Reply to Are kids under 5 ever getting vaccinated?

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Reply to "Are kids under 5 ever getting vaccinated?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I just want to gently point out that all kids under 5 will of course become eligible to be vaccinated when they turn 5.

One reason I have never stressed that much about this vaccine is because all kids wait for vaccines. That's why there's a vaccine schedule. There's a reason we don't give newborns a flu shot. And even the rules around flu shots for young kids are relatively recent -- they only started recommending flu shots for kids 6-23 months old in 2004ish. And this is always true for new vaccines. There's a reason we wait to vaccinate for HPV until a child is 11 or 12. There are very few examples I can think of where a vaccine was developed and then almost immediately available for little kids. It's always a process.

Covid vaccines are new and it will take a while to refine them for different age groups and also to adapt them to a virus that mutates fairly quickly. I don't quite get why people are freaking out about this, particularly when kids under 5 appear to be at higher risk from RSV and flu than from Covid.

If the issue is that people want their kids to be able to unmask and stop quarantining, I think we need to advocate for changes to those rules independent of vaccine access for this group. There is no real evidence that masking is useful for kids under 5 anyway, and our testing tools are good enough at this point to eliminate these draconian quarantines for little ones.

[b]Running around lamenting that this brand new vaccine for this brand new virus is not yet approved and available for toddler is weird to me because what on earth would make you think that's a reasonable expectation? That's not how it has ever worked[/b].[/quote]

I think the media and some public health experts are to blame for this- can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard under 5s referred to as vulnerable because they aren’t eligible for the vaccine.  I’m definitely of the view that if it doesn’t make sense to vaccinate kids until they’re 5, fine, but stop tying quarantine and masking to vaccination status.[/quote]

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