Friday, March 11, 2022
Victims vs. Vectors? The Ethics of Giving COVID-19 Vaccines to Children
Alma Golden
Fifty years ago, I began medical school. Through this half-century, I have provided, prescribed, promoted, and supported vaccine use. As a physician in retirement, I am fully vaccinated and boosted for COVID-19, as are my grown sons and three of my young adult grandchildren.
Vaccine development has a proud history that has prevented millions of children and adults from becoming the victims of infectious diseases. But are children’s COVID-19 vaccines now being used to prevent serious illness in children or as a vector control mechanism to protect adults?
I rejoiced as the Hemophilus influenza type b vaccine saved thousands of infants and children from death or serious disease caused by meningitis and sepsis. I followed the public health science that tracked data and research on the risks, costs, and benefits of vaccines to prevent chickenpox, rotavirus, and many other—now preventable—diseases.
The Hemophilus influenza type b, or Hib, vaccine was a classic study in recognizing and responding to a health threat in children. Data were collected on the frequency of hospitalizations, permanent disabilities, sepsis, meningitis, and death associated with Hib infection in infants and toddlers. Risk, benefit, and cost analyses were developed. Immunized children were monitored for efficacy and adverse effects, both short-term and long-term. The success of that vaccine is a win for nations as well as families.
The ethics of child vaccines should reflect the high standards like this, which have been used since the enactment of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986.
I know this well, as I practiced pediatrics through the turbulent era of rare but serious side effects associated with the pertussis vaccine, which a National Institutes of Health study concluded caused severe reactions in children such as seizures, hypotonic-hyporesponsive episodes, high fevers, and persistent crying.
This led to the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which helps promote development of safe vaccines, addressed compensation for injured vaccine recipients, and simultaneously mandated tracking of vaccine distribution and adverse effects, leading to better vaccine programs and fewer preventable infectious diseases.
Twenty-four months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has demonstrated that few healthy children infected with the virus become victims of severe illness and that those most likely to need intensive care already have previously diagnosed significant health conditions. Most children and youth experience a relatively short duration of illness with low rates of hospitalizations and few deaths. Children are a magnificently resilient group. They appear to develop robust natural immunity.
Although children can be asymptomatic spreaders, some studies indicate that transmission rates between children and within families are lower than between adults. School environments, with some precautions and good ventilation, are surprisingly safe places.
Based on how rapidly the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates, it may be difficult to develop effective vaccines to keep pace with new mutations, such as the omicron variant. It is possible that youth have been blessed with the capacity to respond successfully, and much more rapidly, to these variants than the scientists who are manufacturing the vaccines.
Considering the above, what is the ethical framework for promoting widespread or mandated pediatric COVID-19 vaccination?
Recognizing that children make up a minuscule percentage of severe COVID-19 cases, why are so many health, education, pharmaceutical, and political leaders vigorously promoting pediatric vaccination? Where are the data-based risk-cost-benefit analyses to support their recommendations?
Local and systemic vaccine reactions occur in 30% to 60% of children 5 to 11 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, is rare in that age group but increases in teen and early adult years, especially for males, as noted in multiple countries. Only short-term observations inform our understanding of the vaccine in children and youth. Long-term efficacy and side effects need to be monitored.
In the setting of a highly infectious, highly prevalent virus that appears to be approaching an endemic state, much like colds or the flu, are children to assume the ethical burden of vaccination to protect the larger society when the resulting benefit to them may be minimal and the potential long-term risks and benefits are not fully understood?
If we are concerned that children would serve as the distributors of disease, much as a mosquito is for malaria, does that reduce the obligation of researchers, clinicians, and public health experts to analyze—both medically and ethically—the full spectrum of risks, benefits, and potential impacts of this vaccine on children? Are we fulfilling the medical, regulatory, and ethical standards that have developed since the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Program?
Children with chronic or immunocompromised conditions and/or who are living with close family members with such conditions should be vaccinated, but one must ask whether the promotion of universal child vaccination for COVID-19 is driven by the evidence-based risk of severe disease, death, or disability in children, or by fear and expediency to benefit adults.
