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Why are we vaccinating children against Covid-19?

58 points by ycnews 5y ago

loceng 5y ago
FTA: "Highlights • Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities. • Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children. • Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term. • Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children. • High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term)."
- spockz 5y ago
  Over here the main reason for vaccinating children is to reduce the infections carried over by children. Not necessarily to spare them from symptoms as most children will just have mild symptoms and less long covid. I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children. They would also be impacted the longest and strongest so if that can be prevented with vaccinations without worse side effects that seems fine to me.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I haven’t seen formal studies, but the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen is that children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults, but in absolute terms the symptoms are less severe as they start at higher baseline levels of energy, health, etc. but relative to their peers, the effects can still be quite significant.
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      > children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults It's harder to find than what imagined, but the closest data I found is https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm The Table 1 compare the number of death related to covid-19 with the total number of death * 0-17 years: 678/66,234 ~= 1.0% * 85 years and over: 212,658/1,897,245 ~= 11.2% So the risk of dying by covid-19 compared with all the other risk is much smaller for kids than old people. It would be interesting to compare with the total population of each age, but the difference will be bigger. The problem is that traditional media a social media have a strong sampling bias. A dead of a kid is unusual and it will get more coverage than the dead of a 90 year old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        Hmm.. typo in my original comment. Was meant to say "long covid" not "lost by covid". I agree there's a lot fewer kids dying.
  - r721 5y ago
    >I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children. Study from September: >Up to one in seven (14%) children and young people who caught SARS-CoV-2 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later, suggest preliminary findings from the world’s largest study on long Covid in children, led by UCL and Public Health England researchers. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-largest-study-long-covid-children https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-la...
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Herd immunity cannot be established with the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines, due to high transmissibity amongst the vaccinated, and without herd immunity, every one contracting COVID-19 is inevitable, so I don't see a basis in the 'vaccinate to protect others' argument. As for "long COVID", the best evidence available suggests most cases are misattribution: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
One element I never see discussed is even if the vaccine had no side effects for children, since there is a limited supply of vaccines, inoculating a child in the USA means someone (probably older, less healthy) somewhere else is not getting it. It's totally understandable for US politicians to value the life of a US resident higher than that in another country, but we should discuss how much more valuable that life is.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Perfect vaccine distribution across the entire world isn’t realistic. Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to vaccine distribution. We could waste months or years trying to get all of the vaccines to the “right” people first, or we could start vaccinating as many people as possible in whatever order makes it fastest. The latter option produces significantly better outcomes compared to waiting to try to distribute it globally according to some specific order.
- fimdomeio 5y ago
  And in the same line of thinking that vaccination is a world the more the virus spreads through people that cannot fight it (naturally or via vaccines) the more the change of mutations apearing and spreading.
- adlorger 5y ago
  i think you see this rarely discussed because its an issue that is rapidly declining in importance over time. The trade off of either-this-US-kid-gets-it-or-that-Indian-adult-gets-it becomes less severe when availability of vaccines is going up everywhere rapidly. Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose. so, scarcity is certainly the case sometimes (like right now for Paxlovid) but not for general availability vaccines worldwide.
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    > Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose. Pharmaceutical companies would invest more in finding ways around regional constraints if they didn't have a free profit square by selling their vaccines in the US.
r721 5y ago
This topic was discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739963 And again, this study was done long before omicron: >As of this writing in mid-June 2021 Recent news story: >The omicron-fueled surge that is sending COVID-19 cases rocketing in the U.S. is putting children in the hospital in record numbers, and experts lament that most of the youngsters are not vaccinated. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pandemics-seattle-centers-for-disease-control-and-prevention-75a48388d6ca85ad88de300f32bfdec6 https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pande...
- jtc331 5y ago
