I'd encourage you to do some cursory risk benefit analysis before spreading baseless fear like this.

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.

Besides the flu, RSV is also more dangerous than COVID-19 to children. But RSV had been around for a while so we just accept the risk instead of panicking about it.

https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00443.asp

> Driving them to and from school is 20x more dangerous

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.

Those were certainly pulled out of thin air. All these numbers are for the US:

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.

so 5X more children die in car crashes and not 10X?

Someone said that driving them to and from school is 20x more dangerous (and then edited their comment to say 10x instead of 20x). I was just casually looking up the stats for myself and thought I'd share.

I see, thanks

The 10x number was from a different poster than the one following up with the numbers that were asked for.

It seemed like they were arguing against the accuracy of the estimate, but their math supports it. If you look at the totals, you get 5x and divided covid deaths by 2 years, you get 10x

Sure, here's some research: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

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.

> As of last week, a total of 727 children 0-17 have died from Covid since the pandemic started

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.

I wasn't implying that Covid is harmless, only that vaccinating children against it should be a choice given the data on risks/benefits we currently have.

> 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.

This is a point in favor of vaccination no? Especially when the topic is children.

It's a neutral point. Neither the vaccine or the virus have been around long enough for long-term data.

I'd hardly consider 'we have no idea what the long term effects of this disease are' a neutral point. Would you rather catch the flu, or a new virus that has no symptoms and hasn't hurt anyone in the last 3 months since it showed up? If you had to think about that at all, then you have to admit a lack of long-term risk data is itself a risk when it comes to viruses.

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.

> but children are absolutely hospitalized and killed by this disease.

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...

1: https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/8361479002

> any sort of significant risk to otherwise healthy children

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?

> With all due respect - what on Earth are you talking about?

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.

> The “neutralizing vaccine” angle has spread like wildfire in the past couple of weeks as the anti-vax influencers pivoted to using that angle.

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...