Ethics of COVID immunization in kids
 

The delay of approval of COVID immunization in those under 12 has raised a number of issues - not merely those involving schools. The problem has several issues, including the CFR requiring higher levels of caution with drug approvals for children and a higher standard of assurance of benefit to offset the risk since kids are legally incapable of giving informed consent for such testing like adults are. That is the case with ALL drug testing for children, and the bottom line issue is that the potential benefit TO THE CHILD (emphasis added) must exceed the risk, however little that risk might be. And even with the younger age groups that have been approved it seems that in some respects - incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis, for example, these immunizations while still quite safe are somewhat higher than you see in adults. But the problem as you go younger is not the absolute amount of risk involved for approving these immunizations, it is the risk-benefit ratio.

While the immunizations may not be terribly risky in the pediatric group, neither is COVID. Sure, COVID CAN kill young kids, but it rarely does, just as immunizations CAN kill kids (as the first RSV vaccine demonstrated) although that too is a rare event.

We may be soon facing the issue of potentially vaccinating kids not for their own safety but rather as part of an effort to provide herd immunity to decrease the riskif infection to those who are at increased risk, the elderly, those living with HIV, cancer patients under treatment with immune suppressing radiation or chemotherapy, and those with multiple comorbidities.

This is sort of a new area in Public Health, and it is clear the FDA people are moving slowly and with much concern in the face of political pressure to move faster. The recent top tier resignations may well be part of that concern.


https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/guidance/faq/children-research/index.html

https://news.yahoo.com/vaccine-leaders-resign-pfizer-booster-142824241.html

Or they can be vaccinated for their own benefit...

To allow them to participate in school, sports, etc and allow their parents to work and feed them instead of staying home providing daycare.

Like anything else there's a tradeoff between the risks of vaccination vs. covid or social isolation. Vaccine risks are exceptionally low and the delat variant is affecting young people more.

It is appropriate for the gov to go slow with kids, since the adult trial results do not automatically in all cases translate to child biology.

Speaking of ethical, I wonder how many people would be seeking seeking an off-label use of comirnaty for children under 12 if it were available in the marketplace today.

https://i.ibb.co/B2W2drL/F963-D0-BB-...3640-E4-C0.jpg


an excerpt:

https://www.newsnationnow.com/world/...-15-year-olds/

A physician friend refers to the notion of vaccinating healthy kids for Covid "child abuse."

The Brits look at child vaccination
 

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58410584

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58423152

Did health officials weigh these different options last year when mandating lock downs and home schooling? It doesn't seem like economic destruction, social isolation or mental health was factored into any of the bureaucrat's decision making process in the last year. If it prevented one death they wanted to do it at any cost. So now that we can leverage vaccines as a carrot we are going to put these other issues back into the collective decision making conscience? Doesn't surprise me one bit, the political class has used every tool in their arsenal to force what they think is the best for the people they rule over.

Although I have a limited understanding of bioethics, some research into the topic revealed this: vaccinating one cohort to protect another cohort is only ethical if the vaccine offers a risk less than the disease in which you are vaccinating against. I believe the jury is still out on that.

We vaccinated ours so we could go on a family vacation. And they're getting the flu shot this fall. As far as I can tell they don't seem abused.

What destination required children to be jabbed? I haven’t heard of any places requiring children to be jabbed for entry

The carrot moves often. Was reading about the Guam restricted segment. Guam has an 80% vaccinated rate and is still having issues with the local paper stating that 40% of their hospitalizations being vaccinated people.

Here on the mainland there is a theoretical 70% herd immunity campaign.. in Guam that did not happen so now the governor is threatening to lock it all down again. They’ve already instituted jabbed only activities like in person eating and bars..etc. The schools are shut down only doing online learning. It’s a moving goal post. No way to score a win.

Europe.......

Gee Rick, I believe you live in California, n’est-ce-pas?

https://i.ibb.co/PrLksBL/8-B6-BE22-D...7-D17-F471.jpg

Out of 4 and a quarter MILLION diagnosed cases (and you know darn well a lot of asymptomatic cases were completely missed) the 22.5% of CA residents under 18 had 33 deaths ASSOCIATED (not even necessarily caused by) WITH COVID out of a total 65,585 deaths ASSOCIATED with COVID. By comparison, California annually loses 35 kids five and under from drowning in swimming pools .

The entire youngest half of the population only suffered about 1200 of 65,585 deaths.

Now I’m not anti-vax at all and in fact just got my flu shot for this year (walgren’s has them available) but one can readily understand that vaccinating the kids has a much lower risk/reward ratio than….well, than ANYBODY else. It begs the question of if immunizations for that age group are truly for the sake of the kids at all, because the risk isn’t there. So is this push to speed up immunization approval for those under 12 really for the kids?

Nope.

I’ll vaccinate my two children under 12 as soon as its available, but I’m not writing breathless op-eds in the NYT demanding them RIGHT NOW either as if they have the same statistical clinical risks as 70+ year olds (yes, this past week had a couple of those).

Someone brought up an interesting point is the COVID shot really a vaccine in the traditional sense or more like the yearly flu shot? Vaccines have traditionally given you mostly immunity from the disease not lessened the sickness. I mean you usually don’t say or refer to getting the flu, tetanus vaccine but shot.

It absolutely is not a vaccine, but rather a therapeutic boost of neutralizing antibodies. The Pfizer CEO says three shots per year, but the engineering data says only two per year.

