Member-only story
Kids Spread Covid More Than We Thought — Making Their Vaccination Even More Important
If school is a potential source of Covid transmission, vaccinating young children is even more important to protect the adults they love.
With children’s Covid-19 vaccines on the verge of being available, the question now is how many parents will choose to vaccinate those aged 5–11 years old. While more than one in four parents (27%) are anxious to vaccinate their younger kids, the most recent numbers from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggest it may be an uphill battle to persuade larger numbers of parents to vaccinate their children. About a third want to wait and see how it goes, and a little less than a third have no plans to vaccinate their younger kids.
A recent study, however, provides one more reason to seriously consider the importance of vaccinating children, on top of preventing their own illness: they likely play a bigger role in transmitting the virus to others than we previously thought. The research, published in JAMA Network Open a few weeks ago, involved prospectively collecting data from September 21 through December 2020 at an elementary school in Liège, Belgium. There are two important things to note about that data collection: First, it was before the Delta variant…
