Physician Dhruv Khullar writes at The New Yorker that while there are good reasons to reevaluate current COVID-vaccine recommendations, Kennedy’s approach is in no way based on good science:
Not all vaccines should be recommended for all people. Many countries, including France and the United Kingdom, endorse COVID vaccines only for older individuals and those at high risk for severe cases of the disease. More studies are needed in order to evaluate how much a healthy person benefits from ongoing COVID booster shots if she’s already been infected and/or immunized. Nonetheless, we should not be pleased with Kennedy’s machinations. According to data from the C.D.C., infants under six months of age with COVID have been hospitalized at comparable rates to people in their late sixties and early seventies. Many infants who experience severe illness have no known underlying medical conditions; most are born to mothers who haven’t been vaccinated during pregnancy, and are therefore less able to pass on protective antibodies. (Relatively few older children develop severe COVID.) Meanwhile, pregnant and postpartum women face clear dangers after a coronavirus infection, including blood clots, hemorrhage, and perilously high blood pressure. For this reason, the C.D.C. has considered pregnancy a high-risk condition warranting immunization …
The problem with Kennedy’s decision is that it seems to have been his decision, not the decision of deliberative medical authorities. If such an announcement were to come from independent scientists who review data and debate trade-offs, it might have been justifiable. Indeed, if it had stemmed from leaders who did not have a history of vaccine skepticism and a disregard for standard procedure, perhaps we wouldn’t even be discussing it. But this asymmetry is not a sign that we are unfairly blaming the messenger. It is a reminder that science is about more than the right answer, when such a thing exists. Science is a process, and if we follow its procedures with care we can get closer to the truth.
At The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu emphasizes the bottom line that “kids are at risk from the virus, and a safe shot can lower that risk”:
From the earliest days of the pandemic, children have been afflicted by severe COVID at lower rates than adults. “We certainly did not see as much pediatric disease as we saw adult disease,” Buddy Creech, a pediatrician and the director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program, told me. But kids also were not spared the virus’s worst effects. After the pandemic began, the virus became a top-10 cause of death among American minors, and it has killed more than 1,000 children, many of whom had no preexisting health conditions.
Kids, like adults, are also vulnerable to long COVID, albeit at lower rates. And they have experienced their own unusual, terrifying manifestations of disease, including the inflammatory condition MIS-C. (MIS-C has become much less common in recent years, but is poorly understood and could return with future variants, Creech told me.) Disease that manifests rather mildly now may change as the virus continues to evolve. And generally speaking, among kids, “the younger the child, the higher the risk for severe disease,” Sallie Permar, the chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me.
Yesterday, at the press briefing, Prasad noted that COVID hospitalizes children far less often than it does older adults. But diseases also don’t have to be catastrophically deadly to warrant a childhood-vaccination policy, Ofer Levy, the director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. The death rate for chicken pox, for instance, is extremely low, but the vaccine is available to, and recommended for, all children—not just those with preexisting conditions. And COVID vaccines for kids, especially in the smaller doses tailored to the youngest age groups, are “among the safest we know of,” Permar told me. Although myocarditis is a rare side effect of COVID vaccines, it is primarily a concern for adolescent boys and young men, rather than very young kids; in general, the shots’ side effects include redness at the injection site, soreness, and fever.
