I did a little googling of some vaccine trials and I wonder if vaccine trials might be slightly different with different guidelines than those from drug trials. I’ve seen several that enroll, give the doses at the beginning, and then watch everyone for a couple of years. Looking through clinicaltrials.gov just a little, and see the same. Now some of that would be to make sure enough people get the target disease to show a benefit, but they also have stated safety endpoints. There is also usually a much longer delay between submission of data and actual approval, too. These vaccines are also novel with almost no safety data in humans prior to their development, so common sense says that should make a difference in how something is evaluated. LOL, and I think it’s “only” half that or maybe 1/3 when all is said and done, especially if you exclude first wave which was higher and only look at the current picture, and considering that children were often overlooked and that some percentage get the virus but don’t have measurable antibodies and so aren’t showing up in serology studies. Yet as someone who is not old enough to have gotten smallpox vaccine and has no risk factors so extremely unlikely to die of Covid, I’m still not excited about the risk of hospitalization and needing oxygen, the risk of clots or other bad things even after mild-moderate disease. And that’s not even addressing long COVID. I would not get a new vaccine if it were only about long Covid, based on what I know of it, but there are plenty of other not-death outcomes that are not so nice.

Some of us live in places where some of those things are still being done. Definitely doctors office, temp checks. Can get hair cut unlike a year ago, but wait outside for your turn, waiting room chairs removed most everywhere. And some places even have outdoor mask mandates, though that is loosening up most everywhere I think.

According to this case definition from the CDC, Covid exposure “counts”, so not having a positive test or antibodies wouldn’t exclude the diagnosis for your nephew. https://www.cdc.gov/mis-c/cases/index.html Thanks for sharing his story. I haven’t read or heard very much about MIS-C. I hope he is fully recovered very soon. For the numbers of MIS-C to be suppressed from Covid denial, there would have to be Covid denial among pediatricians. I’m sure there is some, but I’m not really seeing that it is widespread. 🤔

That’s interesting. I have a little more faith in the small hospitals than that. I also understand that MIS-C patients are usually pretty sick and are monitored in the pediatric ICU. I think if a child shows up with something strange and evidence of organ damage as with MIS-C, they will end up in a larger center where there are pediatric specialists. I didn’t think it’s is the kind of thing where they have a fever for two days and go home; they need more careful monitoring and treatment. Don’t they receive immune globulins?

I see. Yes, I’m in favor of local governments having some leeway, so that does seem like overreach. I can also see the other side of this, where there should be some kind of limits on what a local or mayor or city council can do. I mean, I wouldn’t want to live in a town where a mayor decides that even one case of Covid is too much and we all have to wear masks until he says we can stop some time in 2022 even with no one in the hospital. That’s a little bit hyperbolic but serves my point. I also think that as disease burden in the form of hospitalizations fall, there is a much, much higher burden to show that mask mandates, closures, curfews, or anything else that has been done in the name of public health had an effect, and to do a better job at quantifying that effect before deciding to put those things into place again. Restriction of large indoor gatherings seems like it would be the measure with the most evidence and common sense behind it, but some of the others, maybe not so much. I do not think we are in a place anymore where we can justify any restriction just because someone thinks it does something or wants to seem like they are doing something politically. We need much more transparency with regard to what made a difference and what didn’t.

My state has a vaccine registry and there is incorrect information re: one vaccine for one of my children. The pediatrician’s office said there is nothing they can do even though it does conflict with other printed records they have, because it is very difficult to correct something in that system and they were not the ones that made the mistake. I do not know how common this is but know one person with a similar issue. So while I see the problems with a paper system, I also see that there can be problems with an electronic system. Since it isn’t likely there would be a federal vaccine database, it will depend on the state, and states will have various degrees of competency when it comes to these things. With mass vaccination among thousands of different providers, some number of mistakes would be made in entering the information. So in this situation, I am still happy to have a card, even if it were just a backup to an electronic database. And I don’t think we would want a federal database. Can you imagine trying to get anything corrected there? It would be, call this number, wait on hold forever, and end up frustrated.

In this case it’s a law, though, right? So there are many people to hold accountable if you don’t like the law. I don’t have an opinion on this law, but I do know there are a lot of people in other states who think that at 14 months in, taking power for making ALL the rules away from one or two people in the executive branch is long overdue.

Well, but schools will still have to follow department of health guidelines for quarantines in the fall, though. This is where I can see people having issues even in states where colleges and schools don’t require vaccination. People that are vaccinated and exposed, with no symptoms, do not have to quarantine, but those students that are not vaccinated are still going to be stuck at home for 7 or 10 days after an exposure on campus. I think that reminding college students of that will incentivize some of them to be vaccinated that otherwise wouldn’t, and some parents of teens, too. Quarantining this year has been very disruptive for those that have attended school or college, and a lot of folks will be motivated to avoid another year like that.

Current phase three trials are still ongoing, to two years past the second dose. With these trials, though, all the placebo recipients will have been offered the vaccine. But there will be close safety monitoring, which is useful. I don’t know the typical length of a phase 3 vaccine trial, but it is longer than the two months, and that for only some of the participants, that we saw for the Covid vaccines in the US. Of course you’re right that the rare events are often only caught after a drug or device is on the market for a while, or even a more common effect that takes some time to become apparent. There is a long list of things that have been taken off the market, more drugs than vaccines, but there are a few vaccines, too. Once the pandemic crisis is over, we might even see the adenovirus vector vaccines eventually pulled.

