Vaccinating Your Kids: When Should You Do It?
There’s good evidence from the U.K. that delaying the 2nd dose of vaccine boosts people’s immune responses. Should parents take that into account when vaccinating their kids?
Kids aged 5 to 11 could be getting vaccinated against Covid as early as Friday. The CDC’s advisory panel meets on Tuesday to decide who should get Pfizer’s new, lower-dose vaccine for kids, which the FDA authorized last week. The assumption is that the panel will make the vaccine available to all 5-to-11-year-olds, after which CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will officially approve the recommendation, and within a few days shots should be available for kids, since they’ve already been distributed to the states.
The fact that kids can get a Covid vaccine doesn’t, of course, mean they will get it. Plenty of parents are leery of vaccinating their kids against a disease that’s relatively low-risk for them, even though the vaccines are safe and the risk of harm from Covid, low as it is, is much greater for kids than any risk of harm from the vaccines, and even though being vaccinated against Covid will sharply reduce the risk of kids getting infected and transmitting the virus to others. But while the question “Should parents get their kids vaccinated?” (to which the answer is, “Yes”) has been the focus of a lot of attention, a different, but also important, question, has…
