Christopher Labos: Why it is important to vaccinate children against COVID

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Now that Health Canada has approved the COVID-19 vaccine for children ages five to 11 and appointments can be booked. in Clic-Santé, hopefully most should be able to get at least one dose before the holidays.

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But some parents still hesitate to vaccinate their children.

Some are concerned about myocarditis, even though the risks are extremely low and largely limited to young men in their teens and early 20s rather than young children. Furthermore, it is worth reiterating that the vast majority of myocarditis cases observed were mild and resolved with anti-inflammatory drugs.

Many parents also wonder if vaccines are even necessary for young children. They wrongly claim that children do not get sick with COVID-19, when in fact children make up a growing share of new cases. While many children can survive with mild symptoms, many cannot. Some have become seriously ill, others have been intubated, and some have developed complications such as multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which actually means that COVID-19 presents a higher risk of inflammation of the heart than the vaccine. And, unfortunately, hundreds of children have died from COVID-19. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. , 94 children in the age group of five to 11 have died of COVID-19 during the pandemic. That number is small. But we must be careful about using statistics to lull us to cruelty, and remember that these deaths can be prevented and, moreover, they can be easily prevented.

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Some parents, on the other hand, are reluctant to vaccinate their children because they think vaccines will do nothing to limit the spread of the virus. They have heard, incorrectly, that vaccines only limit the severity of symptoms without preventing infection. This idea grew out of the original vaccine studies in which research participants were only tested for COVID-19 if they exhibited symptoms. Critics then claimed that asymptomatic cases went undiagnosed and the virus continued to spread unhindered between people, albeit with fewer and less severe symptoms. This reasoning is also based on the false assumption that because some vaccinated people can still become infected, vaccination has not prevented infection in others.

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Of course, you only have to look at how the pandemic evolved after the vaccine was launched to see the impact vaccines had on the spread of the disease. Vaccines prevent both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases and limit the spread in a population. But testing this in a research setting is tricky and would require people to get tested for COVID-19 regularly, whether they have symptoms or not. Only then could it be definitively demonstrated that the total number of infections is lower in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated. But for practical reasons, this is difficult to do in the general population, as repeat testing people is logistically complicated.

But there is a situation where this type of repeated periodic testing is not only feasible, it was already being done.

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Many health care institutions and hospitals regularly tested their employees during the pandemic, for obvious reasons. Analysis of this data would allow researchers to see whether the vaccines prevented even the asymptomatic spread of COVID-19. Data of Israel and the USA Both have shown that vaccines limited the spread of the virus. Unvaccinated employees were six to ten times more likely to get asymptomatic infections in these two studies. And of course, the less likely you are to get sick, the less likely you are to spread the virus to other people.

Some people cling to the idea that because they and their children are at low risk, they can cope with the infection and do not need to be vaccinated. They forget that even healthy young people have become seriously ill and have died. But they also forget that we vaccinate not only to protect ourselves, but also to protect those around us and the people we love.

Christopher Labos is a doctor from Montreal.

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