Would you be happy for your children to receive covid-19 vaccine

Oh Covid is not deadly? Tell that to my neighbour whose mom died of Covid and 5 million with her.

It’s quite obvious I was talking about children

I think that's fair, but if the vaccine protection against symptomatic disease (the 'common cold') only lasted a few months, would that change your decision?

Another point is vaccination for children who have had confirmed Covid. Where is the argument for vaccinating this cohort with a vaccine that probably offers only short term immunity, which they already have by virtue of infection?

Herd immunity may no longer be possible, doesn't mean we need to stop vaccinating.

No, we certainly don't need to stop vaccinating, but the fact that it seems that HIT can not be met is something that should be taken into account when recommending vaccination.

In a cohort where personal benefit is minimal, there is less of a reason to recommend it, even for population wide advantages. Sure, for people living in households with clinically vulnerable people, it might sway a decision (and then there's the ethical question if we should be making decisions to vaccinate children for someone else's benefit). But for other children, especially those who already have had a Covid infection, the argument begins to fall down.

Also to note, NIAC has never recommended vaccination for 12-15 year olds, except for those that are clinically venerable. They have clearly made the distinction between recommending and offering.

No the point is you seemingly don't even notice when one of the main arguments you've been putting forward has collapsed but just instantly shift to different arguments without any acknowledgement.

What are people supposed to think about that? You obviously have a commitment to selling people on infant-vaccination by whatever means.

Thing is, the families I know with kids in primary school are having a hell of a time with covid infections, close contact isolation and so on, whereas my kids' secondary school (where there is almost 100% vaccination) is completely business as usual apart from masks.

I know there are several important factors other than vaccinations, but it seems like the primary schools are having a much worse time than last year, whereas the secondaries are having a much better time, and the most obvious difference is vaccinations.

This is in no way an endorsement of age 5-11 vaccinations, I'll leave that to NIAC, but it does make me wonder what the picture would look like if we were vaccinating younger kids.

Herd immunity is literally the only way out of this — this has not changed. It is clear that Zero Covid is unachievable and transmission will not be halted by the vaccine, so it now seems fairly clear that herd immunity, aided greatly by the protection offered by vaccines, is the only future that doesn’t involve restrictions. It’s just a question now of how quickly people are willing to stomach getting to that stage.

Had we closed our borders quicker or expedited the vaccine programme, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that Delta would have gotten here eventually and we would still have the same problem. The highly transmissible nature of Delta makes herd immunity more likely, not less — though it certainly does appear to make the journey a more painful one.

@Professor Plumb wrote

My kids' secondary stopped providing lists of close contacts to the HSE at the start of this academic year. This meant in practice that there was little or no contact tracing done. I was told as much by the principal. This was a massive step down from last year where the schools were maintaining accurate records of pupil movements.

No, because chicken pox is pretty serious for kids. I'm not aware of any data that says COVID is something to be particularly worried about (in the case of kids). I'm not sure why vaccination of kids is the smart thing to do?

COVID will be endemic, or it will fizzle out. That ship has sailed.

If you look at other coronaviruses, they tend to become less virulent over time, so Covid probably will too.

We'll manage it like we manage the flu - protecting the vulnerable with vaccines while it's still a risk. There is no way to eliminate it at this stage, or probably never was at the stage the wider world knew about it.

Chickenpox (varicella zoster) vaccine isn't part of the childhood vaccination program in Ireland, and as it's much more dangerous in adults than in children (and much more unpleasant), there's a lot to be said for allowing children to be exposed to it. It's not common in this country for people to be vaccinated against chicken pox, so having a lot of immune naive adults is probably not a very good idea.

I'll do a bit more digging but last I heard vacinnation didn't substantially impact transmission

but this information could be out of date. I'm fully vaxxed and have thus far mostly just accepted what the medical professionals have said. 2 years in I'm staring to ask more questions about policy.