  Even Anthony Fauci, hardly a COVID denier, recently explained on MSNBC that many of those hospitalizations of kids are incidentally COVID positive while the child is actually in the hospital for (his examples) things link appendicitis and a broken leg. Furthermore why case counts are skyrocketing (literally the highest ever seen in the pandemic) hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7%. https://www.air.tv/watch?v=99n-gANuSf6pHQ8A_QQy1Q https://www.air.tv/watch?v=99n-gANuSf6pHQ8A_QQy1Q
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7% For now. Let's see in three weeks from now, and let's hope that it stays that way. The differences in demographics between the populations that we have data on and the ones that are now affected are significant enough that I don't think we should party just yet.
    - vitus 5y ago
      Beyond that, deaths lag behind hospitalizations by several weeks for obvious reasons -- most people who get sick enough to die from the virus will end up going to the hospital first.
implements 5y ago
Because COVID is less transmissible amongst the vaccinated, I assume.
- wsc981 5y ago
  I don’t believe it is. Vaccinated and unvaccinated spread COVID just as easily. Currently the narrative is that vaccinated people are better protected from the negative effects of COVID and hence less likely to land on IC. Actually a Dutch academic doctor (Diederik Gommers) stated this week that most people on IC in The Netherlands have one thing in common: they’re overweight. This doctor is part of the Outbreak Management Team in The Netherlands that deals with the COVID situation. Being overweight might be a be better indicator to see how likely one is to end up on IC compared to vaccination status. As such this doctor is not in favor of a 2G society (unlike the Dutch government that wants to push 2G). This whole policy is lunacy. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the reason for the push to vaccinate children is because emergency use authorization will be gone in March 2022 and if children get vaccinated before March then vaccine producers will not be liable for negative side-effects afterwards. I am not a lawyer so I can’t confirm if there’s truth in this statement. Regardless, very few children will get negative side-effects from COVID, much more will get negative side-effects from mRNA vaccines (especially boys stand to get much more myocarditis cases). I think our children are our future and I certainly won’t risk an experimental vaccine on my soon-to-be 5 year old, perfectly healthy, daughter. A vaccine that (from my POV) seems to be quite ineffective and for which we still don’t know if there will be any long-term (say 10+ years) negative effects.
  - encoderer 5y ago
    Same. Four year old daughter. I have no intention of getting her a Covid vax and I’ll move school districts if my liberal city (Berkeley) tries to mandate it. My wife and I are both vaxxed and boosted but why would I shoot a drug into her that only claims to prevent severe disease, which is a very rare occurrence in kids.
    - sixothree 5y ago
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
mabbo 5y ago
A: Because children pass COVID-19 on to older people who are highly likely to die. It's like saying "Why fight forest fires? Very few people live in the forests." Because the fire will grow and burn down all the cities. And also: because we can do both. All the elderly people (that are willing to take the safe and effective vaccine) are vaccinated. We have plenty of vaccines leftover. This isn't a matter of picking who gets it and who doesn't.
- kruxigt 5y ago
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  That's a very poor answer since giving any medicine to a child with risks exceeding the benefits so that someone else could benefit would violate the Hippocratic Oath. Also, there aren't plenty of vaccines leftover worldwide. Vaccines would be going to poorer countries that have low vaccination rates if those vaccines weren't being used for children.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    The risk to 5–11 year olds of the mRNA Covid vaccines is ~0, orders of magnitude lower than the (still very low compared to older adults) risk of Covid. These are incredibly safe vaccines. Out of ~9 million vaccinations, there have been ~100 "serious" adverse effects reported, most of those fever or vomiting but also e.g. 5 experiencing new-onset seizures and 11 with (recovered or recovering) myocarditis. 2 girls (5 and 6) with "complicated medical histories" in "fragile health" died after vaccination, and their deaths are being investigated but are not believed to be caused by the vaccine https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a1.htm?s_cid=mm705152a1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a1.htm?s_cid=... Among 12–17 year olds, the vaccines result in on the order 200x reduction in hospitalization. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a3.htm?s_cid=mm705152a3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a3.htm?s_cid=...
    - cudgy 5y ago
mattlondon 5y ago
> Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children That is not going to make you feel any better if it is your kid who is one of these "negligible" deaths. If there is anything you can do as a parent to reduce the risk to your kids, of course you are going to do it (especially if it is a no-brainer quick simple low-risk and cheap like a vaccination). Kids get all sorts of vaccinations and injections starting for their first few weeks of life (and even minutes - they get a vitamin K shot immediately after birth in the UK) , why should covid be any different?
- jtdev 5y ago
- jtc331 5y ago
  What if it doesn’t reduce risk though?
  - tragictrash 5y ago
    You need to leave and stop pushing your anti-vaccine misinformation. Every Post in here for you is a what if based on zero facts. You should know when to stop talking.
    - jtc331 5y ago
      No. Clearly you don’t read my comments since I regularly note facts from around the world. Researchers in England found in the first 12 months of COVID only 25 COVID deaths for under age 18. That is an incredibly small number. That level of risk is so low that any honest person would have to ask the question whether reducing risk is actually possible without worse side effects (and that’s not just for vaccines — I mean for any intervention including non-pharmaceutical interventions). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w
