Should we REALLY consider vaccinating our kids?
The virus isn’t killing kids at a high rate, kids are infectious with or without a shot, can someone explain why foregoing all of the safety measures we have developed over time are no longer valid?
*The writings, thoughts and opinions here in are the authors own and represent in no way any organization, group, or service that the author may or may not be a party to. To include any state, federal, or non government entity*
“Despite the very best efforts of those who have fetishized control through fear and resorted to ideological demagoguery—what we do NOT have is a virulent death sentence for our kids. This further begs the question, why are we proposing to forego the safe practices decades of immunology and virology have taught us?
We Americans in the 2000s have been able to put our fair share of stupid ideas in the annals of human history. Twenty years in Afghanistan and Iraq, furthering the idea that a misused pronoun is on par with beating someone with a baseball bat. Do we really need to add the monumentally ill-advised, and to put it simply, the short-sighted idea of issuing government edicts of vaccinating kids under the age of 18? While the frothing hoards of outraged fear addicts are no doubt clicking away at such vaunted medical journals as the Atlantic, being offered conjecture and out of context numbers, we already have the data to give you a definitive answer; no we must not even consider at this point mandating vaccines for those under 18. We have no idea the results of long-term studies on these vaccines; even at the shortest length possible to consider them safe for the literal future of our county. Why there needs to be any reason other than that astounds me, but we also have no precedent for inoculating against what will likely become, as stated by our newly anointed secular pope, a seasonal, flu-like illness.1 Yes, I know Covid isn’t the flu, calm down, I said “flu-like” as in having aspects similar to the yearly rounds of influenza we experience stop twitching. Lastly, if our societal discussion on vaccines has the goalposts moved yet again, I mean we might as well have it on a flatbed truck at this point, from no symptoms or transmission leading to eradication, to “well you’re still going to get infected, you still might get sick, and you’re still going to transmit it” all be it in elderly populations at a less severe rate, the question must be asked. What is the point in giving the vaccine to a precious portion of the population who are already getting asymptomatic to mild cases anyway, and will still transmit the virus?
One learns something pretty unique getting a degree that requires even a modicum of research, if the only sources you are finding come from post-modernists or opinion piece journalists, you may want to pump the breaks. A quick google search can give you plenty of those inadequate sources, often prattling on about the cherry-picked studies or repeated to the point of gospel factoids, but digging a bit deeper one can find articles with actual substance rather than platitudes and doomsaying. Like the article written by the Director of Clinical Ethics and the Director of Pediatric Bioethics from Seattle Children’s Hospital in conjunction with the Associate Director of Clinical Medical Ethics from the University of Chicago Medicine giving the bare minimum of standards when discussing vaccinating children.2 As the ever-growing chorus tells their lessers, “trust the science!”, here are three scientists, and ethicists at that, who are telling us that paramount to all other conversations on vaccinations, particularly in children, safety is our number one priority. Generally, the bare minimum for safety includes both pre and post-licensure studies to assess both the efficacy and safety of the vaccination. Considering the approved US vaccines, as of the writing of this article, are either operating under an Emergency Use Authorizations (Moderna and Johnson & Johnson) or have gained FDA approval (Pfizer-BioNTech / Comirnaty), and in Phase 1&2 clinical trials in children and young adults, I’d say we haven’t quite met that wicket.3 4 While the researchers acknowledge that, in extremis, safety can be used as a criterion to be weighed against, there must be overwhelming statistical data showing the need for safety not to be a precondition, and to even start the conversation about 8 other preconditions that should be met before even considering mandating vaccines in children. Dr. Rafael Dal- Re follows up on this article noting that 11 phase 3, now in phase 4, placebo-controlled studies are being conducted on adults, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and goes on to state that “it would be prudent to start phase 3 trials in children once there is enough 1-year safety data in adults. So, prelicensing data on 1-year safety (and efficacy) in children cannot be expected before 2023.”5 To be clear, this is discussing PRE licensure studies, post-licensure studies would take the year of data collection and about six months of analysis, so this now puts us halfway through 2024 before we truly even know if any of the vaccines are either truly effective or safe within our most precious national resource. A rebuttal to this is Pfizer’s phase 3 are completed, but the ever shifting definition they and the government have of “completed” and “on-going” makes saying definitively that we have sufficient safety or efficacy data is impossible to anyone unless an agenda is at play.
