A ruling from the California Supreme Court last week to confirm that individual school districts do not have the authority to require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19. A few weeks earlier, officials in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s government confirms it has dropped plans to require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and legislation to a similar effect was scrapped last year. That means COVID vaccines are unlikely to make it to the list of 10 injections California needs to go to school, at least for the foreseeable future.
Some may fear that this puts children and communities at unnecessary risk. But both our current scientific understanding of COVID-19 vaccines and the drawbacks of their regime suggest that government officials and courts have made the right decision.
Unlike the other vaccines required for enrollment in California schools, the COVID vaccines are unreliable in preventing infection or transmission and are protective at best modest Protection against infection only a few months.
Vaccines such as measles, mumps, rubella and polio required for school attendance reliably prevent outbreaks when local vaccination rates reach a certain threshold. The Hepatitis B And Varicella (chickenSmallpox) Vaccines provide years of protection against infection and reduce the risk of long-term transmission. Tetanus vaccination only provides individual protection, but it is given in combination with diphtheria and pertussis vaccines, providing long-term protection against outbreaks.
We’ve never had evidence that the COVID vaccines would behave like vaccines that provide a high level of durable protection against infection and transmission, which is known as herd immunity. It was clear they wouldn’t since 2021 And even clearer since the emergence of the Omicron variant. A to learn found that the COVID infection rate was essentially the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated adolescents after about five months. And COVID vaccines does not appear to reduce the chance of infected people infecting others.
To put it bluntly, there is So prove that the COVID-19 vaccines provide individual protection against serious illness and death. But the risks for most children at this stage are small. That’s according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than 96% of children have been infected with the virus, and studies continue to demonstrate this post-infectious or “natural” immunity at least as protective as vaccine-induced immunity.
What’s more, one Recent research of the Omicron variant in England found a COVID mortality rate among under-20s of just 2 per 1 million infections. It was also found that no children with previous infections have died from a later SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fortunately, the COVID-associated disease known as childhood multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) has emerged anything but disappearand of high quality studies Keep it up to show That’s how long COVID is rare in children.
Some children are at higher risk for COVID than others. However, the lack of a government mandate does not deter families and doctors from choosing to vaccinate these children.
Risk-benefit analyzes by my own research team for Children And Adolescents Support individualized approaches to COVID vaccination that weigh expected benefits against known potential side effects. A well-defined vaccine-related risk is myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, which is disproportionately common in adolescent and young adult males and can have potentially serious and long-lasting consequences. A high-quality prospective study estimated that the side effect would occur in about 1 in 3,000 13- to 18-year-old men receiving a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A school assignment would therefore require many children to accept known risks for unclear benefits.
In an international context, schools and universities in Europe generally do not require a COVID vaccination. The European CDC is focusing on providing the bivalent booster vaccine to people who are age 60 or older, or who have underlying conditions that put them at high risk. The UK only offers scholarships to people aged 50 and over who work in care homes or are otherwise at high risk. France has just announced that from next autumn it will no longer recommend vaccination to people under 65 who are not at high risk.
A statewide vaccination mandate also threatens to return thousands of students to distance learning schools. Therefore, the Los Angeles Unified School District is indefinite delay the January 2022 deadline for students 12 and older to get a COVID vaccination. It turned out that more than 30,000 unvaccinated students could be excluded from classes, disproportionately affected Young people of color who have already suffered major educational gaps during the pandemic.
With California’s COVID vaccination rate at 68% in 12 to 16 year olds, 38% in 5 to 11 year olds, and only 8% in children under five, and requiring vaccinations in California schools would further reduce enrollment in public schools ability to compensate deteriorated. jeopardizing the budgets of struggling districts, whose students, in turn, are disproportionately at risk.
Restoring public confidence requires practices that weigh the expected benefits of an intervention against potential harms. Mandating school vaccinations for COVID-19 will not significantly reduce health risks to our children or communities, but it may unnecessarily exclude students from the classrooms where they should be.
Tracy Beth Høeg is a research epidemiologist at UC San Francisco and a physician. These views are her own.
Source: LA Times