      - tragictrash 5y ago
        I'm sorry, I must have misread your username when I posted that, I had meant to send that to jtdev.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
It’s so strange to read these questions as if kids were living in isolation from adults. Kids are in closer contact with each other and their parents than adults are with each other. It’s not even a close comparison. They may not get severe infections as often as adults, but ask any parent and they’ll let you know just how effective kids are at spreading infections. It also feels deliberately disingenuous to bring up possible vaccine side effects without explaining that those same side effects occur with higher frequency and severity from the infection itself. It’s increasingly looking like exposure to Coronavirus is inevitable, so choosing the lower risk option of being vaccinated is obviously better than risking the worse side effects of the infection itself. Too many people are trying to treat this as a comparison between vaccinated or never being exposed to the virus ever, which is an increasingly unlikely possibility.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jtdev 5y ago
- sweezyjeezy 5y ago
  Yeah if a kid infects a parent, and that parent dies, that is an incredibly bad outcome for the kid.
  - anthonypasq 5y ago
    presumably the parents would be vaccinated???
- encoderer 5y ago
  The science is murky on whether being vaccinated prevents being infectious. Others have pointed it out and are being flagged. I took JNJ and boosted with Moderna I want people to choose to get vaxxed but as far as I can tell nobody is out there saying getting vaxxed will prevent you from spreading the disease.
_Microft 5y ago
Go read the summary in section 5, the style is pretty weird... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002100161X#sec0085 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002... (I bet you neither would have expected ammonium nitrate explosions getting mentioned in the article!)
- r721 5y ago
  So many mentions of VAERS too... >While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases.
- blackearl 5y ago
  I'm definitely not someone who reads these types of articles often but this part definitely stood out to me. Are these analogies common? It seemed odd.
  - PopeUrbanX 5y ago
    No, these are clearly very marginal academics ("independent consultants", seriously?) doing bad science.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    No, this article has a number of dog whistles and other verbiage that is meant to appeal to anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists. It’s not good scientific work. It’s an agenda-pushing piece disguised as a journal article.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobolus 5y ago
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002100216X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002... > Expression of concern: Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19? > The journal would like to alert readers to the fact that the Special Issue titled “COVID-19 Pandemic: Health impact and Novel research” including the article titled” Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” are being rereviewed post-publication by an independent Editor and a new set of reviewers, due to concerns raised regarding the validity and scientific soundness of the content. Further updates will be provided to readers once the investigations have concluded.
Nemrod67 5y ago
2 years on, still going strong with the BS. Freedom and safety, story of the World
throwaway55421 5y ago
"Reducing the spread of covid 19" is not a thing in the vaccine context. You are going to get it. Everyone is going to get it, probably repeatedly. France has vaccine passports out of the wazoo and 200k cases. "Reducing the spread" of something implies that the spread is actually reduced at the macro level. It's irrelevant whether a single vaccinated person has a slightly reduced probability of transmitting the disease if _in aggregate_ everyone gets it anyway. You may as well say that an umbrella helps prevent wet hair. Well yeah, but not in a blizzard. In a blizzard your hair is saturated anyway. No prevention has occurred. "Vaccinate the world" doesn't solve covid. Vaccinated populations still get and transmit the virus. They're much better off of course because the individuals fight off the virus more effectively and their health systems function better. But they still bloody get the virus, still provide a reservoir for mutations, etc. If I had a quid for every totally nonsensical proclamation about "solving covid via xyz" I'd be a billionaire.
schleck8 5y ago
Working at a school, this is an awful and dangerous article. Schools are very likely to become hyperspreaders with how little space there is between kids in class, and because the younger ones (grade 5 to 8) are still immature. The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high. > A study by the Helmholtz Centre Munich, for example, showed that the number of children with antibodies in their blood was six times higher than the cases reported by the Bavarian State Office for Health and Nutrition. [1] I'm honestly baffled by how shortsighted the 'if it's not sick, it's not an issue' logic is. This does not work with Covid. [1] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faq-sind-kinder-tatsaechlich-corona-treiber,SAqkHA5 https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faq-sind-kinder-tatsaec...
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  How come we don't have data about spread from schools etc? Its been 2 years A lot of things are 'likely'
- tjansen 5y ago
