Covid vaccines for children?

Life Health & Fitness
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NYP on Covid misinformation spread by “the experts.” Couple of myths directly refer to vaccines and young people.

Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection:

“Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle. They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates. A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite. We now know that myocarditis is six to 28-times more common after the Covid vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males. Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a Covid vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had Covid.”

Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster:

"…the evidence was never there that they lower Covid mortality in young healthy people. That’s probably why the CDC chose not to publish their data on hospitalisation rates among boosted Americans under 50, when they published the same rates for those over 50.

Ultimately, White House pressure to recommend boosters for all was so intense, that the FDA’s two top vaccine experts left the agency in protest, writing scathing articles on how the data did not support boosters for young people."

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Some data:

Children are at a very small risk of serious illness or death from Covid. The IFR for kids ranges from 0.0021% at age 1 to 0.01% at age 18.

"Data from the CDC shows that children make up less than 0.1% of Covid deaths since the pandemic began in March 2020.

"Children under the age of five only make up 259 of the 852,000 deaths the U.S. has recorded.

Even the WHO acknowledged this:

“WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said Tuesday that healthy children likely do not need booster shots as they face little risk from the virus.”

More:

Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Studies find that overall risk of death or severe disease from COVID-19 is very low in kids.

“Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.”

Added to that is the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of jabs for kids:

“Two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine offer almost no protection against coronavirus infection in kids ages 5 to 11…”

Throw in the relative superiority of natural immunity:

“…our review demonstrates that natural immunity in COVID-recovered individuals is, at least, equivalent to the protection afforded by complete vaccination of COVID-naïve populations.”

“…the level of protection against re-infection, symptomatic disease, and severe disease appears to be at least as durable, if not more so, than that provided by two-dose vaccination with the mRNA vaccines.”

Add to all that the incidence of adverse events for children, and it is hard to see any necessity at all for (repeated) Covid vaccines for every single child.

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Just to add a little more context to that:

  • Accidents (of all types) are the leading cause of child deaths in almost all countries, and about half are road accidents. 57 children died in accidents in Taiwan in 2021. Every $ spent on COVID “vaccines” for children is a $ that isn’t being spent on patching up these unfortunate kids in the ER, or attempting to prevent those accidents in the first place.

  • Cancer is the leading cause of death in Taiwan, and is uncommonly high even in a region (Asia) where cancer is relatively more common. 500 children are diagnosed with cancer every year in Taiwan; annual mortality is about 80 per year.

These are the low-hanging fruit in this picture. They’re not easy to address, which is perhaps why the CDC is keen to promote facile solutions with dubious benefits - like COVID vaccinations - rather than work on ways to reduce the death toll caused by things which are at least theoretically preventable.

Also: roughly 90,000 people worldwide die every year from encephalitis (with various underlying causes), so about 10 fatal cases per million. It’s rare, but not unheard-of. There is little reason to believe that Taiwanese children are or were exposed to a higher-than-usual risk of encephalitis as a result of COVID, or that COVID vaccines would have protected them from it.

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That’s not right, @finley. Pneumonia, malaria etc are going to be leading causes of child deaths.

EDIT: “in almost all countries”. OK, I agree.

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Fair enough, I guess I meant to say developed/urbanized countries.

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This is the data for the world:

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15% of all child deaths in 2017 – Pneumonia and other lower respiratory diseases.

12% of deaths – Preterm births and neonatal disorders.

10% of deaths – Diarrheal diseases.

Here’s a sample of leading causes of infant (age <1) death in a western nation, Australia:

In 2015–17, 3 leading causes of infant deaths accounted for the majority (86%) of deaths:

  • perinatal conditions (53%)
  • congenital anomalies (23%)
  • symptoms, signs and abnormal findings, including Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) (9.3%).

For children (1-14) in 2015–17, the leading causes of deaths were injuries (33%), cancer (19%) and diseases of the nervous system (10%)—rates of 3.5, 2.1 and 1.0 per 100,000 children, respectively.

The US:

Almost 20,000 infants died in the United States in 2020. The five leading causes of infant death in 2020 were:

  1. Birth defects.
  2. Preterm birth and low birth weight.
  3. Sudden infant death syndrome.
  4. Injuries (e.g., suffocation).
  5. Maternal pregnancy complications.

In the US, for 1-19s, in 2020 (the most recent year with available data from the CDC), firearms were the number one cause of death for children ages 1-19 in the United States, taking the lives of 4,357 children.

CDC breakdown of leading causes of death per specific child age group in the US:

Children aged 1-4 years

  • Accidents (unintentional injuries)
  • Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities
  • Assault (homicide)

Source: National Vital Statistics System – Mortality data (2021) via CDC WONDER

Children aged 5-9 years

  • Accidents (unintentional injuries)
  • Cancer
  • Assault (homicide)

Source: National Vital Statistics System – Mortality data (2021) via CDC WONDER

Children aged 10-14 years

  • Accidents (unintentional injuries)
  • Intentional self-harm (suicide)
  • Cancer

Source: National Vital Statistics System – Mortality data (2021) via CDC WONDER

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Suicide in the top 3 for 10-14 year olds? Bloody hell. Wonder when that happened? Last I heard it would have been somewhere in the top 10, but not at #2.

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Fairly confident the answer is “the internet”.