I’ll add some sentences on vaccinating children in the age group 5-11.
The US CDC recommends doing so. I’ll first consider the COVID-19 risks and then hope to find more on the risks of vaccination. The CDC website recommending the vaccination this says:
“There are approximately 28 million children between the ages of 5 and 11 years old in the United States, and there have been nearly 2 million cases of COVID-19 within this age group during the pandemic. COVID-19 can make children very sick and cause children to be hospitalized. In some situations, the complications from infection can lead to death.”
Here and in the rest of the cited website section, you will see words like “can” and “some situations”, whereas in the section on vaccine safety, the words are “very rare”. Nonetheless, at least some numbers are there:
“As of mid-October 2021, children ages 5 through 11 years have experienced more than8,300 COVID-19 related hospitalizations and nearly 100 deaths from COVID-19. …
Children who get infected with COVID-19 can also develop serious complications like multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C)— … Since the pandemic began, more than 2,300 cases of MIS-C have been reported in children ages 5 through 11 years. Children with underlying medical conditions are more at risk for severe illness from COVID-19 compared with children without underlying medical conditions.”
Based on this data, the risks can be calculated relative to cases; the resulting risk numbers constitute an upper bound for the risks (based on the data in the text). We cannot use this to calculate the risk relative to infections, because we don’t know how many infections there have been; the upper bound is 28,000,000. We can thus calculate risks relative to a “population” of 2,000,000 as an upper bound or relative to a population of 28,000,000 as a lower bound, but note the words “more than” and “nearly” above. (In all of this I have to assume that the children were unvaccinated.) That said, the risks are:
becoming a “case” given infection: At least 7.143%
hospitalization: 0.03% − 0.415% (at least),
MIS-C: 0.008%-0.115% (at least),
death: 0-0.005% (at most)
(That said, the sentence “Children with underlying medical conditions are more at risk for severe illness from COVID-19 compared with children without underlying medical conditions.” may motivate parents of children with underlying medical conditions, but also demotivate parents of children without such conditions.)
1)
I’ll add some sentences on vaccinating children in the age group 5-11.
The US CDC recommends doing so. I’ll first consider the COVID-19 risks and then hope to find more on the risks of vaccination. The CDC website recommending the vaccination this says:
Here and in the rest of the cited website section, you will see words like “can” and “some situations”, whereas in the section on vaccine safety, the words are “very rare”. Nonetheless, at least some numbers are there:
Based on this data, the risks can be calculated relative to cases; the resulting risk numbers constitute an upper bound for the risks (based on the data in the text). We cannot use this to calculate the risk relative to infections, because we don’t know how many infections there have been; the upper bound is 28,000,000. We can thus calculate risks relative to a “population” of 2,000,000 as an upper bound or relative to a population of 28,000,000 as a lower bound, but note the words “more than” and “nearly” above. (In all of this I have to assume that the children were unvaccinated.) That said, the risks are:
becoming a “case” given infection: At least 7.143%
hospitalization: 0.03% − 0.415% (at least),
MIS-C: 0.008%-0.115% (at least),
death: 0-0.005% (at most)
(That said, the sentence “Children with underlying medical conditions are more at risk for severe illness from COVID-19 compared with children without underlying medical conditions.” may motivate parents of children with underlying medical conditions, but also demotivate parents of children without such conditions.)
The Comirnaty study estimates efficacy to be 90.7% (95% CI: 67.7 to 98.3).
Now to determine the sensibility of a vaccine, I assume that these risks of Covid-19 should be compared to background risk?