Why experts think children need to be vaccinated against COVID

Pharmaceutical company Moderna said it has begun testing the COVID-19 vaccine in thousands of children under the age of 12, and the first step towards a new stage in vaccination campaign experts is to eradicate the pandemic. It states that it may be necessary to do so.

Children are generally immune to the worst illnesses, but under the age of 18 accounts for about one-fifth of the US population of 330 million, and millions have been infected so far. ..

“If we really want to aim for herd immunity, it will require 80% of our population to be vaccinated, and we really do it if we don’t vaccinate our children. “No,” Lisa Biobeer Pediatrics (AAP), president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told AFP.

Moderna’s two-dose regimen is currently approved for use in adults, and the company is already in the middle of adolescent studies and is expected to be completed by June.

The new exam will enroll 6,750 participants between the ages of 6 months and 12 years.

Pfizer’s vaccine has already been licensed for people in their 16s and older, and like Johnson & Johnson, they are conducting adolescent research, and AstraZeneca is studying vaccines for children 6 years and older.

Younger and older children

The benefits of vaccination of children are direct in that they prevent the rare and severe pediatric COVID-19 and the mysterious post-infection condition “multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children” (MIS-C). However, it is also indirect in that it limits the spread.

“The risk and benefit calculations will be different for vaccinations at ages 9 and 90,” Ameshua Darja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health and Security, told AFP.

“What levels of side effects are tolerated, and are current generations of vaccines best suited for use as pediatric vaccines?” He went on to say that the vaccine under development is better than the one currently approved. He added that it may cause few or weak side effects.

Adalja added that he saw a more direct role for the vaccine in high school children, who are very similar to adults in that they can spread the disease.

According to the latest official data, 294 people under the age of 18 have died of COVID-19 in the United States, a small percentage of the total 535,000.

The superiority of the study also shows that younger children, especially children under the age of 10, are less likely to be infected and therefore less likely to spread the virus.

However, in either case, “unlikely” does not mean “impossible.”

“Millions of children are infected with the virus, and the more children infected, the more children can have complications,” said Zucker School of Medicine and Cohen Children’s Medical Center. Henry Bernstein, a pediatric professor at AFP, told AFP.

“We know that COVID is already disrupting their education, we know that it causes physical and mental health problems, and also emotionally. There is a problem.”

Bernstein prefers to vaccinate children, but he adds that it is imperative to study shots thoroughly because “children are not small adults” and therefore differ in important physiological points. It was.

“They deserve research to show that these vaccines are safe and effective.”

Another tool

According to data collected by Education Week, there are currently partial school closure orders in five states or territories in the United States, seven ordering them to be released, and the rest on a mixed basis. It is in operation.

None of the poll experts said that vaccination should not be seen as a prerequisite for schools to resume for face-to-face learning, but instead as one of many. I believed.

Nipunie Rajapakse, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic, said:

Given that children are generally less susceptible to COVID, some suggest prioritizing individuals with risk factors.

“But in some cases, it can be difficult to accurately predict which children are at risk of developing a severe infection,” says Rajapakse.

This is especially true for MIS-C, the most feared pediatric complication that occurs weeks after infection and causes inflammation in different parts of the body.

In the United States, more than 2,600 cases and 33 deaths have been seen so far from this condition.

© 2021 AFP