  > The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high. I think this is not a good argument: - Vaccines have been shown to be not very good at preventing infections, especially a few months after the last dose, and even more so with newer variants. - As far as I know, most virologists say that infection is inevitable. Vaccinating kids can delay the infection, but not prevent it.
PopeUrbanX 5y ago
Anyone who's read even a handful of scientific articles in the biomed space can easily tell that this is a garbage paper in a garbage journal: https://retractionwatch.com/2021/12/19/elsevier-subjects-entire-special-issue-of-journal-on-covid-19-to-an-expression-of-concern/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/12/19/elsevier-subjects-ent... Please flag this terrible post.
- Jimmc414 5y ago
  Why can't we ask the question?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - PopeUrbanX 5y ago
    Did I say that the question can't be asked? Do you understand that there's a linked webpage attached to the title of this submission?
igetspam 5y ago
I have one kid. The trick of long term issues due to COVID is non zero. The risk of death is non zero. Many people have decided that science is subjective. VAERS data is unreliable at best, since it's unverifiable. (Anyone can submit anything and there was a spike in reporting of side effects and death early on.) My level of acceptable risk is not the same as this paper argues it should be but I find the data suspect.
fabian2k 5y ago
The article already has an expression of concern from the editors, that's pretty rare and casts doubt on any peer-review this might have received. Just reading the appendix, the calculation they do for the dangers of dying by COVID or the vaccine are completely insane. They take the raw VAERS numbers (which are not designed for this purpose and represent deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it). They then multiply this by 100 to account for VAERS allegedly undercounting deaths. They then assume that only 6% of people dying from COVID died from COVID, everone else allegedly only died with COVID. And then they claim that PCR tests are highly likely to be false positive, so many people that are tested positive don't actually have COVID. This is just a series of completely outlandish claims, you can arrive at any number you want if you add "corrections factors" of two orders of magnitude with no real justification, especially if you start from bad data to begin with.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Your note on misuse of VAERS data caught my attention: "deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it". Apparently the same kind of sleigh of hand is widespread practice in mainstream epidemiological data collection, according to recent comments by none other than Dr. Fauci. > "But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID," Fauci continued. "And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, 'hospitalized with COVID,' as opposed to because of COVID." https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/broken-leg-anthony-fauci-child-covid-19-hospitalizations-overblown https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/broken-...
- nradov 5y ago
  False positive PCR tests are rare but they do occur. https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/researchers-identify-technique-detect-false-positive-covid-19-results https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/researchers-identify-tech... https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/e54 https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/e54 Some convalescent patients continue to test positive long after the infection is cleared and they are no longer contagious. https://wi.mit.edu/news/new-research-reveals-why-some-patients-may-test-positive-covid-19-long-after-recovery https://wi.mit.edu/news/new-research-reveals-why-some-patien...
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Why are we flagging scientific articles on HN? What happened to having a normal civilized discussion and argument exchange?
- dm319 5y ago
  This science article is dodge.
ab3rC1te 5y ago
trembonator 5y ago
satisfice 5y ago
When the CDC or WHO tells us that there is merit to this work, I will know to give it credit. As long as they don’t, the paper is asking us to believe that public health institutions are somehow stupid or corrupt. I am not qualified to evaluate the claims made here, directly. I am qualified to notice that there are a lot of prominent experts from big universities on TV telling us things that are not in keeping with some of the key claims of this paper.
- cudgy 5y ago
  “prominent experts from big universities” If you are not qualified to evaluate these claims, how do you know they are prominent let alone “experts”? Why are you so willing to accept their opinions over a research articles conclusions?
  - satisfice 5y ago
    Because that’s what it means to BE civilized. It means that we learn how to trust each other. I’m willing to trust experts for the same reason that you trust them to build roads and buildings and grow the food you eat and when you are sick with covid you go and beg those experts to save you instead having the courage of your skeptical convictions and dying alone in a forest. I evaluate information about expertise partly based on social heuristics. For instance, long term reputation; and reputation networks such as are cultivated by mainstream (read responsible and accountable) journalism. I accept their opinions because they are internally consistent, survive skeptical journalism over time, and based on the poor quality of criticism against them. I am knowledgeable enough to detect many of the tricks and evasions of charlatans. And I review the work of watchdog organizations, too. Finally, I believe that most people are decent. Most people are mediocre, yes, but they are decent. Conspiracies of evil cannot grow very large, because they collapse. Too many people are too good.
quantified 5y ago
For the same reason we vaccinate boys against HPV. Protects the ones they love.
gethoht 5y ago
"Why are we vaccinating children against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus... etc. etc. etc." It's the same answer.

