{"id":95973,"date":"2022-06-20T17:05:31","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T15:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=95973"},"modified":"2022-06-11T16:33:50","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T14:33:50","slug":"20-05-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=95973","title":{"rendered":"The Insanity of Mandating Camp Boosters for Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Insanity of Mandating Camp Boosters for Kids<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nALAN SALZBERG & ABRAHAM WYNER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Evidence of increased risk with no gain in protection isn\u2019t stopping camps, schools, or the CDC from pushing third shots for children and teens<\/strong><\/span>.<\/h4>\n

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A2LE\/ALAMY<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Camps, schools, and synagogues across the United States are requiring not just the standard two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine but also a booster shot for everyone age 5 and over. Camps such as Ramah In the Poconos<\/a>\u00a0say that \u201cthe COVID vaccine and boosters are an essential public health component for our communities.\u201d Thus the policy: No third shot, no camp.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Several institutional COVID-19 committees are equating the benefits of boosters with those of the vaccines themselves, but when it comes to boosters for kids in the age of Omicron, this claim of equivalence is weak at best\u2014and outright false at worst. Do claims regarding the ability of vaccination to lower infection also apply to boosting the vaccinated? They don\u2019t. Do claims regarding the effect of vaccination on risk of serious illness apply to boosting vaccinated kids? There is no evidence for that. Finally, are heart problems associated with boosting such a small risk that they are outweighed by the risk of hospitalization for COVID-19? Not at all:\u00a0Recent data<\/a>\u00a0from Israel show that a small number of kids and young adults, especially young males, are more likely to suffer serious and potentially life-altering consequences to their heart from the booster than to be hospitalized with COVID-19. If we were parents of a\u00a0Ramah-age young adult male, we would raise bloody hell.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s consider each claim in detail, beginning with the first about infection. The available data regarding Omicron indicates there is a benefit to booster shots\u00a0for adults<\/em>. For kids, the benefit drops to nearly zero.\u00a0Israeli data<\/a>\u00a0from near the peak of the Omicron outbreak (January 28, 2022), when there were nearly half a million active infections across all age groups, show that the infection rate among 12- to 19-year-olds who were boosted was 5.6%, versus 6.1% for those vaccinated but not boosted. (Infection rates were slightly higher when boosted versus merely vaccinated for 12- to 15-year-olds, and slightly lower when boosted versus merely vaccinated for 16- to 19-year-olds.) Even this small overall effect may be too high, because this dataset, like all studies of booster effectiveness in children, is not collected in the context of a randomized controlled trial. As a result, small differences in infection rates can easily be the result of confounding factors. For example, boosted children may be more inherently cautious or test less frequently than those who are not, and thus might be slightly less likely to be recorded as infected. (We rely on Israeli data because Israel\u2019s national health system allows for more complete and far more reliable reporting than that of the United States.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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But how about serious infection in camp-age kids? Here, the answer is unclear\u2014not because there isn\u2019t good data, but because there are almost no serious infections among a comparison pool of vaccinated-but-unboosted young people. In Israel, at the peak of the Omicron outbreak, there were two serious cases among more than 40,000 infections in those aged 12 to 19 (one unvaccinated, the other vaccinated and boosted); among the 4,400 infections in those vaccinated-but-unboosted, not a single case was serious. On the face of it, at least, it seems that young people who are boosted have a\u00a0higher<\/em>\u00a0rate of serious infection\u2014but the sparsity of data means that we cannot know whether this is simply due to chance. What the data does show is that\u00a0if<\/em>\u00a0there is a benefit to boosting an already vaccinated child, that benefit is tiny.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since boosting kids has almost no substantive protective value, it\u2019s appropriate to ask, Does boosting kids cause any harm? For vaccinated teenage boys, a group for whom the risk of serious COVID-19 is incredibly small, any serious side effect of a booster shot can easily outweigh the increased risk of a COVID-19 infection. For this reason, the December 2021 Food and Drug Administration\u00a0panel review<\/a>\u00a0of Pfizer\u2019s application for booster shots for 16- to 17-year-olds considered the increased odds of myocarditis, a potentially dangerous inflammation of the heart muscle. In its review, the FDA noted an elevated risk of myocarditis (and related pericarditis) in about 1 in 5,000 in vaccinated males aged 12 to 19. Despite the evidence, however, the FDA recommended approval, citing it as a \u201ckey benefit\u201d \u201cto prevent breakthrough COVID-19 cases.