Pfizer has joined Moderna in asking the FDA to approve its vaccine for young kids just as the requirement for California students to get vaccinated was put on hold.
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There were likely many factors that contributed to the state law being postponed, one being that it’s still too early to tell whether or not children are going to need continuing COVID-19 vaccinations for children.
"My own sense is that we are going to continue to need COVID-19 vaccines," said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of infectious diseases, pediatrics, epidemiology and population health at Stanford University on KCBS Radio’s Ask an Expert with Holly Quan and Matt Bigler on Friday. "But I think from a legislative standpoint, politicians want to see what happens."
Lawmakers are likely looking to see how the rollout of the vaccine for children under the age of five goes, and how that will affect schools.
It's also still uncertain how the post-omicron variants will behave, and what new surges may arise.
"But it's going to have to come up again for sure," she said, probably in the next year or so.
While lawmakers may be hesitant to require the vaccines for children, infectious disease experts and pediatricians see the need for continuous vaccination for kids.
"I think right now it may be a political hot button issue they're not ready to take on," said Maldonado.
And the hesitancy stems from the fear that the vaccine might have adverse effects on young kids, so much so that people are more worried about what the vaccine will do than what the virus will do.
The misinformation about the vaccine is perhaps one of the saddest setbacks that has come out of the pandemic, said Maldonado.
"This is about risk perception and for people to feel the vaccine is not safe and that COVID-19 is better for their kids than the vaccine is very sad," she said. "It's absolutely not true."
While at this point those that get the virus are unlikely to suffer serious illness, that presents a new issue.
"We don’t know who is going to be that one person out of one hundred, or one thousand, that’s going to wind up in the hospital on a ventilator or who will die," she said.
The risk is much higher in older people, and lower in younger people, but that doesn’t mean the risk isn’t there at all.
"All of us who are pediatric and infectious disease doctors have cared for children who have been in the hospital with serious disease, who are young, obviously, and no underlying conditions," said Maldonado.
COVID-19 causes more hospitalizations and deaths in children than any other infectious disease for which there is a vaccine, she said. Nearly one thousand children have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic started, and over 40,000 have wound up in the hospital.
"It's a bit like Russian roulette, you don’t know that your child isn’t going to be the one to wind up in the hospital," she said.
And children are not immune to symptoms of long COVID-19 either, said Maldonado, anywhere from 10 to 30% have experienced long COVID-19, which is still difficult to treat.
"We don’t know if it's going to have lifelong consequences," she said.
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