Ocwieja knows that her excitement puts her in a minority. An April poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that less than a fifth of parents of kids under 5 are eager to vaccinate them right away; of the rest, about half say they definitely won’t sign their children up for shots, or will do so only if required. Plenty of parents still harbor worries over the shots’ safety, fretting that the injections might be more dangerous than the disease. And many who watched their kids contract the coronavirus, sometimes repeatedly, no longer feel much urgency about tacking on immunization—especially now that American society has opened back up, and nearly all mitigation measures have been dropped, signaling that the crisis has passed.
But the case for kids getting their shots as soon as possible is still strong, even two and a half years and billions of infections into SARS-CoV-2’s global sweep. Vaccination will not just protect children during the current surge but also prep them for the fall and winter, when schools resume session and another wave of cases is expected to rise. Since the pandemic began, at least 13 million American children have caught the coronavirus—a definite undercount, given the catastrophic state of testing in the United States. Of them, more than 120,000 have been hospitalized, more than 8,000 have developed a poorly understood inflammatory condition known as MIS-C, and more than 1,500 have died, nearly a third of them younger than 5. And an untold number have developed the debilitating, chronic symptoms of long COVID. “We can’t always pick out the child” who goes on to get the sickest, says Dawn Sokol, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Ochsner Health, in New Orleans. Many of the kids who ultimately fall ill are “running around, happy-go-lucky, no risk factors at all.” Vaccination, perhaps especially for the youngest among us, is an investment in the future.
It’s true that SARS-CoV-2 hospitalizes and kills a smaller percentage of kids than adults. But that small percentage has ballooned into catastrophically large absolute numbers. Experts have also dismissed the notion of stacking childrens’ stats against adults’. The more apt comparison, rather, weighs the life unimmunized kids could be leading if they were vaccinated. The availability of immunizations has turned COVID-19, especially in its severest forms, into a vaccine-preventable disease; that alone, experts told me, makes the shots worth taking.
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