58 points by ycnews 5y ago

FTA: "Highlights • Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities. • Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children. • Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term. • Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children. • High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term)."

spockz 5y ago
Over here the main reason for vaccinating children is to reduce the infections carried over by children. Not necessarily to spare them from symptoms as most children will just have mild symptoms and less long covid. I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children. They would also be impacted the longest and strongest so if that can be prevented with vaccinations without worse side effects that seems fine to me.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I haven’t seen formal studies, but the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen is that children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults, but in absolute terms the symptoms are less severe as they start at higher baseline levels of energy, health, etc. but relative to their peers, the effects can still be quite significant.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    > children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults It's harder to find than what imagined, but the closest data I found is https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm The Table 1 compare the number of death related to covid-19 with the total number of death * 0-17 years: 678/66,234 ~= 1.0% * 85 years and over: 212,658/1,897,245 ~= 11.2% So the risk of dying by covid-19 compared with all the other risk is much smaller for kids than old people. It would be interesting to compare with the total population of each age, but the difference will be bigger. The problem is that traditional media a social media have a strong sampling bias. A dead of a kid is unusual and it will get more coverage than the dead of a 90 year old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Hmm.. typo in my original comment. Was meant to say "long covid" not "lost by covid". I agree there's a lot fewer kids dying.
- r721 5y ago
  >I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children. Study from September: >Up to one in seven (14%) children and young people who caught SARS-CoV-2 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later, suggest preliminary findings from the world’s largest study on long Covid in children, led by UCL and Public Health England researchers. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-largest-study-long-covid-children https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-la...
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Herd immunity cannot be established with the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines, due to high transmissibity amongst the vaccinated, and without herd immunity, every one contracting COVID-19 is inevitable, so I don't see a basis in the 'vaccinate to protect others' argument. As for "long COVID", the best evidence available suggests most cases are misattribution: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

One element I never see discussed is even if the vaccine had no side effects for children, since there is a limited supply of vaccines, inoculating a child in the USA means someone (probably older, less healthy) somewhere else is not getting it. It's totally understandable for US politicians to value the life of a US resident higher than that in another country, but we should discuss how much more valuable that life is.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Perfect vaccine distribution across the entire world isn’t realistic. Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to vaccine distribution. We could waste months or years trying to get all of the vaccines to the “right” people first, or we could start vaccinating as many people as possible in whatever order makes it fastest. The latter option produces significantly better outcomes compared to waiting to try to distribute it globally according to some specific order.
fimdomeio 5y ago
And in the same line of thinking that vaccination is a world the more the virus spreads through people that cannot fight it (naturally or via vaccines) the more the change of mutations apearing and spreading.
adlorger 5y ago
i think you see this rarely discussed because its an issue that is rapidly declining in importance over time. The trade off of either-this-US-kid-gets-it-or-that-Indian-adult-gets-it becomes less severe when availability of vaccines is going up everywhere rapidly. Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose. so, scarcity is certainly the case sometimes (like right now for Paxlovid) but not for general availability vaccines worldwide.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  > Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose. Pharmaceutical companies would invest more in finding ways around regional constraints if they didn't have a free profit square by selling their vaccines in the US.

r721 5y ago

This topic was discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739963 And again, this study was done long before omicron: >As of this writing in mid-June 2021 Recent news story: >The omicron-fueled surge that is sending COVID-19 cases rocketing in the U.S. is putting children in the hospital in record numbers, and experts lament that most of the youngsters are not vaccinated. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pandemics-seattle-centers-for-disease-control-and-prevention-75a48388d6ca85ad88de300f32bfdec6 https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pande...

jtc331 5y ago
Even Anthony Fauci, hardly a COVID denier, recently explained on MSNBC that many of those hospitalizations of kids are incidentally COVID positive while the child is actually in the hospital for (his examples) things link appendicitis and a broken leg. Furthermore why case counts are skyrocketing (literally the highest ever seen in the pandemic) hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7%. https://www.air.tv/watch?v=99n-gANuSf6pHQ8A_QQy1Q https://www.air.tv/watch?v=99n-gANuSf6pHQ8A_QQy1Q
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > hospitalizations are only up 14% and deaths are down 7% For now. Let's see in three weeks from now, and let's hope that it stays that way. The differences in demographics between the populations that we have data on and the ones that are now affected are significant enough that I don't think we should party just yet.
  - vitus 5y ago
    Beyond that, deaths lag behind hospitalizations by several weeks for obvious reasons -- most people who get sick enough to die from the virus will end up going to the hospital first.

