The U.S. government appears to be inching closer to green-lighting the first coronavirus vaccine for kids. According to The New York Times and other news organizations, the safe and effective two-shot vaccine from Pfizer could win FDA emergency-use authorization for children and teens aged 12 to 15 as soon as next week.
Opening up vaccinations to younger teens would add nearly 20 million people to the pool of Americans who are eligible for inoculation against the scourge that continues to ravage entire countries and has claimed well over half a million American lives. That, in turn, could juice the United States’ flagging vaccination campaign—and make the coming school year much safer for students, teachers, and school staff. But don’t count on those obvious benefits to convince potentially tens of millions of anti-vaxxer parents. In fact, experts say, resistance to America’s world-class vaccination campaign is stiffening among science-deniers and Fox News-bingeing right-wingers, and when kids are involved, it will get ugly.
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The American anti-vaxxer movement has plagued public-health campaigns for years. And far-right skeptics who falsely suggested coronavirus shots were part of a mind-control plot or a scheme to alter DNA—among other outlandish claims—have tainted this vaccine rollout since before it even began.
Epidemiologists expect even more ferocious pushback once America’s kids are up for jabs.
“This is going to be a social and political battle,” Irwin Redlener, the founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told The Daily Beast.
In early April, New York-based Pfizer submitted data to the FDA showing the company’s two-dose messenger-RNA vaccine is safe and effective for people aged 12 to 15. In contrast to the anxious situation of waiting for one’s age group to become eligible just weeks ago, there is now plenty of vaccine available for newcomers. Owing to a slow decline in the daily vaccination rate—from a peak of 3.3 million shots a day in mid-April to 2.3 million a day last week—U.S. states are sitting on nearly 70 million unused doses.
Not all of those doses are Pfizer, of course. But tens of millions are. Some experts hope that making younger people eligible for the vaccine could boost the daily vaccination rate, and pour gas on America’s race toward some kind of population-level “herd immunity.”
Around 148 million Americans have received at least one dose of vaccine, or about 45 percent of the population. But it’s not enough.
“We need 75 to 80 percent to interrupt transmission,” Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and virologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told The Daily Beast.
The problem, he noted, is that around 20 percent of Americans are under the age of 16.
Realistically, we can’t get to 80 percent vaccine coverage without vaccinating kids and teens. That’s because around a quarter of American adults—including up to half of Republicans—don’t intend to get vaccinated, according to recent polls.
Vaccinating kids and teens could somewhat make up for jab-resisting adults and nudge the country closer to population-level immunity. But millions of those kids and teens—the exact number is unclear—have anti-vaxxer parents.
Some hesitant parents mistakenly believe kids and teens can’t catch—or die from—COVID. In fact, they can. As more older Americans get vaccinated—and as new, more transmissible variants of the novel coronavirus evolve and spread—more younger people are getting sick. Children now account for around 20 percent of U.S. COVID cases, as NPR reported.
“All infections risk increasing variants, so controlling infection matters,” Jennifer Reich, a University of Colorado sociologist who studies immunization, told The Daily Beast. “Young people will also benefit from the vaccine directly. Although uncommon, COVID can cause a bad outcome in some young people. Although it is not yet well understood, there are reasons to believe that young people may face longer-term challenges following infection, including multisystem inflammatory syndrome. That is not inconsequential.”
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, is characterized by inflammation of organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes and intestines. The mysterious condition appears in some cases to coincide with COVID infection, and represented one of the earlier indicators that even the very young could be seriously impacted by the pandemic.
Of course, it won’t just be scientists cheering the vaccination of kids and teens. “Some teachers or unions are not likely going to return to work unless schoolchildren are vaccinated,” said Jeffrey Klausner, a clinical professor of preventive medicine at USC who previously worked at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Klausner said there’s no strong scientific justification for that stance. “If teachers are vaccinated, they are highly protected,” he explained. But in some communities, vaccination mandates will be insisted upon by educators and their advocates, he suggested.
“That’s the political reality,” Klausner said.
Mandates can, of course, provoke a backlash. The mere idea of a “vaccine passport”—a card proving someone has been inoculated—prompted lawmakers in Republican-controlled states including Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Utah to swiftly ban businesses from requiring a passport from customers.
Aimee Bernard, a University of Colorado immunologist, said she hopes reluctant parents can be persuaded, despite some of them engaging in concerted and extreme activism. “I would ask them if they have any specific concerns about the vaccine, and help to answer questions and clear up any confusion surrounding misinformation they may have read or heard about on social media,” she told The Daily Beast.
“I would also tell them that I trust the vaccines so much that I have been fully vaccinated, and so have my teenage children,” Bernard added. “We’re all doing well and feeling great. We all got vaccinated so that we could protect ourselves as well as the people in our community. We also got vaccinated so that we could do our part to help end the pandemic and stop transmission of the virus.”
But Hotez said one-on-one persuasion by doctors to patients “only gets you so far.” He cited Fox News’ escalating attacks on the vaccines and the growing popularity of online anti-vaxxer groups, which themselves benefit from Russian disinformation campaigns.
“At some point we’re going to have to do something about the 58 million followers on anti-vaccine sites,” Hotez said.
As long as millions of parents resist vaccination, millions of kids effectively will, too. Opening up vaccine eligibility is good for children and teens and good for the country. But the same anti-science attitude that has left yawning gaps between adult vaccination in some red and blue states also limits just how many people might take advantage of newfound eligibility and get their shot.
“That’s going to be a tough population to reach,” Hotez said.
