NASHVILLE, TN – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has approved the Pfizer COVID vaccine for teenagers. Any day now, it is expected to approve Moderna’s vaccine for children ages 12-17. In recently completed clinical trials by the vaccine-makers, the Pfizer shots were 100% effective; the Moderna vaccine was 96% effective. The dosage for teens is the same as for adults.
Moderna has trials underway for kids under 12, including babies who are 6 months old. In those trials, the dosage is scaled so researchers can find out how much vaccine will safely produce the same immune response in young children as it does in adults.
“We haven’t generally paid close attention to what is going on with our children,” said Dr. Grace Lee, a pediatrics professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is a member of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which has met weekly since December.
Lee said that at least 4 million children have tested positive for the coronavirus in the U.S. but noted as many as 22 million kids may have been infected. The CDC thinks the undercount is due to underreporting and the large number of young people who haven’t been tested.
“Children are now responsible for nearly one quarter of newly reported COVID-19 cases in more recent weeks,” Lee said. One reason is because the country is reopening and kids have gone back to school.
“The overall the proportion of hospitalizations reported seems to be increasing in children but that’s primarily due to the protection that we’re seeing amongst adults with vaccinations,” she said. As of last week, 160 million people have had one dose and 127 million people are fully vaccinated.
“What were seeing right now as a society is that the U.S. is beginning to be able to reopen because our infection rates are coming down. The vaccines have been incredibly effective. In the past week over one million teens have received at least one dose of vaccine as well,” Lee said.
A researcher at Northeastern University in Boston says some people haven’t gotten a vaccine because the official story seems to be changing all the time.
“We are right now on the front lines of science; we are seeing it evolve. We’re not used to seeing the answer, the ground truth, changing before our very eyes but that’s truly how it is” said Mathew Simonson. He is lead author of a May report, “Vaccinating America’s Youth”.
“The government truly did have genuine concerns about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. They reversed course, paused, and then they got more information and updated, and declared it totally fine and safe,” he said.
Simonson said part of the reason we see vaccine hesitancy is because people aren’t used to the experts being uncertain. “We’re like a bunch of children looking to our parents for answers and our parents are struggling to figure the answers out,” he said.
Simonson is part of the Covid States Project, joint research by a consortium including Northwestern, Harvard, and Rutgers Universities. Since the beginning of the pandemic researchers have been surveying about 25,000 people once a month.
They track peoples’ attitudes toward vaccines and other public health behaviors– whether they are wearing masks, whether they believe coronavirus is manmade, and other other related topics.
In February they asked parents how they felt about vaccinating their kids.
Parents are more likely to resist the vaccine versus other adults across all racial groups. The survey found Black Americans remain the most hesitant racial group, with nearly three-quarters of Black parents (73%) being vaccine hesitant or resistant compared to 57% of Black adults without children.
In a previous report, researchers found parents with less education and lower incomes are more vaccine hesitant than other adults. Higher earning parents showed no significant difference in vaccine hesitancy versus adults without children. The most recent study found young mothers are the most vaccine resistant among all groups.
Key findings:
- Younger mothers aged 18–35 (32%) are significantly less willing to vaccinate their children than older mothers (23%).
- Parents of kids under 12 years old and older children (13–17 years old) show about the same level of resistance (20%) when it comes to vaccinating their children.
- While vaccine acceptance varies by political affiliation the difference between parents and those without kids are roughly the same (between 11-13% are hesitant).
- Gaps between parents and childless adults are similar across regions of the U.S. In New England 39% of parents are hesitant versus 27% for non-parents; in the Midwest (37% vs. 28%), and the West Coast (39% vs. 30%).
Simonson thinks more young moms aren’t getting vaccinated and aren’t planning to vaccinate their kids because of misinformation spread through social media and also because their lives are relatively isolated compared to other adults.
“We’re seeing about a third of mothers saying ‘no way my child will be getting one’,” he said.
Fathers of all ages are between 10-15 % resistant and fathers’ resistance has gone down from 14% to 11% in the most recent study.
“We don’t see LatinX and African American families lagging behind White families ….Asian American parents are less resistant while LatinX, African American, and White families are statistically all in the same place,” Simonson said.
Parents are less likely to think vaccines are safe and reliable; they are less likely to say that benefits out way the side effects; the biggest gap is about the infertility myth. Sixteen percent of parents are concerned about vaccines causing infertility while just 7% of nonparents think it causes infertility. Groups like QAnon and others, who say Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump, are spreading that misinformation.
“I really think that a big part of what is going on here is our social networks. Young mothers are much more likely to be interacting with other parents. Their whole world is other moms,” Simonson said.
He said misinformation bounces around a tight circle of mothers, parent associations, or mothers in play groups. He said that fathers are probably less involved in parenting and more likely to have work friends or others who aren’t parents.
“It may originally come from social media. It’s hearing your friend repeat it that reinforces it and makes you believe it,” he said.
References to the Tuskegee experiments and government sterilization programs amplify the effects of misinformation because they scare people.
Those fears are not groundless. The legal sterilization of poor women began in the early 1900s and continued as late as 1970 during the Nixon administration. He dramatically increased Medicaid-funded sterilization of low-income Americans, primarily women of color. Supposedly, tubal ligation or hysterectomy was voluntary, but in practice, women were either misinformed or at least uninformed about what procedures they had agreed to.
So doctors are faced with correcting perceptions about the COVID vaccines that come from a history of eugenic policies that bear no connection to what we face today with COVID-19.
Dr. Jose Perez is chief medical officer at the South Central Family Health Center in Los Angeles. Last week, a young mother, one of the clinic’s 27,000 patients, asked him if she should vaccinate her child. Perez let her know that there is no link between the use of the vaccine in adults and in children that points to infertility.
“So the role of professionals of color like me becomes very important. I think our patients trust their providers, trust people who look like them…..I know that the more we reach these folks that look like me encouraging our patient to get vaccinated the more likely they are to listen to our voices and not to those crazy voices out there in the Internet world,” Perez said.
Most of his patients work in low-income jobs like restaurants and day labor. Los Angeles has set up huge vaccine centers, very accessible by car, but most of Perez’s patients take the bus.
Perez said his patients are being asked to choose between earning a living for the day or vaccinating their children. “That is by far one of the biggest barrier we have identified in South Central,” Perez said.
Immigration status is another reason people aren’t getting the shot. Perez said his undocumented patients are scared of the government.
“They don’t want to come to clinics, don’t want to go to county facilities in fear that a utilization of a particular service will put in jeopardy any kind of legal immigration status they are waiting to conclude,” he said.
Although many of his patients have health insurance, many do not. Perez said that many of his uninsured patients think they need to pay to be vaccinated even though vaccines are free to everyone.