In another 50 years, I wonder if historians will observe that we treated children as disease vectors rather than potential victims of a viral illness.
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Even Mild Cases of COVID-19 Can Lead to Brain Changes
Mild COVID-19 cases were linked to changes in the brain, in a newly published study.
Approximately 785 people underwent a brain scan and about half later tested positive for COVID-19. All the participants got a second brain scan, including those who had survived the disease.
Researchers from the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford analyzed the scans and found the participants infected with COVID-19 had a reduction in the thickness of gray matter—which helps humans perform various functions such as making decisions—and other negative outcomes.
“Despite the infection being mild for 96% of our participants, we saw a greater loss of grey matter volume, and greater tissue damage in the infected participants, on average 4.5 months after infection,” professor Gwenaëlle Douaud, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.
“They also showed greater decline in their mental abilities to perform complex tasks, and this mental worsening was partly related to these brain abnormalities. All these negative effects were more marked at older ages.”
The paper was published in Nature following peer review.
The scans were taken from the UK Biobank, a large-scale medical database that contains information on approximately 500,000 UK residents.
Those whose scans were analyzed were aged 51 to 81. The reason the study did not include younger people is that all participants in the scanning were 40 or older, Douaud told The Epoch Times in an email.
The scans were taken on average 38 months apart.
Researchers said the two cohorts—people who ended up getting infected and people who did not—were similar in terms of age, sex, and many risk factors.
Participants also engaged in cognitive tests, and the infected group was more likely to experience cognitive decline by the time of the second test.
The brain changes ranged from 0.2 to 2 percent additional change in the infected group.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/even-mild-cases-of-covid-19-can-lead-to-brain-changes-study_4323882.html ?
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Researchers discover drug-resistant Covid in Australian patients
One of the main medicines used to combat severe cases of Covid-19 is causing the virus to mutate and there is a risk it could spread in the community.
If this happens, elderly and immunocompromised patients can’t be treated with the drug Sotrovimab.
Sydney University researcher Dr Rebecca Rockett studied 100 Covid patients in health care facilities in the Western Sydney Local Health District in New South Wales during the Delta outbreak between August and November 2021.
For four of the patients given the drug, the virus in their body mutated within six to 13 days and the treatment was no longer effective at containing the infection.
Samples of the mutated virus taken from these patients were able to be grown in a laboratory dish and this proved the new version of the virus was capable of spreading to others.
“The worrying thing is the fact that the virus was still viable and persisting in these patients after they develop the resistance,” Dr Rockett said.
“What we don’t want to see is that someone in the community develops resistance and they can pass that resistance to other people and that makes the drug ineffective, not just for that individual but for who they transmit the virus to,” she said.
Many of the patients in the study were severely immunocompromised and Dr Rockett said one theory about the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus was that they developed in such people.
“There are definitely cases in the literature where these patients with really immunocompromised conditions are given a lot of different therapies and could develop a number of mutations that can make the virus less more likely to evade current vaccines and treatment strategies,” she said.
This is a key reason this population of patients should be kept under surveillance, she said.
To keep control of the virus, doctors must undertake active surveillance of severely ill patients and identify treatment-resistant mutations earlier so they can be contained, she said.
The research team has not conducted experiments to determine whether current Covid-19 vaccines could combat the mutated virus that developed in these patients.
Sotrovimab is one of three key Covid-19 treatments called monoclonal antibodies that doctors were using to stop patients from becoming seriously ill.
These types of treatments are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight off viruses.
In January, the US FDA revealed that two of these treatments no longer worked against Omicron leaving Sotrovimab as the only weapon in the arsenal.
In another worrying development last month a Colombia University study that is yet to be peer reviewed found the cousin of Omicron – BA. 2 – had developed resistance to Sotrovimab.
This leaves recently approved treatments paxlovid, molnupiravir which are in short supply as the mainstay of treatment.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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