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

Possibly the closest to a not-for-profit vaccine currently authorised in the EU is Vaxzevria (AstraZenica/Oxford or Oxford/AstraZenica, whatever).

I don't remember that vaccine getting a lot of love on this forum, people were raging about getting an inferior vaccine with a longer dosing schedule. From memory there were lots of (somewhat reasonable) complaints about Britspin.

Which just goes to show how difficult it is to produce a vaccine without someone complaining about vested interests and corruption.

On the issue of vaccines for children I was fully behind it and my two teenagers are vaccinated.

However the message from the health experts now, seems to be that while vaccines are providing protection against serious illness, the protection provided to prevent transmission is not as good as originally hoped for.

Thats fine thats how these things work.

As far as I'm concerned the only reason to vaccinate children is to prevent/reduce onward transmission since the actual disease is only a minimal risk at this age group. That in itself is a dodgy enough reason but if vaccine have only limited effectiveness at preventing transmission, why vaccinate children?

And covid, a virus, is going to be more ethical and play nicer with people's bodies because it isn't beholden to shareholders?

I think the issue is we have data on how the virus en-masse affects this age cohort. We don't have the same amount of data with respect to the vaccine. It's perfectly reasonable for parents to adopt a cautious approach. Listen to the number of FDA hearing members who make this point. If some parents want to go ahead and vaccinate their children then fine, if others want to exercise some more caution and adopt a "wait and see approach" then that's fine too. Neither side should be castigated for their decision.

The thing that really disappoints me is thus far is I haven't heard much, if any, very clear discussions from the different agencies (e.g. FDA, ECDC, NIAC etc) on both the risks and the benefits for this cohort.

Why can't the risks and benefits be very clearly outlined and explained for parents so that they can make a really informed decision?

I heard two consultans on RTE yesterday (one radio [infectious disease consultant, St'James] and one on six-one news[childrens hospital I think?) and both were very, I would say, gun-ho for the vaccine approval, great news, exciting etc. But there was no real discussion about the risks or fears that parents might have. I don't think this does the vaccine argument any favours, explain the risks and things we don't know, don't gloss over it and I think you'll pull more people along with you.

It can't be that hard for the benefits vs risks to be explained.

To make a proper assessment either way you would have to know the risk of virus-induced myocarditis Vs vaccine-induced myocarditis in children.

The latter has been quantified at about 1/16,000 (boys 12-17 yo) 1/100,000 (girls 12-17 yo).

I'm not sure if a virus-induced figure exists for the same age-groups.

I imagine the 450/million figure you mention for virus-induced myocarditis applies to the general population rather than specifically to children. (correct me if I'm wrong). As children suffer less with covid-19 than the general population, it could reasonably be expected that for children the risk might be lower than 450/million.

"The risk of myocarditis/pericarditis from vaccine is known to be many times smaller than the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis from COVID-19."

Can you share the risk figures for each, specifically for children?

I haven't seen a figure for risk of infection-caused myocarditis in that age group, but it would be very helpful if you have one.

This is a decent recent article covering risks from both virus and vaccine.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-real-risk-of-heart-inflammation-to-kids-is-from-covid-19not-the-vaccine

Those disease you mention are all nasty diseases for children. I accept part of a succesful vaccination programme is the herd immunity thing but those disease you mentioned are harmful to children.

Those vaccines also prevent transmission which the covid vaccines are proving to be poor at.

(for adults vaccines are still important to prevent serious illness and i will certainly take the booster when offered it)

Covid is not. We are vaccinating children against a disease which will do very little harm to them.

For me the benefit/risk calculation is starting to veer away from vaccinating children.

I don't seriously disagree with what you're saying, but measles is "only" fatal to around 1 in 1,000 healthy children. 0.1%. For the past year or so we've had people dismissing COVID because it "only" kills 0.6% (or whatever) of cases. But if their kid got measles they'd rightly sh!t their pants.

If you look up the risks of serious side-effects from the MMR vaccine the odds look pretty bad (much worse than for the COVID vaccines). But no sane person skips the MMR for their kids, because the odds of bad but non-fatal symptoms from the diseases it vaccinates against are higher still, and are in the range that we can reason about.

People who are trying to reason about this for themselves (rather than ask their GP, which is what a sensible person would do when they have a health concern), struggle when trying weigh up three increasingly small sets of odds associated with this vaccine (odds of infection, odds of virus effects, odds of vaccine side-effects). It's not straightfoward.

What makes it even more frustrating is people weighing in with god-like certainty from one side or another (but mostly the anti- side). The National Geographic article I posted a link to above shows how there is a great deal of debate and uncertainty even amongst paedeatric cardiologists with a lifetime of education, training and experience. But some randomer on boards knows the answer with unshakeable certainty, right?

@[Deleted User] wrote

but @Wibbs wrote

Did you miss that bit?

I posted this on another thread but, yes, I'll be getting my three under-12 kids vaccinated.

As far as I can tell so far, the vaccine appears safe. They've been vaccinating under 12s in the US for weeks and no major side effects have materialised. I have had the vaccine myself and no major worries.

We have particular circumstances though. My Dad is in the midst of getting chemo and is quite ill. Even if the fact of my children being vaccinated brought him less stress and more ability to spend time with them then it'd be worth it. He'll likely pass away of cancer in a year or two, and perhaps I wouldn't get them vaccinated after that, but for the moment if it means they are less likely to pass on the virus to him, thus cutting even shorter the time he has left, then fine. He is very close them and them to him.

Useful materials from the FDA approval meeting here

Page 6 and 7 of this document has some useful info I thought to help people make a judgement either way

"As of October 17, 2021, 691 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in the United States in individuals less than 18 years of age, with 146 deaths in the 5-11 year age group. The most common underlying medical conditions among hospitalized children were chronic lung disease (29%), obesity (25%) and neurologic disorders (23%). A total of 68% of hospitalized children had more than one underlying condition. Obesity and feeding tube dependence were associated with increased risk of severe disease. Available evidence suggests that highest risk groups include children with special healthcare needs, including genetic, neurologic, metabolic conditions, or with congenital heart disease" It also references ethnic minorities as being of higher risk.

So some kids will have a high risk profile re: COVID and others not so much. I wish authorities were more nuanced in their recommendations for vaccination of this cohort and not make it a binary choice.

I think it will be important to look at the US experience and the data from there as they're ahead of the curve on vaccination of kids.