Well, there is research showing that the spike protein itself seems to have some effects, in animal models, though I don’t know much about that. It might not be good to have these proteins manufactured by cells in our nervous system, heart, blood vessels, for example. I would think that with vaccine, the amount of mRNA getting into circulation and going other places is very small, if any, and that seems to be the thinking from what I’ve heard. I don’t know if there is anything to this or not; I was articulating a concern that I’ve seen expressed by others. For me, the choice is easy for an adult, especially ones above a certain age. The vaccine generally appears safe, and Covid is bad. This outweighs any theoretical unknowns, and outweighs the fact that normally, we would not have millions of people take a brand-new vaccine after only a few months of testing. I agree, this particular one makes no sense.

That is the sense I have gotten, too. I got vaccinated to avoid hospitalization and severe complications. I do not have an expectation that I will never get infected; if I’m lucky, I won’t, but next best would be that I get infected and don’t know I have it, or have some symptoms that are soon over. Will having asymptomatic or milder disease prevent most long Covid? I would think and hope so, but I don’t think that is the primary reason to get vaccinated. I haven’t decided about my younger children, either. Here is an opinion from a pediatric infectious disease specialist that brings up some concerns that he thinks need to be addressed before widespread vaccination of children. I find it interesting that he says since MIS-C does not seem to be a viral process and it isn’t understood very well, we would want to be sure vaccination would not lead to more of it. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00212-7/fulltext I don’t know what to make of it, but it is something that is on my radar to hear more about. Though I guess if there is anything to it, we might see something happen when the 12-15’s get it.

From the questions I have heard of on Q and A or podcasts, the implications of what would happen are vague. Like, immune system=mysterious, who knows what will happen, and we don’t know what we don’t know. Not just mRNA, but the spike protein hanging around in the body and causing inflammation in different organs. I’m not sure what the overtly anti vaccination sites or groups say about it.

I think what @ktgrok meant is problems that begin or show up only months after receiving the vaccine. That is what some people mean by long term affects, as in there used to be a thought that childhood vaccines could trigger some children to develop type 1 diabetes; that’s something that was investigated and not found. Same with Hepatitis B and MS. Some people now are hesitant with mRNA because some of it could theoretically be taken up by other tissues rather than the desired local target tissues. Some vaccine reactions do have lasting effects, it’s true, but the ones that have been well-documented have occurred within a couple of months of vaccination. It’s not like you get a vaccine and then the tinnitus or low platelets or temporary paralysis happens six months later.

BioNTech was studying it. Pfizer did not get together with them until after the pandemic began. Basically BioNTech is all the brain power and technology, and Pfizer has the manufacturing capacity, Investment $, and marketing to make it happen. More or less.

I think the wet market idea died a long time ago. That doesn’t mean that humans didn’t get it from an animal intermediary, but it most likely wasn’t at the Wuhan wet market. China CDC said many months ago that they don’t think it was the wet market. There were many samples taken, and they couldn’t find the virus. Some of the early patients were indeed traced to the wet market, but other work showed that it probably didn’t start there. This article is from a year ago. And the WHO commission reviewed this data, too. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/wuhan-wet-market-was-not-the-origin-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic/ar-BB14KRSY

If the US is doing much better by then, I do wonder about an EUA for the under 11. Will it still be an emergency, or will we have enough population immunity by then that it seems much less urgent at that time?

I agree that the poll results might be different for 12 and up compared to younger children. I do feel differently about a 15 year old than I do about a 7 year old. Study after study shows even lower disease rate and ability to both contract and transmit in the 4 or 5 to 11 age range, too. I suspect more teens than children have already had Covid, too, since for a multitude of reasons, it is not as easy to keep them socially distanced. And there might be a psychological factor to answering no in a poll, since we know it will be a while until young children can be vaccinated, if they will be, so it feels very hypothetical compared to being able to vaccinate a teen just two weeks from now.

They had more doses of Astra Zeneca than Sinopharm, enough for 45,000 vs. enough doses for 25,000 people with Sinopharm. But they got the Sinopharm first, and the people first vaccinated were with Sinopharm, some of whom were in the tourist industry and are probably more likely to be infected. From here: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/seychelles-bids-reach-covid-herd-immunity-mid-march-76220535 My wild guess would be that the breakthrough infections were more in the younger working people who got the Sinopharm. They still might not be infectious to others, but some of them are in healthcare and tourism and most likely to be exposed. Maybe one reason they are having trouble, too, is that they went for an essential workers first strategy in vaccination, and have fewer of their more vulnerable citizens protected. I have no basis for thinking that, but we do know who is generally more likely to end up in the hospital.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/skorea-says-astrazeneca-pfizer-covid-19-vaccines-87-effective-after-first-shot-2021-05-05/

On the Seychelles— that BBC article says they used mostly Astra Seneca and Sinopharm, which is supposed to be better than Sinovac, but who knows. But 20% of the cases are from foreigners, which I presume means tourists, and 2/3 of all cases are in unvaccinated people. 1/3 are in the fully vaccinated, which still sounds alarming, but may not be. It depends on the actual numbers and on how long after vaccination they consider someone is fully vaccinated (are many of the cases within a few days of the second dose?). It also would make a difference if they are testing a lot of asymptomatic people- maybe the vaccinated cases have more asymptomatic or mild cases, but they aren’t actually transmitting it to other people.

Yes! It’s always a man, too, when I see those. And the bandanas. I know they are complying, but honestly, might as well not wear anything if that’s their “mask”

I don’t have an opinion one way of the other, and we may not know until one day, some researcher samples the right animal and finds something more suggestive. Lab leak of a virus that was being studied seems like a possibility to someone like me who has no idea, lol, and I also thought the WHO report was strange. It put the Chinese-promoted idea of a frozen food origin higher on the list. A lab leak might not only implicate China, though of course China would have been the ones to cover up if that were the case. NIH apparently provides funding for the Wuhan lab, as well as for gain of function research in other places. