Your article is great but you should really take into account the fact that that the vaccine isn't based on the spike of the variants currently circulating. It protects very well against severe disease - and likely will keep doing so - because there are many epitopes on the prefusion spike it produces + cellular immunity adapts itself; b…
Your article is great but you should really take into account the fact that that the vaccine isn't based on the spike of the variants currently circulating. It protects very well against severe disease - and likely will keep doing so - because there are many epitopes on the prefusion spike it produces + cellular immunity adapts itself; but for kids, the focus should probably be more on long covid and/or potential concentration of spike protein in some organs (which means potential long term side effects, from the vaccine as well as from the infection) than on severe disease.
If they get infected easily after the vaccine (and they likely will with Omnicron, as you mention) they might develop long covid, as well as other potential post-covid long term effects, vaccinated or not. The odds of getting long covid might be lower, we don't know yet, nor do we know how lower it's gonna be, but we know that immune escape variants will get more and more likely. And that vaccinated kids who never met the virus (and have no cross immunity with an hCoV) will get infected at some point in the future.
After vaccine + infection (or infection + vaccine, or even infection only probably) the situation is not the same as there is some local immunity in the upper respiratory track and immunity, not focusing only on S is wider; with the vaccine only the only thing that will happen is that kids might recover quicker, and that's not even sure for those who would have recovered quicker anyway. Of course, for those who would have needed to go to the ICU the vaccine would have been a game changer. But we don't vaccinate kids against the flu. For those who go to the ICU, the vaccine would have been nice there as well...
Of course, for kids at risk of severe disease the answer is easy: get the vaccine asap. For the healthy ones the vaccine is probably a good choice, but it might be not that useful if it only provides protection against severe disease. In my opinion the question remains open because the risk of severe disease is pretty low, and the vaccine doesn't necessarily protects against infection side effects from the current - and next - variants.
Your article is great but you should really take into account the fact that that the vaccine isn't based on the spike of the variants currently circulating. It protects very well against severe disease - and likely will keep doing so - because there are many epitopes on the prefusion spike it produces + cellular immunity adapts itself; but for kids, the focus should probably be more on long covid and/or potential concentration of spike protein in some organs (which means potential long term side effects, from the vaccine as well as from the infection) than on severe disease.
If they get infected easily after the vaccine (and they likely will with Omnicron, as you mention) they might develop long covid, as well as other potential post-covid long term effects, vaccinated or not. The odds of getting long covid might be lower, we don't know yet, nor do we know how lower it's gonna be, but we know that immune escape variants will get more and more likely. And that vaccinated kids who never met the virus (and have no cross immunity with an hCoV) will get infected at some point in the future.
After vaccine + infection (or infection + vaccine, or even infection only probably) the situation is not the same as there is some local immunity in the upper respiratory track and immunity, not focusing only on S is wider; with the vaccine only the only thing that will happen is that kids might recover quicker, and that's not even sure for those who would have recovered quicker anyway. Of course, for those who would have needed to go to the ICU the vaccine would have been a game changer. But we don't vaccinate kids against the flu. For those who go to the ICU, the vaccine would have been nice there as well...
Of course, for kids at risk of severe disease the answer is easy: get the vaccine asap. For the healthy ones the vaccine is probably a good choice, but it might be not that useful if it only provides protection against severe disease. In my opinion the question remains open because the risk of severe disease is pretty low, and the vaccine doesn't necessarily protects against infection side effects from the current - and next - variants.