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In plain language, the FDA told parents that it\u2019s worth taking the small risk of serious side effects by boosting children in order to avoid the even smaller risk of serious infection. To reach this conclusion, the FDA analysis relied on the Delta-wave assumption that vaccinated-but-unboosted people are twice as likely to be infected as the boosted. But we are now in the Omicron wave, in which the vaccines continue to be effective, but boosters provide no measurable increased protection from infection or from serious illness in children. Has the FDA revisited and revised its policy? It has not. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control just expanded its booster recommendation to include children ages 5 to 12.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The FDA panel also estimated that hospitalizations caused by the booster (from myocarditis) would be more or less balanced by hospitalizations prevented by the booster. As previously noted, the evidence shows the FDA was wrong regarding the prevention of infections and serious illness. But regarding hospitalization from myocarditis, real-world data indicates that hospitalizations from boosters are on the high side of the FDA\u2019s estimated 23 to 69 per million. What\u2019s more, a March 2022\u00a0review of Israeli data<\/a>\u00a0found 11 hospitalizations for myocarditis within a week of the\u00a0second<\/em>\u00a0dose among 160,000 males aged 12 to 15. This corresponds to a hospitalization rate of about 70 per million. Furthermore, a recent\u00a0Nordic study<\/a>\u00a0confirmed that rates of myocarditis are much higher among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated. The FDA glossed over the little data on 16- to 17-year-olds it reviewed. That data, on a mere 78 boys, contained one hospitalization from myocarditis. Conventional statistical analysis from this data would have put the hospitalization rate at least at 1 in 1,500 or more with 95% confidence, indicating that the FDA\u2019s assumptions of a rate of 1 in 5,000 might have been too low.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A very\u00a0recent study<\/a>\u00a0published in\u00a0Scientific Reports<\/em>\u00a0also indicates a much higher rate of cardiac events in young people associated with vaccination than previously thought. The researchers tracked calls to Israeli emergency medical services (IEMS) for cardiac arrest (CA) and acute coronary syndrome (ACS) among people aged 16 to 39. They were able to show that in 2020, CA and ACS calls to IEMS significantly increased compared with rates in 2019, but in time periods\u00a0not correlated<\/em>\u00a0with increased infection. In 2021, the rates of calls to IEMS for CA and ACS again jumped considerably (relative to the already heightened 2020 rates)\u2014this time, the calls were significantly correlated with time periods of vaccinations for young people. As always, these studies are correlational, not causal. But combined with the other data described above, they should raise alarms about the possibilities of cardiac problems with each additional shot.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Myocarditis, while it is often resolved, is nevertheless\u00a0thought<\/a>\u00a0to be \u201ca major cause of sudden, unexpected deaths in adults less than 40 years of age,\u201d according to the April 2022 study in\u00a0Scientific Reports<\/em>. Such a serious potential side effect should be enough to turn the decision to boost into a personal matter best decided by children\u2019s parents in consultation with their doctors, who can better consider prior infection and individual variations in health. In an\u00a0editorial<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New England Journal of Medicine<\/em>, our colleague, Dr. Paul Offit, a leading academic virologist, has acknowledged these issues with myocarditis and raised the possibility that\u00a0too many COVID-19 shots<\/em>\u00a0can have unintended long-term consequences on the vaccine\u2019s ability to protect against new strains. He advised his own young adult son not to be boosted.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Camps, synagogues, and other institutions may think their decision to enforce booster shots for vaccinated kids is a cautious approach, but it\u2019s actually reckless. Boosted kids gain little or nothing in terms of reduced risk of serious COVID-19 infection but gain all the additional risk of serious side effects and hospitalization caused by the booster.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Alan Salzberg<\/strong> is the Principal of Salt Hill Statistical Consulting and an instructor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the\u00a0Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Abraham Wyner<\/strong> is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Insanity of Mandating Camp Boosters for Kids ALAN SALZBERG & ABRAHAM WYNER Evidence of increased risk with no gain in protection isn\u2019t stopping camps, schools, or the CDC from pushing third shots for children and teens. . A2LE\/ALAMY Camps, schools, and synagogues across the United States are requiring not just the standard two shots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95973"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95993,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95973\/revisions\/95993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}