According to experts, for the world to be safe from COVID-19, we need everyone to be vaccinated, including children. To get back to normal, we also need vaccinated adults, ongoing safety measures, safe reopening of public spaces, access to all recommended vaccines, and most importantly, a rigorous pathway to identifying truly safe COVID-19 vaccines for children. kids.
More than a year after this pandemic, the world has changed. The global devastation caused by the pandemic seemed relentless, and the collateral damage to children is likely to reverberate for years to come. Yet as a result of extraordinary collaboration and global determination, COVID-19 vaccines arrived less than a year after the virus was discovered, a departure that has provided much-needed hope for the world's population.
Childhood is one of the most vulnerable periods to become seriously ill. This is the period when protection is most needed and therefore children have traditionally been the main recipients of vaccines. Regarding the plan to vaccinate children between 5 and 11 years old in the United States, a natural question that looms is: should we start vaccinating our children against COVID-19 also in Canary Islands?
About Covid-19 Vaccines for Children:
Ensuring the protection of a group that makes up a quarter of the world's population seems essential as we move toward control of the pandemic. Protection is urgently needed when the risk of disease is high.
However, for children, there is a relatively low risk of disease. According to WHO data, children account for 1 in 9 SARS-CoV-2 infections, which constitutes only 2% of all hospitalizations. Most infections in children are mild and they recover completely. Severe disease is rare, but well described; this includes the inflammatory and life-threatening condition Multisystemic Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). About 1 in 3500 cases in children results in death, compared with a figure of 1 in 60 for adults.
While children are known to transmit the virus to others, recent evidence from Iceland and South Korea suggests that children may be less efficient transmitters of SARS-CoV-2 than previously thought. To put this in perspective, it is important to remember that the risk of children spreading the virus is not zero, and an increase in cases in the community will also be reflected in children.
While keeping schools open for face-to-face classes is critical to children's education and development, having a large cohort of unvaccinated and susceptible children, despite their lower risk of infection and transmission, can become important if cases in the community begin to increase.
Finally, evoking the ethical principle of distributive justice that benefits and burdens should be distributed among members of society fairly, the specialists argue that children should be included in COVID-19 vaccine trials so that they can benefit from immunization.
Ensuring the safety of vaccines for children as a critical point:
While the case for COVID-19 vaccines for children is clear, accumulating strong evidence of the safety of vaccines for children is an even higher priority. Far from being miniature versions of adults, children have notable differences in their metabolic and immune processes compared to adults. Younger children have more active immune responses that result in stronger reactions, such as a higher fever and localized reactions.
A rare immune phenomenon is antibody-dependent enhancement, where antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 caused by a vaccine can cause worse disease. According to experts, the scientific community learned from previous trials of vaccines in children for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and dengue infection, that vaccines can, paradoxically, intensify the disease, resulting in increased risk for children. vaccinated. Because of this, long-term safety data in children must be studied carefully before recommendations can be made for the deployment of vaccines in children.
Conducting pediatric vaccine trials is more complicated than adult trials due to ethical issues and a number of factors unique to children. However, the importance of including children and pregnant women in vaccine trials as early as possible is increasingly recognized around the world. Many COVID-19 vaccine products licensed for emergency use in adults (AstraZeneca, Pfizer / BioNTech, and Moderna) have successfully initiated vaccination in children older than 12 years.
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