Ivan Hernandez, 13, will get help from his mom as Sequoia Hutton administers a dose of COVID-19 vaccine at Roosevelt Park in Los Angeles. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
From the earliest days of the pandemic, medical doctors and public well being officers have seen widespread vaccination as the simplest means to cease COVID-19 in its tracks. But a rising contingent of medical experts is now questioning whether or not that standard knowledge ought to apply to youngsters.
Their doubts are usually not borne of conspiracy beliefs, however couched within the rigorously calibrated language of danger and profit. And they’re anticipated to get a public airing subsequent week as advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ponder a spate of put up-vaccine coronary heart issues in adolescents and younger adults.
No one is arguing that COVID-19 immunizations for kids ought to cease altogether. Rather, a debate has erupted over the necessity to inoculate wholesome youngsters as quickly as attainable and in accordance to the 2-dose routine approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
The vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have been administered safely to hundreds of thousands of adults and been vetted in a number of thousand adolescents. But neither has been subjected to exhaustive testing in various pediatric populations, as is often required for a vaccine meant for common use in kids.
The FDA approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use in adolescents as younger as 12 on May 10. In the weeks which have adopted, the protection monitoring techniques managed by the FDA and CDC detected dozens of instances of a attainable facet impact in newly vaccinated teenagers: an irritation of the center muscle often called myocarditis.
The instances sometimes developed in older adolescents, most of them boys, three to 4 days after they acquired a second dose. Virtually all have been thought-about delicate, presenting as chest ache and tightness that resolved after remedy with over-the-counter drugs. None of the sufferers seem to have died or suffered severe cardiac malfunction, although it is too early to know whether or not they are going to undergo lengthy-time period results.
As of June 10, the federal government’s vaccine monitoring techniques detected 226 instances of myocarditis or a associated situation referred to as pericarditis after vaccination in individuals youthful than 30. Normally, fewer than 100 instances could be anticipated for this age group, stated Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office.
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More investigation is required to decide whether or not the vaccine precipitated these coronary heart issues or if the timing was merely a coincidence, he stated.
Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, stated the experiences will give the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices a chance to “give people a clinic on relative risk” — because it did after the COVID-19 vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson was linked to a rare blood-clotting disorder in youthful girls however nonetheless deemed safe for use.
Offit stated he doubts the myocarditis instances will upend the lengthy-standing certainty that kids ought to be vaccinated rapidly.
“I’d give it to my child in a second,” he said.
Others aren’t so sure. The possibility that children getting the vaccine — especially a second dose — could put their hearts at risk has amplified calls for more debate before parents, schools and others embrace the conviction that all healthy children need to get vaccinated.
Carla Mendez, 17, receives a COVID-19 shot at Esteban Torres High School in Los Angeles. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
It’s not just the prospect of a surprise side effect that has prompted the sudden surge in vaccine caution.
As the pandemic appears to be winding down across the United States and its limited toll on children has been tallied, it’s no longer clear that immunizing children will bring the outbreak to a faster close, said Dr. Martin Makary, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University.
Makary is urging his colleagues to “think twice” earlier than recommending common COVID-19 vaccination of wholesome kids. Given the information in hand, “there’s no compelling case for it right now,” he wrote this month in MedPage, a website widely read by physicians.
In an interview, Makary said his concerns might be allayed with a more thorough examination of the safety data.
“But no one is thinking like this,” he said. “We’ve converted now from being pro-vaccine to vaccine fanaticism.”
Given the general decline in new infections and hospitalizations, there’s time for a thorough FDA vetting of the vaccines for children and adolescents, Makary said. Even if it takes months, it could wind up protecting more children from harm.
The emerging debate threatens to divide a community that’s largely been united by the pandemic.
From the moment that the first COVID-19 vaccine started going into Americans’ arms, one certainty has seemed almost beyond questioning: As soon as enough doses were available, the nation’s children would roll up their sleeves.
There are strong arguments for that position too.
Although it’s clear COVID-19 has largely spared children from severe illness, the CDC says 456 American kids have died of the disease, though that is considered a conservative estimate.
At least 20,000 — and as many as 100,000 — kids have been hospitalized with COVID-19. Indeed, the CDC reports that even as adult hospitalizations declined in March and April, the rate at which adolescents were admitted ticked upward. Nearly one-third were treated in intensive care units, undercutting the argument that severe illness rarely happens in this age group.
COVID-19’s toll on some children also lingers well beyond a bout of infection. As of mid-May, at least 4,018 in the U.S. have developed a condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MISC, that frequently appears four to six weeks after a child has cleared his or her infection and typically requires hospitalization.
Myocarditis is common in these very sick children, and roughly 1% die.
If COVID-19 were a disease seen only in children, statistics such as these would galvanize medical professionals and public health officials to find a way to protect them, New York pediatrician Dr. Risa Hoshino wrote in a MedPage commentary sparked in part by Makary’s views.
By any definition, COVID-19 has been an emergency for the nation’s children and the FDA’s emergency use authorization is an “appropriate pathway” for getting vaccines to young Americans, she added.
At Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, pediatric cardiologist Dr. Jodie Votava-Smith has seen the wreckage of COVID-19 firsthand, and she has no doubts about the value of vaccinating kids.
In the last month, she has helped treat a patient who developed myocarditis after a dose of vaccine, she said. The child’s symptoms were mild and readily treated with ibuprofen.
Votava-Smith said her assessment of vaccines’ value has been more profoundly shaped by the dozens of children treated at CHLA for serious heart muscle inflammation as a result of having COVID-19. These children were severely ill and now face potentially enduring health effects. The disease was the cause of their misery, she said, not the vaccine.
The mother of two children who are 5 and 7, Votava-Smith said she “can’t wait” to get them vaccinated. “They know they’ll be getting their shot when it’s their turn,” she said.
Dr. H. Cody Meissner, a Tufts University pediatrician who advises the FDA on vaccines, said it’s a mistake to evaluate COVID-19 vaccines for children in the same way as it was cleared for emergency use in adults.
“The risk calculation for vaccinating an adult is pretty easy,” he said. When as many as 4,000 adults a day were dying of COVID-19, “even if there was a little risk of vaccine, most people would accept that.”
But for children, he said, “the calculus is a bit different.” Although they seem to contract the coronavirus pretty readily, they’re far less likely than adults to get sick or die. So even if instances of post-vaccination myocarditis are rare, they still change the risk-benefit analysis.
“The data are not sufficient to say that the benefit of these COVID-19 vaccines outweighs the risk in children and adolescents,” Meissner said. “We may get there. But we’re not there now.”
Times staff writer Sean Greene contributed to this report.
Updates:
8:08 AM, Jun. 18, 2021: This story originally said the CDC vaccine advisory committee would discuss COVID-19 vaccines for children at a meeting on Friday, June 18. That meeting has been postponed till subsequent week in observance of the brand new Juneteenth National Independence Day vacation.
This story initially appeared in Los Angeles Times.