Southwest Airlines canceled hundreds more flights yesterday. “Asking questions about vaccines for kids or being more cautious for kids than older adults - these are reasonable approaches.” “I hope we can be prepared to be a little bit gentle with each other,” she wrote.
Instead, she devoted a recent newsletter to reviewing the evidence about children and Covid vaccines. What does Oster think about all of this? She has taken the high road on social media and in her email newsletter, rather than relitigating the earlier debate. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania told me.
“Unvaccinated people at any age are much more likely to cause transmission relative to vaccinated people,” Dr. It feels like a close call that leans toward vaccination for an individual child - and an easy decision for the sake of a child’s grandparents and everybody else’s grandparents. I have heard the same from multiple scientists, including those who understand why many parents are reluctant. If I had young children, I would vaccinate them without hesitation. The arguments in favor are that any troubling side effects seem very rare that there is uncertainty about the long-term effects of Covid and that vaccinating children can help protect everybody else, by reducing transmission. The arguments against doing so are that there are some rare side effects and that Covid seems no more worrisome for children than some other respiratory diseases. In the U.S., many vaccinated parents have decided not to vaccinate their eligible children yet. It remains unclear how many countries will recommend the vaccine for young children. There is not the scientific consensus about vaccinating children that there is about adults. The threat also argues for more workplace vaccine mandates, to reduce the overall spread of the virus.Īll of which raises a thorny question: Should young children be vaccinated? I know some readers will recoil at the mention of that question, but I think it’s a mistake to treat it as unmentionable. The annual average risk that an American dies in a vehicle crash is lower - about 1 in 8,500 - but not a different order of magnitude.įrom a policy perspective, Covid’s threat to older people argues for encouraging them to get Covid booster shots, even if it remains unclear how much vaccine immunity is waning. And few parts of life pose zero risk.Īs a point of comparison, the annual risk of death for all vaccinated people over 65 in Seattle this year appears to be around 1 in 2,700. The risks are not zero, but they are quite low. Others - especially those without major health problems - may reasonably choose to travel, see friends and live their lives. Some may decide to be extremely cautious until caseloads fall to low levels. Still, the Covid risks remain real for vaccinated elderly people.ĭavid Wallace-Wells has argued in New York Magazine that despite the widespread discussion of Covid’s outsize impact on the old, most people are “hugely underestimating” how large the age skew truly is.ĭifferent elderly people will respond to the risks in different ways, and that’s OK. Just compare the size of the bars in the above charts. In terms of risk reduction, a vaccine is more valuable for an older adult than a younger adult. To be clear, getting vaccinated is still the best thing that an elderly person can do. That’s different from what the initial vaccine data suggested. For older people - especially the very old, as well as those with serious health conditions - vaccination does not reduce the risk of Covid hospitalization or death to near zero. There is obviously some distressing news in these comparisons.
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