Should you get a Covid vaccine for your 5-11 year old?

Now that the Pfizer Covid vaccine is being made available for children age 5-11, some parents are asking, "Should I get my child vaccinated?" It's a very good question.

In general the risk of serious illness in healthy kids age 5-11 is very low. At my last check, there have been 146 children in this age group who have died of Covid in the U.S. since the pandemic began a year and a half ago. Any preventable death is a tragedy, but this compares to 35 - 199 annual deaths of children under 18 from influenza. To put things in perspective, prior to introducing the chicken pox vaccine for all children in the U.S., in all ages there were over 100 deaths/year from complications of chicken pox and about 10,000 hospitalizations/year. Since the universal vaccination of children for chicken pox, there are less than 20 deaths from chicken pox each year in the U.S. and less than 1700 hospitalizations per year.

The risk of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in people <21 years old who are infected with covid is estimated to be about 3/10,000 infections.

So this risk of the infection in this age group is not trivial, but it is on the order of a level of risk we as a society are generally willing to accept. What are the risks of the vaccine? Children age 5-11 seem to have a lower risk of common general side effects such as fevers, chills and aching from the 1/3 dose of the Pfizer vaccine compared to older children, but most parents are concerned about serious side effects.

In the study that was cited to recommend the vaccine for this age group, about 1500 children received the vaccine and there were no serious side effects. About 750 children received the placebo. Over a 3 month observation period, 3 children in the vaccine group developed symptomatic covid infection compared to 16 in the placebo group for a reported efficacy of 91%. There were no hospitalization in either group.

I think whether you vaccinate your 5 - 11 year old depends on whether you are a believer in the safety of vaccines. I believe in the general concept and safety of vaccines, and in adults and older children the data support the safety of the covid vaccines. There is little reason to believe that the safety profile wouldn't apply to younger children, but before the FDA gave emergency use authorization for the Pfizer Vaccine in adults, they gave the vaccine to 18,000 people 16 and over, over ten times the number of 5-11 year olds studied

So if your child has a medical problem such as moderate to severe asthma, obesity or diabetes I recommend the vaccine, but this is a unique situation in which we are asking healthy 5-11 year olds to take a vaccine perhaps more for the benefit of their parents and grandparents or their community than for themselves. If you choose to vaccinate your child, after your child receives their vaccine and you see them running around being a normal kid, there will be that sense of comfort that the vaccine has given your child a level of protection against this frightening illness and protection against the inconvenience of a covid diagnosis.

I can't help but wonder, though, if we aren't having to have emergency use authorization of the covid vaccine for 5-11 year olds, and maybe children under 5 by January, because not enough adults joined the fight and stepped up to take their vaccine. We are having to vaccinate our youngest children so sick adults don't overwhelm our hospitals and so we can live "normal" adult lives. If adults weren't dying in our hospitals, I think it would be at least another year before the vaccine would be approved for all elementary school aged kids.

If you are interested in getting the covid vaccine for your 5-11 year old, you can call the Wray Clinic at 970 332-4895 to get on a waiting list.