One of the best things about researching what “THE” science says tells us, is that you can generally remove the conjecture and overtures to emotion, and look at data points. I am becoming convinced that when you’re at “government bureaucrat orientation day” they flip this, but let us do as the scientists that actually have to work for a living do and look at the data. Hey, maybe we will find that sticking an unvetted vaccine based on new technologies in your kid, is in fact, what we should do. Off the bat, we need to determine if the actual virus is killing those that are under 18.
Despite sensationalist headlines such as “Save Our Babies”, we see that as of October 16th 11.6% of total cases have been in children, checking in at 5,213,679. Their deaths, you might ask, well they account for around 0.09%, there is some variation in that number due to how states are keeping and managing records and infers some estimation by the CDC.6 In spite of the very best efforts of those who have fetishized control through fear and resorted to ideological demagoguery, these are the numbers. The weak rebuttal that generally follows in a frail, Jake Paul Esque 1-2 punch of degradation is that they are going to “give it to grandma” and then it trails off in the data as hard as some public speakers trail off his teleprompter. To put it simply, yes children transmit the virus from their roughly 95% mild or asymptomatic cases, which if even symptomatic the children had a high likelihood of comorbidities, but two things confound this argument when put in context.7 Since this argument is about vaccines, it must be understood that a vaccinated person still carries and transmits the virus despite what President Biden proclaims from his pulpit, but Johhns Hopkins, Harvard scientists, and even the CDC director confirm transmission is occurring, vaccinated or not.8 9 10 The next, as Fauci has stated, is that this will become a seasonal ordeal. In respiratory viruses such as Influenza and RSV, with comparable infection and fatality rates, be it within the statistical margin of error lower, we do not federally mandate vaccinations among children.11 12 13 We then need to look at the reproductive number of the virus, the R0, to assess whether or not the precedent has even been set by other viruses for which we inoculate children. Right now Covid, thanks to the Delta variant, has an R0, using our highest estimates at 2.79 and Harvard giving us a reproductive rate of 1 plus or minus 0.2, meaning for every one person that gets it they can transmit 1 to 3 people in a susceptible population.11+ It is important to note here that we are likely to continue to see a drop-off in Delta variant cases if the United States follows trends seen elsewhere in the world.14 15 Now, let's compare that to the R0 of what we are currently poking our kids for and we see R0 values for measles at 12-18, varicella and mumps at 10-12, rubella at 6-7, polio at 5-7, and smallpox at 3.5- 6.16 17 18 19 20 21 With this we see that the reproduction, in our current worst-case scenario, is with the absolute highest estimates you can find somewhere near the low end of small, and leaving that sentence without context seems scary, but we must add context. Smallpox death rates range anywhere from 30% to 100% in the forms of which we worry about, polio is a bit more comparable in fatality rate at 5-15% of the 1% of cases that progress to a paralytic form, but not only is it generally more infectious, but the symptoms associated with non-fatal cases including paralysis, making it arguably a bit of a bigger deal.22 23 Further, the Delta variant is where we thought we were seeing cases with reproduction rates in the 5 range, though that turns out to no longer be the case, but even with that new big bad infecting children, is producing mild symptoms according to Yale medicine, and we are likely to continue to see a drop off soon as England saw after dramatic spikes in infectivity and cases.24 25 There are a lot of numbers here and not on-screen death counters, so to break it down, yes we have an infectious respiratory disease running around the globe right now, what we do not have is a virulent death sentence for our kids. This further begs the question, why are we proposing to forego the safe practices decades of immunology and virology have given us for a virus that has little to no threat of causing a serious illness in or killing a child under 18?
Ellen Cranley, “Fauci Warned That Coronavirus Could Likely Become Seasonal,” Business Insider, April 5, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-coronavirus-is-likely-seasonal-after-global-outbreaks-2020-4.
