Approval of vaccines for children is crucial in Covid-19 fight: Doctor
Dr. Amesh Adalja, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Senior Scholar, talks about the importance of getting vaccines approved for children ahead of the new school year.
Video Transcript
ZACK GUZMAN: --and what that vaccination status might look like as we're learning more and more data about it, effective in kids below the age that it's already been approved for. And for more on that, let's bring on our next guest. Dr. Amesh Adalja Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Senior Scholar, joins us once again. Dr. Adalja, good to be chatting with you today.
It's such an important question right now about what to do in vaccinating kids, because as of right now, we've seen hospitalizations in the US top 100,000 for the first time since winter. A lot of concerns about this year's back-to-school season. So talk to me about what you heard from Dr. Fauci there, kind of laying the path out forward.
AMESH ADALJA: What we've heard is that it's going to be really important, if we want in-person schooling to continue unabated in the midst of this pandemic, to have as high a vaccination rate in a school as possible because that's what gives your school resiliency against the pandemic. We have this new tool, the vaccine. We didn't have that last school year.
And the more schools utilize the tool for their teachers, for their employees, and for their students, the safer schools are going to be, the more like normalcy we're going to see in schools. And I think that this is something that each school district should think about. Is this something they want to mandate for their students, just like they mandate many of the other vaccines? And I think there is an argument to be made that this is the way to move forward in this pandemic so we don't have the pandemic continue to impact learning.
ZACK GUZMAN: There are a lot of concerns, of course, about hospitalization of young kids as a result of COVID, which is something that, of course, we didn't see early on in the pandemic. Talk to me about what it is that you're seeing and hearing from hospitals and the conditions that kids are placed in once they are infected.
AMESH ADALJA: Well, we know that children have been spared from the severe consequences of disease, and that still remains true. However, we know that children are not vaccinated to the degree that adults are. If you're below the age of 12, you can't be vaccinated in the United States. And those children between the ages of 12 and 17, only about half of them are fully vaccinated. So that's something that the Delta variant is going to take advantage of. It's finding unvaccinated individuals wherever they are.
And the other issue is that children are mostly back to their activities. They're going to camp. They're going to school. They're going to sports. They're hanging out with their friends again, so they're getting infected. And that's going to inevitably translate into hospitalizations, which we didn't see in the past, because A, we didn't have this more contagious variant, B, most activities were not out there, and C, schools were closed, and children were kind of sheltered. Now we're going to start to see this.
But again, when you look at the hospitalization rate, especially for younger children, it's not higher than what you would think for influenza or RSV. So we've got to do some risk calibration as well. But the solution to this is to get vaccine into the arms of children above the age of 12. And the more we do that, the more children who are not eligible for vaccination will be protected.
ZACK GUZMAN: And lastly, when we talk about hospitalizations, to your point, we've always seen this-- cases spike first and then hospitalizations and death follow thereafter. And there are some hopes here that cases might be plateauing, at least this time around. But how important maybe does that mean that the next wave could or could not materialize, how much that hinges maybe on getting vaccines out there for kids and under the age that it's already been approved from now given everything you laid out there that's needed if we are to avoid another spike like we saw last winter?
AMESH ADALJA: The more population immunity we have, and whatever age group it is, that's going to dampen any further waves that we have. We're still going to see waves. We're going to see acceleration when it gets colder. That's just simply based on the biology and epidemiology of this virus. It's not going anywhere. But we can significantly lessen the impact and the disruption that these waves have by having more and more vaccines in people's arms, especially those at high risk for hospitalization.
That's going to be the key, is trying to tame this virus, remove its ability to put hospitals in crisis. And we've done that in many parts of the country, just not in the South particularly, where there's lots of high-risk individuals that are getting hospitalized. And children are kind of a byproduct of that. They're, like I said, spared from severe consequences of disease for the most part.
But the more population immunity we have, the less the virus is going to circulate, the less opportunity it has to infect children. And when the vaccine is approved for children above the age of five, that's going to help with our population immunity because those children are going to be-- it's going to be harder for the virus to infect them. And that's going to be important as we move the next transition phase of this pandemic.
ZACK GUZMAN: Dr. Asmeh Adalja, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Senior Scholar, appreciate you coming on here to chat with us. You've been helpful throughout the whole pandemic breaking all this down. Thanks again for the time.
