Vaccinating children makes no sense
Posted at 1.10pm UK time
The Telegraph reports that Boris Johnson will be forced to decide on whether to give vaccines to children. The answer is no. The data we have suggests that children are hardly touched by the virus at all. The vaccine does, however, have rare side effects and, in the case of children, it seems likely that these might be more commonplace than incidences of serious SARS-CoV-2 related illness.
However, let us imagine for a moment the government does not care about this. Let us also assume that it is not concerned about the effect forcing the vaccine on children might have on hitherto enthusiastic vaccine take-up. Let us finally imagine that we do not care about the moral aspects of giving British children finite vaccine resources for an illness that does not affect them, while people in the developing world die by their thousands. In other words, let us assume that the UK’s Covid-19 policy is to be made entirely for the biosecurity of the British baby-boomer generation.
Even in this case, children should not be given the vaccine. Almost all adults over 55 (the main at-risk group) have been vaccinated, and the main threat to them now is a variant that can escape such protection. Therefore, the vaccine doses for British children would be far more effectively directed to the COVAX programme and sent to nations with uncontrolled Covid outbreaks. Already, variants from South Africa, Brazil and India have shown significantly increased transmissibility.
For now, this does not matter to Britain, because initial data suggests the vaccine successfully prevents serious illness from them all. But how long can this hold? How long before one can also defeat the vaccine to some extent? Vaccinating countries that could be a source of such a vaccine-defeating variant is a far more useful way to use finite doses than giving them to British children – even if we take the risks to children and morality out of the argument.
