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Over the course of a June weekend, a COVID-19 vaccination clinic in Oregon vaccinated more than 1100 children, adding beaverton’s 4-year-old woman.
Christine Torres Hicks/OHSU
Four weeks ago, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U. S. )The U. S. government approved COVID-19 vaccines for young children. A few days later, doctors’ offices and clinics began distributing vaccines to young children and young children.
In Portland, Oregon, a clinic that provided bubbles, toys and a dance party delivered more than 1,100 injections in two days. In Arizona, more than 2,000 children under the age of five won their first dose in about 3 weeks. During the same time in Fayetteville, Georgia, a practice distributed about a hundred doses to young young people.
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As of July 14, nearly 400,000 children under the age of five had gained at least one dose, the CDC reports. This represents about 2% of eligible children in this age group.
Pediatrician Eliza Hayes Bakken saw an initial flood of parents signing up for appointments as soon as vaccines were available. Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.
Vaccinating young children can be long and slow, says Adrianne Hammershaimb, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. About a portion of U. S. parents with children under the age of four said they most likely had their youth vaccinated, their team reported last month in the Journal of the Society for Pediatric and Infectious Diseases. That number is “lower than we’d like, but it’s not surprising,” he says.
Only about 55% of U. S. adults surveyed say COVID-19 vaccination has been incredibly or very effective in restricting the spread of the coronavirus, the Pew Research Center in Washington, D. C. reported July 7. In Hammershaimb’s experience, the challenge is not so great that parents are against vaccines or distrust all vaccines. Rather, “parents are genuinely involved with the unknown,” he says. for your children
As BA. 5 continues to cause cases (which now account for about 65% of new infections in the U. S. )Parents talk to doctors about the risks of COVID-19, vaccine safety, and timing of vaccination. Here, Hammershaimb and 3 other pediatricians answer some non-unusual questions they have.
“This is a big question we get,” hammershaimb says. Children are just as likely to get COVID-19 as adults, although cases tend to be milder. Half of inflamed children probably have no symptoms.
The disease also tends to be more fatal to adults than to children. Among other people over the age of five and five, COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death in the United States, scientists reported July 5 in JAMA Internal Medicine. But COVID-19 can also hit young people hard. It ranks eighth among causes of death among other people over the age of 19 and under in the United States.
“Hear on TV that COVID is a big challenge for kids,” says Sara Goza, a pediatrician in Fayetteville, Georgia, who served as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2020. “It’s a bit shocking. ” In his practice, he has noticed that inflamed children develop prolonged COVID and chronic fatigue. “This disease is not without complications,” he says.
Bakken’s 9-year-old son contracted COVID-19 in 2020, before the vaccine was launched. His case was not as serious, but it had long-term sequelae. She had to take more medication for her asthma and be more careful when exercising. . It might sound minor, Bakken says, but that wasn’t the case for his son. “It affected his daily life. “
Parents who take their young children for vaccination can expect to see side effects similar to those not unusual in other vaccines for the formative years. Fatigue, irritability, redness at the injection – those are symptoms that the body is reacting to the vaccine. it’s meant to, she says Bakken. Es possible for some kids to have no side effects, and that’s not right either, she says.
Vaccination is another issue parents have asked (something that was also raised in a recent Science News poll on Twitter). Clinical trials and real-world information suggest the vaccines are for children and adults, Bakken says. – much less frequent than COVID headaches itself. “
Take myocarditis, the rare inflammatory disease detected after receiving Pfizer or Moderna’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. In children older than 12 to 17 years, myocarditis occurs in about 1 in 10,000 after vaccination, scientists reported July 13 in the BMJ.
But teens are up to six times more likely to suffer from central headaches after a COVID-19 infection than after vaccination, CDC scientists reported in April. in most other people with myocarditis after vaccination, symptoms are temporary and the center recovers completely.
Hammershaimb monitors the surveillance systems of the CDC and the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. The U. S. Food and Drug Administration tracks possible adverse events for the vaccine. If some fear arises, he says, “we can step in, stop the vaccination program, and closely watch all reported cases. “”Ultimately, he says, parents want to weigh the hypothetical threat of a rare adverse reaction against the known threats of COVID-19 infection.
She encourages parents to enroll their children to get vaccinated this summer, so they can start the fall with coronavirus coverage already in place. It is conceivable that COVID-19 boosters targeting the omicron variant will be available at the beginning of the school year. However, that doesn’t mean parents have to wait, he says. “We need young people to be as protected as possible when they return to school. “
Sophie Katz, a pediatric infectious disease physician in Nashville, agrees. Although the ability of existing vaccines to prevent omicron infection in children appears to be declining rapidly, vaccines continue to be effective rather than hospitalization, he wrote in a JAMA editorial in May. And a study of children in Israel who had won the Pfizer vaccine found that two doses had moderate coverage compared to the original omicron variant, scientists reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 29.
Katz’s 13-month-old baby has already had COVID-19, but she says, “I’m going to go one hundred percent to vaccinate her. For Katz, it’s about protecting her son from a serious illness. “I will do anything to prevent my daughter from going to the hospital. “
J. Pillay et al. Incidence, factors, herbal history and hypothetical mechanisms of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination with COVID-19: abstracts and review of living evidence. BMJ. Published on July 13, 2022. doi: 10. 1136/bmj-2021-069445.
MSShiels et al. Top Reasons for Death in the United States from the COVID-19 Pandemic, March 2020 to October 2021. JAMA Internal Medicine. Published online July 5, 2022. doi:10. 1001/jamainternmed. 2022. 2476.
C. J. Cohen-Stavi et al. Efficacy of the omicron BNT162b2 vaccine in children aged five to 11 years. New England Journal of Medicine. Published online June 29, 2022. doi: 10. 10five6/NEJMoa220five011.
S. Flaxman et al. COVID-19 is one of the leading causes of death among youth and youth ages 0 to 19 in the United States. medRxiv: 10. 1101/2022. 05. 23. 22275458. Published June 28, 2022.
E. A. Hammershaimb et al. ACCEPTANCE of the COVID-19 vaccine among U. S. parentsU. S. : A Nationally Representative Survey. Journal of the Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. Posted on June 24, 2022. doi: 10. 1093/jpids/piac049.
H. E. Katz and K. Edwards. Protect the youth of omicron. JAMA. Published online May 13, 2022. doi:10. 1001/jama. 2022. 7315.
Meghan Rosen is a life scientist for Science News. He earned a Ph. D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a specialization in Biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and then graduated from the Science Communication Program at UC Santa Cruz.
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