implements 5y ago

Because COVID is less transmissible amongst the vaccinated, I assume.

wsc981 5y ago
I don’t believe it is. Vaccinated and unvaccinated spread COVID just as easily. Currently the narrative is that vaccinated people are better protected from the negative effects of COVID and hence less likely to land on IC. Actually a Dutch academic doctor (Diederik Gommers) stated this week that most people on IC in The Netherlands have one thing in common: they’re overweight. This doctor is part of the Outbreak Management Team in The Netherlands that deals with the COVID situation. Being overweight might be a be better indicator to see how likely one is to end up on IC compared to vaccination status. As such this doctor is not in favor of a 2G society (unlike the Dutch government that wants to push 2G). This whole policy is lunacy. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the reason for the push to vaccinate children is because emergency use authorization will be gone in March 2022 and if children get vaccinated before March then vaccine producers will not be liable for negative side-effects afterwards. I am not a lawyer so I can’t confirm if there’s truth in this statement. Regardless, very few children will get negative side-effects from COVID, much more will get negative side-effects from mRNA vaccines (especially boys stand to get much more myocarditis cases). I think our children are our future and I certainly won’t risk an experimental vaccine on my soon-to-be 5 year old, perfectly healthy, daughter. A vaccine that (from my POV) seems to be quite ineffective and for which we still don’t know if there will be any long-term (say 10+ years) negative effects.
- encoderer 5y ago
  Same. Four year old daughter. I have no intention of getting her a Covid vax and I’ll move school districts if my liberal city (Berkeley) tries to mandate it. My wife and I are both vaxxed and boosted but why would I shoot a drug into her that only claims to prevent severe disease, which is a very rare occurrence in kids.
  - sixothree 5y ago

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

mabbo 5y ago

A: Because children pass COVID-19 on to older people who are highly likely to die. It's like saying "Why fight forest fires? Very few people live in the forests." Because the fire will grow and burn down all the cities. And also: because we can do both. All the elderly people (that are willing to take the safe and effective vaccine) are vaccinated. We have plenty of vaccines leftover. This isn't a matter of picking who gets it and who doesn't.

kruxigt 5y ago
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
That's a very poor answer since giving any medicine to a child with risks exceeding the benefits so that someone else could benefit would violate the Hippocratic Oath. Also, there aren't plenty of vaccines leftover worldwide. Vaccines would be going to poorer countries that have low vaccination rates if those vaccines weren't being used for children.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  The risk to 5–11 year olds of the mRNA Covid vaccines is ~0, orders of magnitude lower than the (still very low compared to older adults) risk of Covid. These are incredibly safe vaccines. Out of ~9 million vaccinations, there have been ~100 "serious" adverse effects reported, most of those fever or vomiting but also e.g. 5 experiencing new-onset seizures and 11 with (recovered or recovering) myocarditis. 2 girls (5 and 6) with "complicated medical histories" in "fragile health" died after vaccination, and their deaths are being investigated but are not believed to be caused by the vaccine https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a1.htm?s_cid=mm705152a1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a1.htm?s_cid=... Among 12–17 year olds, the vaccines result in on the order 200x reduction in hospitalization. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a3.htm?s_cid=mm705152a3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a3.htm?s_cid=...
  - cudgy 5y ago

mattlondon 5y ago

> Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children That is not going to make you feel any better if it is your kid who is one of these "negligible" deaths. If there is anything you can do as a parent to reduce the risk to your kids, of course you are going to do it (especially if it is a no-brainer quick simple low-risk and cheap like a vaccination). Kids get all sorts of vaccinations and injections starting for their first few weeks of life (and even minutes - they get a vitamin K shot immediately after birth in the UK) , why should covid be any different?

jtdev 5y ago
jtc331 5y ago
What if it doesn’t reduce risk though?
- tragictrash 5y ago
  You need to leave and stop pushing your anti-vaccine misinformation. Every Post in here for you is a what if based on zero facts. You should know when to stop talking.
  - jtc331 5y ago
    No. Clearly you don’t read my comments since I regularly note facts from around the world. Researchers in England found in the first 12 months of COVID only 25 COVID deaths for under age 18. That is an incredibly small number. That level of risk is so low that any honest person would have to ask the question whether reducing risk is actually possible without worse side effects (and that’s not just for vaccines — I mean for any intervention including non-pharmaceutical interventions). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w
    - tragictrash 5y ago
      I'm sorry, I must have misread your username when I posted that, I had meant to send that to jtdev.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

