Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 5 years old, school mandates are coming.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country, is already requiring students 12 and older to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of the year. The rest of the state plans to follow suit within the next few months and require all public and private school students to get the vaccine if they want to attend in-person school, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams has also suggested he’d support such a measure.
Given the Biden administration’s affinity for vaccine mandates, the Department of Education might also roll out its own mandate for schools that accept federal funding. In fact, just a couple of months ago, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said he would support mandatory coronavirus vaccinations to keep students in school.
“I wholeheartedly support it,” he said in September. “It’s the best tool that we have to safely reopen schools and keep them open. We don’t want to have the yo-yo effect that many districts had last year, and we can prevent that by getting vaccinated.”
There’s just one problem: Unlike with adults, there is almost no benefit at all to vaccinating children against COVID-19. You might say, “better safe than sorry,” but there are risks that probably outweigh the tiny benefit for children at that age.
The FDA revealed in a recent report that if 1 million boys ages 5-11 were given a double shot of the Pfizer vaccine, the number of COVID ICU stays among children would be reduced by a grand total of just 67 visits. The data also show that a million vaccinations would prevent just one COVID-19 death.
At the same time, this vaccination rate would produce 57 ICU stays for myocarditis, or heart inflammation, a side effect connected to COVID-19 vaccination, especially in young boys. So that’s a net of only 10 hospital visits prevented.
In an attempt to assuage concerns about the risks for children, one of the advisers on the FDA’s vaccine committee admitted last month that the only way to really determine whether the COVID-19 vaccines are safe for children is to just start giving them to children.
That’s not exactly reassuring.
FDA writes that giving 1 mill male kids age 5-11 a double Pfizer shot can reduce ICUs by 67 visits (if the outbreak continues is like Delta and if efficiency holds steady for 6 months which we know it does not), but can cause 57 ICU visits for myocarditis. https://t.co/3QOxrxGMDr pic.twitter.com/Yy8kMxDsya
— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) November 7, 2021
Some parents might look at those odds and still think vaccinating their children against COVID-19 is worth it. And that’s fine — they have the right to decide what’s best for their family.
But there will be many other parents unwilling to take such liberties with their children’s health, especially since children are not at risk from COVID-19 in the first place. Indeed, a recent poll found that two-thirds of parents do not want to vaccinate their children as soon as they are eligible. They have just as much right as the pro-vaccine camp to make their own decision on their own time.
Unfortunately, government officials are moving closer and closer to taking that right away from them. If I were a parent, I’d start considering my options now — it might affect my choices about how to vote, where to send my children to school, and even where to live.
