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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

13 times actually

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

I think this will be more relevant to vaccinating kids: If this result holds for kids as well, and considering that Covid is not dangerous for kids, maybe kids are better off getting covid

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I've seen this cited several times in this thread, but I've seen no one mention that (according their own FAQ):

> medRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is a free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

The context is important, even if it turns out to be true.

Indeed the final version has not been published yet, but there are no major reasons to doubt its validity. Here's an evaluation of the preprint from Johns Hopkins: https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/comparing-sars-cov-2-natural...

For teens, UK [edit:] Chief Medical Officer recommends but not mandates first dose, and does not recommend second dose at least until spring. The benefits are marginal.

2 ICU prevented admissions / million first doses

87 hospital prevented admissions / million first doses

0.16 ICU prevented admissions / million second doses

6 hospital prevented admissions / million second doses

> Having the vaccine is not compulsory.

> Prof Whitty said an "offer" of vaccination will be made to all children aged 12-15.

> But he said young people and their parents needed to be supported and there should be no stigma attached to their choice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57888429

On the other hand, the UK vaccination advisory board does not recommend vaccinating under-16s because they consider there to be inadequate evidence the risks outweigh the benefits. (Despite considerable and very public political pressure to come to a different conclusion, and if I remember correctly even some of the members who were most sceptical about it resigning and being replaced.)

Quoting from the recent BBC article: "The UK's chief medical officers recommended a single Pfizer dose for all children aged 12 to 15." Perhaps there is a difference of position between 'advisory board' and 'chief medical officer', I am not that familiar with the UK scene.

From the article: "They made their recommendation after the JCVI - the scientific body advising the government on vaccines - said it did not recommend vaccinating healthy children on health grounds alone." The JCVI are the body that normally makes these decisions and has for the pandemic so far, but they kept on repeatedly refusing to recommend vaccination for under-16s unless they had a pre-existing condition no matter how many times the government asked or how unsubtle their hints - so there was a kind of weird political fudge where the government found another body that'd approve of them, largely based on the potential to reduce disruption to kids' education. (However, that disruption was itself mostly a result of government policy decisions, and the main reason the UK actually seems to be vaccinating under-16s is because other countries have been doing it which makde it politically untenable not to do the same.)

Thanks for clarifying!

Absolutely not the case. Children should be vaccinated. The Israeli study was useful in establishing that infection results in immunity. That’s it. It does not establish that infection is lower risk than vaccination.

Children are at low risk from COVIS

Pushed reply too soon. Children are at low risk, but not no risk. To the extent that kids are running around with infections, they’re transmitting virus to others and providing a reservoir for mutation. That is not productive.

Let’s get the kids vaccinated. It’s the cheapest way out of this thing.

I don’t buy the “unvaccinated as a reservoir for mutation” line of thinking. For one, there are many, many countries with a low vaccination rate and it’s going to be like that for a long time.

Also, I haven’t see data on what the R0 is from vaccinated person to vaccinated person with Delta. If it’s above 1 then all we’re doing is creating immense selective pressure for vaccine escape.

The latter seems likely to me. I don’t understand how anyone thinks the blame for mutations lies solely or even mostly with the unvaccinated. Vaccines, distributed in a pandemic, are likely to cause immense selective pressure, and that is one of the reasons that the WHO originally planned on non-vaccine herd immunity when they wrote their respiratory pandemic game-plan prior to 2020.

I’m fully vaccinated, not anti-vax, and not an expert. This is just my understanding based on what I’ve read.

Has there ever been a vaccination program that was so successful, so fast, that we reached nearly 100% vaccination in less than what, a year or so? Why wouldn't every other virus simply mutate in these "reservoirs" and make vaccines a failed idea?

Not all viruses are created equal; some are much more prone to mutation than others. And indeed, vaccines for highly mutation-prone ones do "fail" in some sense -- that's why we need flu shots every year but one or two doses of the chickenpox vaccine are preventative for a lifetime: the flu is an RNA virus and also has a mechanism for swapping genes between different strains infecting an individual organism (including animals), so it changes a lot, and vaccines only last until the in-the-wild flu changes out from under them, whereas chickenpox/varicella is a DNA virus that's much more genetically stable.

> Not all viruses are created equal

Emphasis on created

* Flu, which has a particularly high mutation rate, does exactly that: in some years the flu vaccine is only 10% effective.

* Most viruses are less infectious than covid, especially delta covid.

* The covid vaccines are novel, targeting a specific protein. Natural immunity targets more than one protein, I've heard up to 28 in case of covid. This should make vaccine escape much harder, as it is significantly more difficult to mutate around 28 proteins at the same time. By 'natural immunity' I mean immunity gained by exposure to the natural pathogen, either through live infection or an inactivated pathogen vaccine.

> To the extent that kids are running around with infections, they’re transmitting virus to others and providing a reservoir for mutation

Can make the same argument for the vaccinated people. Vaccines don’t prevent infection, they reduce symptoms. So by same logic they run around with the infection spreading it to everyone.

Vaccines don't 100% prevent infections, but there's strong evidence that they both significantly reduce the rate at which people become infected and, should they become infected, the rate at which they can retransmit the virus to others, and we have no reason to believe they wouldn't do the same in children. It's not an all-or-nothing affair.

> It’s the cheapest way out of this thing.

I think we should be wary of those "easy way outs", because nothing seems to indicate that vaccines are a panacea. They are of course the best that us adults can do right now to protect ourselves, but if restrictions get too relaxed simultaneously, then we ve just created pressure on the virus to create a variant that will escape completely. This is a marathon and we are not yet done. a combination of vaccines with distancing will be required for a long time. Humans are adaptible, the earlier we start the better.

(Also, we shouldn't argue in absolutes, it s not going to fix anything)

Some children are at greater risk from the vaccine than covid so it seems reckless to just push vaccines. You will quite possibility kill more kids by pushing the vaccine on them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

I don't understand this whole push to vaccinate kids.

In the beginning all the panic was about the "most vulnerable" in the population, while the young ones apparently could deal with it fine enough.

A year and a half later and we are rushing to vaccinate the youngest ones, even tho it doesn't prevent them from spreading and they have great chances to get trough the disease without the vaccine already.

The ultimate goal here seems to be to just get everybody vaccinated, possibly even yearly.

In the beginning it was about the most vulnerable because those were the people dying and we didn't have enough vaccines.

Now we have enough for everyone and it turns out kids are spreading it to each other. It's true the vaccine doesn't totally stop someone from spreading the vaccine, but it does help.

Not dangerous for them except for all the ones who have died from it, you mean.

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