Vaccinated or not, we have decided not to go anywhere or patronize any business where we have to "show our papers" like it's a Moscow train station in 1979. The water is nearly to a boil.

Typically "for their own benefit" implies medical reasoning and not being allowed to do the things they were once allowed to do and now not allowed to do.

Social isolation and mental/developmental issues have been very clearly observed in school age children during the lockdowns. Plenty of info available on that.

You are of course perfectly entitled to do that (and vice versa).

Personally I don't care either way. Individuals can make their own choices, and businesses/organizations can make theirs as well. It will all shake out in the end.

Okay but that's a government induced problem, not a medical one.

In some cases the businesses cannot make their own choice. Government induced, again.

Absolutely, not that the politicians gave it an ounce of weight in their lockdown plans. And it hits the disadvantaged hardest. Many kids are destined to drop out of school before even finishing high school. US-wide, the high school graduation rate is only 88%

https://www.usnews.com/education/bes...rates-by-state

and in disadvantaged areas less than that - in some FAR less than that. And those students will live the rest of their lives with the result of missing this school time.

It worked fine as a vaccine for the original version, better than many other vaccines for efficacy. Still decent efficacy for D (relative to, say, the flu cocktail). Excellent efficacy against severe covid.

And technically the word your grasping for is "prophylactic" not "therapeutic".

No, it does not prevent disease.

Of course it will shake out but will the end result of that shake out be a series of states seceding from the Union? And people left living in blue states getting 3 boosters a year? The number of people who are actually backing up their threats and moving as a result of the events of the last year is going to further divide the country and eventually force some states to start pushing for succession. I don't know a single person who went to the hospital as a result of Covid. I know multiple people moving across the county as a result of the political malarkey the last year. Maybe it will be good for the country. I anticipate I'll be moving in the next 5 years as will everyone in my family if things don't start to improve in the next year (and I'm not talking about Covid - I'm not a afraid of Covid, every single person I care about in my family has had it and recovered - I'm talking about the political power grabs).

The frogs are nearly boiled. Congratulations.

Sure it does, just not perfectly. Welcome to biology.

Different issue, and covid is a sideshow with respect to that.

More that it does not prevent infection and transmission, and that it is too short-lived to give the sort of robust and long term protection other vaccines give. Certainly worth getting if you are over 35 and have not already had COVID. Or if you have serious comorbidities like HIV or otherwise immune suppressed.

It's very early in the stats, but it appears the vaccine is also responsible for the R0 increase, and not just the increased ace2 binding ability of the Delta variant. That's probably almost exclusively the result of people's behavior after vaccination. The outbreak going on at Cornell is a good example of this, despite them being almost 100% vaccinated. Herd immunity is out the window, at any vaccination rate.

But are they being hospitalized or dying? If no, then there’s nothing to see here. Who the hell cares about outbreaks or cases anymore. If people are just getting a cold and then better the vax is working and we all need to move on with life.

^^^exactly

Nobody cares about "just a cold", because colds don't cause a wave of people with breathing problems.

Depends on who you mean by “nobody”. Nearly 40% of COVID mortality is in 80+ year old people. Even before COVID the AVERAGE 85 year old male had a 7% chance of dying in the next year:


https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

For people in a nursing home/long term care facility it’s much higher. They have a 35% ANNUAL mortality with a life expectancy of only 2.2 years. At that point in their lives all it takes is a cold to cause a viral pneumonia that may progress to a bacterial pneumonia. Even before COVID, nursing home acquired pneumonia’s often ran a 50% mortality, and they are the second most common infections in nursing homes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363502/

One must ask what is fair. How much can we honorably put kids at risk - or blight their futures with lockdowns - to extend the lives of elderly by a few months. Look at the figures for California. The entire youngest half of the population sustained only about 1200 deaths out of 65,000 deaths. Ten times as many toddlers die every year from drowning in backyard swimming pools than the number killed by COVID.

We need to stop pretending this isn’t a disease of the elderly. Yes, anyone CAN die of COVID, but the ones who statistically DO die of COVID are the elderly and those with comorbidities. Blighting the lives of the young through lockdowns and shutting down schools isn’t going to stop that from happening. Not even with Australia-like house arrest.

There has been much written about the students who were, through no fault of their own, unable to participate in online learning when schools across the country went fully remote in March of 2020.

Issues of broadband access and connectivity, as well as access to digital devices, were tangible problems that districts and school leaders could work to solve. As a result of creative solutions like making school buses mobile hotspots, or purchasing and distributing Chromebooks en masse, many students were able to continue their schooling.

What is less discussed is that as many as 3 million students have disappeared since the beginning of the pandemic. These students have never shown up for an online class and never took advantage of any solutions provided by districts. Now, with school districts across the country gearing up to resume in-person learning, some educators are optimistic that these students will return.


https://thehill.com/opinion/educatio...-to-classrooms

This is absolutely false. He is recommending a booster to supplement the initial dose. That’s three shots in the first year, not every year. He also said there’s a possibility of an annual booster but did not say it was a certainty.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/pfiz...12-months.html


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

There are many “experts” saying we will need a “booster” every 6 months with no end date.

So will I be fired if I don’t get the booster now?!? SMH, it will never end people.

In his latest interview, he says they stand ready to deploy an update for the variants in as little as 90 days. Does anyone think they aren't going to provide a yearly prime/booster update? That's an annual shot dose, variant primer dose, and then the booster dose 6-8 months later.

You seem surprised that the goalposts might be moved. Again....