? That’s the reason this argument keeps playing out over and over again. We’re in some sort of weird reality were people don’t realize that a non-trivial number of kids die every single year from the flu and therefore set their baseline to how many kids can die from Covid and still consider schools “safe” to zero.
0: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/2019-2020/2019-20-pediatr...
He wasn't saying there was no danger (although he's implying it's small enough to be moot, which is subjective). Fundamentally, I think the argument most people are having here is 'what is the acceptable level of risk and what is the actual benefit, before vaccines should be required?"
This honestly seems to be the basis of a lot of hot-button issues (COVID, guns, voting, abortions), but somehow the conversations never play out that way. Risk is a continuum, and the benefits of different policies may or may not 'pay' enough out to any given individual.
All that being said, what is the relative risk to a healthy 5, 10 or 15 year old?
These are recycled anti-vax talking points. The “neutralizing vaccine” angle has spread like wildfire in the past couple of weeks as the anti-vax influencers pivoted to using that angle. I went from never hearing that phrase (outside of research papers) to seeing it everywhere almost overnight.
The (fallacious) argument is that because the COVID vaccine can’t completely prevent infection, it’s worthless.
This is obviously false as we know the vaccine drastically reduces disease severity.
President Biden and other key officials have said that if you get vaccinated you won't get COVID. Here's just one example from an AP fact check. This was not from when the vaccines were just out, either. He was saying this less than 6 months ago.
> President Joe Biden offered an absolute guarantee Wednesday that people who get their COVID-19 vaccines are completely protected from infection, sickness and death from the coronavirus. [1]
1: https://news.yahoo.com/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-01184362...
There's a huge difference. This vaccine has a miniscule benefit for kids. We've never before mandated a vaccine for children that didn't provide a sizable benefit to the child him or herself.
Mandatory vaccinations for school-age children exclusively target illnesses with high childhood morbidity/mortality: Measles, Polio, Chickenpox, DtP.
SARS-CoV2, thankfully, is safer than influenza for kids. As of right now, the CDC says that 727 kids have died in the US with Covid throughout the entire pandemic:
ETA: here's the current list of required vaccines in FL http://www.floridahealth.gov/programs-and-services/immunizat...
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
> Figure 1 shows the global age-sex distribution of tetanus mortality in 2015. Tetanus deaths were concentrated in neonates when they were compared with deaths in each of the other age categories
Hep B infection during childhood leads to chronic hepatitis in 95% of cases:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-b
> Hepatitis B infection acquired in adulthood leads to chronic hepatitis in less than 5% of cases, whereas infection in infancy and early childhood leads to chronic hepatitis in about 95% of cases. This is the basis for strengthening and prioritizing infant and childhood vaccination.
In both cases, children are being vaccinated for their own direct benefit, not some vague, external benefit to others.
(Also, it's worth pointing out that we mandate these vaccinates for school-age children because that's the first time such a mandate can be enforced. Babies are supposed to be vaccinated for both within the first six months of life: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...)
In recent years, tetanus has been fatal in approximately 11% of reported cases. Cases most likely to be fatal are those occurring in persons age 60 years or older and unvaccinated persons. In about 20% of tetanus deaths, no obvious pathology is identified and death is attributed to the direct effects of tetanus toxin.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/tetanus.html
I'd argue the heb-b vaccine is a good idea too.
As far as we know the protection doesn't even last a year, a tetanus vaccine might need refreshment after 10 years but would still offer some protection.
Above details from this overview: https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/07/24/no-california-d...
I, for one, am glad to live in a state with strong and consistent vaccination requirements for school children.
Do you think kids should be mandated to be vaccinated for a disease they've already had? What if that vaccine does not appear to prevent illness or spread? What if the vaccine does not have full FDA approval?
This is not a new approach. California already mandates that schoolchildren get vaccinated for chicken pox. It's not sufficient to have gotten the disease: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2019-...
I'm not going to argue about this so will leave your other questions unanswered. Take care.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/unvaccinated-5x-more...
Even if COVID-19 didn't hurt kids directly, a rational state could require them to get vaccinated to tamp down on a major source of community spread and protect people who are hurt more by the virus.
Getting vaccinated is far from the worst thing the government makes people do. The U.S. government still runs the military draft, and has forced unwilling people to go fight and die in miserable circumstances for a cause they think is unjust. By comparison, getting a vaccine to protect the community is small potatoes.
Prove this first, then weigh the risk/benefits publicly.
> The U.S. government still runs the military draft,
The United States military has been all-volunteer since 1973, no?
Young men still have to register just in case they change their mind.
To the best of my knowledge all the vaccines on the required list are fully FDA approved. COVID-19 one has a lesser "FDA emergency authorization".
Nope, they’re vaccines.
> 3) children rarely even show symptoms from SARS-CoV-2 infection
This is beyond false. I don’t know where you’re getting these talking points.