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It's not just the EU. Nearly every first-world country has done the same. The US was the fringe player in this debate. The Covid vaccines for children (and esp
by timr 1y ago
It's not just the EU. Nearly every first-world country has done the same. The US was the fringe player in this debate.
The Covid vaccines for children (and especially infants) were approved with essentially no proof of effectiveness because bad outcomes from Covid are so incredibly rare in these age groups. They would have needed to run gigantic trials in order to have any hope of catching any signal, and that was deemed expensive and/or impractical. Instead, the trials used use (poor) proxies for effectiveness, such as antibody titres. In some cases, even these proxies barely showed a signal.
Subsequently, there have been real signals of bad side-effects from the vaccine in children (i.e. myocarditis, particularly in young boys), that make the risk/reward trade-off incredibly cloudy. A great many people don't know this, because the issue has become political on both sides of the debate.
The chance of harm to children from the Covid vaccine is small, but so is the benefit. Unfortunately, one side of the US political spectrum only knows the former part of that statement, and the other side only knows the latter. Both are half the story.