Douglas J. Opel, Douglas S. Diekema, and Lainie Friedman Ross, “Should We Mandate a Covid-19 Vaccine for Children?,” JAMA Pediatrics 175, no. 2 (January 2021): p. 125, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.3019.
“COVID-19 Vaccines,” Office of the Commisioner U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA, August 13, 2021), https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/covid-19-vaccines.
“A Phase 1/2/3 Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, and Immunogenicity of an RNA Vaccine Candidate against COVID-19 in Healthy Children and Young Adults - Full Text View,” A Phase 1/2/3 Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, and Immunogenicity of an RNA Vaccine Candidate Against COVID-19 in Healthy Children and Young Adults (ClinicalTrials.gov), accessed October 9, 2021, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04816643.
Rafael Dal-Ré, “Mandatory Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccine for Children?,” JAMA Pediatrics 175, no. 5 (January 2021): p. 533, https://doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.6010.
“Children and Covid-19: State-Level Data Report,” American Academy of Pediatrics, August 16, 2021, https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/.
Sah, Pratha, Meagan C. Fitzpatrick, Charlotte F. Zimmer, Elaheh Abdollahi, Lyndon Juden-Kelly, Seyed M. Moghadas, Burton H. Singer, and Alison P. Galvani. “ASYMPTOMATIC SARS-COV-2 Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 34 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109229118.
Amesh Adalja, “New Data On Covid-19 Transmission by Vaccinated Individuals,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, August 5, 2021, https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/new-data-on-covid-19-transmission-by-vaccinated-individuals.html.
“Statement from CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH on Today’s MMWR.” US Centers for Disease Control. CDC, July 30, 2021. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0730-mmwr-covid-19.html.
“Summary Data Reproductive Rate.” Harvard Dataverse, June 26, 2021. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=4202836&version=8.0.
Ellen Cranley, “Fauci Warned That Coronavirus Could Likely Become Seasonal,” Business Insider, April 5, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-coronavirus-is-likely-seasonal-after-global-outbreaks-2020-4.
D. M Fleming, “Mortality in Children from Influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus,” Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 59, no. 7 (January 2005): pp. 586-590, https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2004.026450.
Matthew Biggerstaff et al., “Estimates of the Reproduction Number for Seasonal, Pandemic, and Zoonotic Influenza: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” BMC Infectious Diseases 14, no. 1 (April 2014), https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-480.
Philip Ball, “Surprise Dip in UK Covid Cases Baffles Researchers,” Nature News (Nature Publishing Group, August 3, 2021), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02125-1.
“CDC Wonder.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed October 12, 2021. https://wonder.cdc.gov/.
Fiona M Guerra et al., “The Basic Reproduction Number (r 0 ) of Measles: A Systematic Review,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 17, no. 12 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/s1473-3099(17)30307-9.
“Varicella-Zoster,” Health Care Worker Information (Health Service of Ireland), accessed August 18, 2021, https://www.hse.ie/eng/health/immunisation/hcpinfo/guidelines/chapter23.pdf.
“Mumps Laboratory Case Definition (Lcd),” Department of Health-Australia, November 24, 2015, https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/cda-phlncd-mumps.htm.
“Vaccination Coverage among Children Enrolled in Head Start Programs or Day Care Facilities or Entering School,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1998), https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss4909a2.htm.
Mirjam Kretzschmar, Peter F. Teunis, and Richard G. Pebody, “Incidence and Reproduction Numbers Of PERTUSSIS: Estimates from Serological and Social Contact Data in Five European Countries,” PLoS Medicine 7, no. 6 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000291.
Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, “Smallpox,” U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA, August 23, 2018), https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/smallpox.
Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, “Smallpox,” U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA, August 23, 2018), https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/smallpox.
“Disease Factsheet about Poliomyelitis,” European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, May 7, 2021, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/poliomyelitis/facts.
“Disease Factsheet about Poliomyelitis,” European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, May 7, 2021, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/poliomyelitis/facts.
Philip Ball, “Surprise Dip in UK Covid Cases Baffles Researchers,” Nature News (Nature Publishing Group, August 3, 2021), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02125-1