It’s so strange to read these questions as if kids were living in isolation from adults. Kids are in closer contact with each other and their parents than adults are with each other. It’s not even a close comparison. They may not get severe infections as often as adults, but ask any parent and they’ll let you know just how effective kids are at spreading infections. It also feels deliberately disingenuous to bring up possible vaccine side effects without explaining that those same side effects occur with higher frequency and severity from the infection itself. It’s increasingly looking like exposure to Coronavirus is inevitable, so choosing the lower risk option of being vaccinated is obviously better than risking the worse side effects of the infection itself. Too many people are trying to treat this as a comparison between vaccinated or never being exposed to the virus ever, which is an increasingly unlikely possibility.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jtdev 5y ago
sweezyjeezy 5y ago
Yeah if a kid infects a parent, and that parent dies, that is an incredibly bad outcome for the kid.
- anthonypasq 5y ago
  presumably the parents would be vaccinated???
encoderer 5y ago
The science is murky on whether being vaccinated prevents being infectious. Others have pointed it out and are being flagged. I took JNJ and boosted with Moderna I want people to choose to get vaxxed but as far as I can tell nobody is out there saying getting vaxxed will prevent you from spreading the disease.

_Microft 5y ago

Go read the summary in section 5, the style is pretty weird... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002100161X#sec0085 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002... (I bet you neither would have expected ammonium nitrate explosions getting mentioned in the article!)

r721 5y ago
So many mentions of VAERS too... >While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases.
blackearl 5y ago
I'm definitely not someone who reads these types of articles often but this part definitely stood out to me. Are these analogies common? It seemed odd.
- PopeUrbanX 5y ago
  No, these are clearly very marginal academics ("independent consultants", seriously?) doing bad science.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  No, this article has a number of dog whistles and other verbiage that is meant to appeal to anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists. It’s not good scientific work. It’s an agenda-pushing piece disguised as a journal article.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jacobolus 5y ago
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002100216X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002... > Expression of concern: Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19? > The journal would like to alert readers to the fact that the Special Issue titled “COVID-19 Pandemic: Health impact and Novel research” including the article titled” Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” are being rereviewed post-publication by an independent Editor and a new set of reviewers, due to concerns raised regarding the validity and scientific soundness of the content. Further updates will be provided to readers once the investigations have concluded.

Nemrod67 5y ago

2 years on, still going strong with the BS. Freedom and safety, story of the World

throwaway55421 5y ago

"Reducing the spread of covid 19" is not a thing in the vaccine context. You are going to get it. Everyone is going to get it, probably repeatedly. France has vaccine passports out of the wazoo and 200k cases. "Reducing the spread" of something implies that the spread is actually reduced at the macro level. It's irrelevant whether a single vaccinated person has a slightly reduced probability of transmitting the disease if _in aggregate_ everyone gets it anyway. You may as well say that an umbrella helps prevent wet hair. Well yeah, but not in a blizzard. In a blizzard your hair is saturated anyway. No prevention has occurred. "Vaccinate the world" doesn't solve covid. Vaccinated populations still get and transmit the virus. They're much better off of course because the individuals fight off the virus more effectively and their health systems function better. But they still bloody get the virus, still provide a reservoir for mutations, etc. If I had a quid for every totally nonsensical proclamation about "solving covid via xyz" I'd be a billionaire.

schleck8 5y ago

Working at a school, this is an awful and dangerous article. Schools are very likely to become hyperspreaders with how little space there is between kids in class, and because the younger ones (grade 5 to 8) are still immature. The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high. > A study by the Helmholtz Centre Munich, for example, showed that the number of children with antibodies in their blood was six times higher than the cases reported by the Bavarian State Office for Health and Nutrition. [1] I'm honestly baffled by how shortsighted the 'if it's not sick, it's not an issue' logic is. This does not work with Covid. [1] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faq-sind-kinder-tatsaechlich-corona-treiber,SAqkHA5 https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faq-sind-kinder-tatsaec...

cblconfederate 5y ago
How come we don't have data about spread from schools etc? Its been 2 years A lot of things are 'likely'
tjansen 5y ago
> The students catch covid and (we've known this for a year) usually have mild to no symptoms, but they go on to infect their parents. The dark figure is very high. I think this is not a good argument: - Vaccines have been shown to be not very good at preventing infections, especially a few months after the last dose, and even more so with newer variants. - As far as I know, most virologists say that infection is inevitable. Vaccinating kids can delay the infection, but not prevent it.

PopeUrbanX 5y ago

Anyone who's read even a handful of scientific articles in the biomed space can easily tell that this is a garbage paper in a garbage journal: https://retractionwatch.com/2021/12/19/elsevier-subjects-entire-special-issue-of-journal-on-covid-19-to-an-expression-of-concern/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/12/19/elsevier-subjects-ent... Please flag this terrible post.

Jimmc414 5y ago
Why can't we ask the question?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- PopeUrbanX 5y ago
  Did I say that the question can't be asked? Do you understand that there's a linked webpage attached to the title of this submission?

igetspam 5y ago

I have one kid. The trick of long term issues due to COVID is non zero. The risk of death is non zero. Many people have decided that science is subjective. VAERS data is unreliable at best, since it's unverifiable. (Anyone can submit anything and there was a spike in reporting of side effects and death early on.) My level of acceptable risk is not the same as this paper argues it should be but I find the data suspect.

fabian2k 5y ago

The article already has an expression of concern from the editors, that's pretty rare and casts doubt on any peer-review this might have received. Just reading the appendix, the calculation they do for the dangers of dying by COVID or the vaccine are completely insane. They take the raw VAERS numbers (which are not designed for this purpose and represent deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it). They then multiply this by 100 to account for VAERS allegedly undercounting deaths. They then assume that only 6% of people dying from COVID died from COVID, everone else allegedly only died with COVID. And then they claim that PCR tests are highly likely to be false positive, so many people that are tested positive don't actually have COVID. This is just a series of completely outlandish claims, you can arrive at any number you want if you add "corrections factors" of two orders of magnitude with no real justification, especially if you start from bad data to begin with.

angelzen 5y ago
Your note on misuse of VAERS data caught my attention: "deaths happening shortly after vaccinations, but not necessarily connected to it". Apparently the same kind of sleigh of hand is widespread practice in mainstream epidemiological data collection, according to recent comments by none other than Dr. Fauci. > "But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID," Fauci continued. "And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, 'hospitalized with COVID,' as opposed to because of COVID." https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/broken-leg-anthony-fauci-child-covid-19-hospitalizations-overblown https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/broken-...
nradov 5y ago
False positive PCR tests are rare but they do occur. https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/researchers-identify-technique-detect-false-positive-covid-19-results https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/researchers-identify-tech... https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/e54 https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/e54 Some convalescent patients continue to test positive long after the infection is cleared and they are no longer contagious. https://wi.mit.edu/news/new-research-reveals-why-some-patients-may-test-positive-covid-19-long-after-recovery https://wi.mit.edu/news/new-research-reveals-why-some-patien...

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Why are we flagging scientific articles on HN? What happened to having a normal civilized discussion and argument exchange?

dm319 5y ago
This science article is dodge.

ab3rC1te 5y ago

trembonator 5y ago

satisfice 5y ago

When the CDC or WHO tells us that there is merit to this work, I will know to give it credit. As long as they don’t, the paper is asking us to believe that public health institutions are somehow stupid or corrupt. I am not qualified to evaluate the claims made here, directly. I am qualified to notice that there are a lot of prominent experts from big universities on TV telling us things that are not in keeping with some of the key claims of this paper.

cudgy 5y ago
“prominent experts from big universities” If you are not qualified to evaluate these claims, how do you know they are prominent let alone “experts”? Why are you so willing to accept their opinions over a research articles conclusions?
- satisfice 5y ago
  Because that’s what it means to BE civilized. It means that we learn how to trust each other. I’m willing to trust experts for the same reason that you trust them to build roads and buildings and grow the food you eat and when you are sick with covid you go and beg those experts to save you instead having the courage of your skeptical convictions and dying alone in a forest. I evaluate information about expertise partly based on social heuristics. For instance, long term reputation; and reputation networks such as are cultivated by mainstream (read responsible and accountable) journalism. I accept their opinions because they are internally consistent, survive skeptical journalism over time, and based on the poor quality of criticism against them. I am knowledgeable enough to detect many of the tricks and evasions of charlatans. And I review the work of watchdog organizations, too. Finally, I believe that most people are decent. Most people are mediocre, yes, but they are decent. Conspiracies of evil cannot grow very large, because they collapse. Too many people are too good.

quantified 5y ago

For the same reason we vaccinate boys against HPV. Protects the ones they love.

gethoht 5y ago

"Why are we vaccinating children against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus... etc. etc. etc." It's the same answer.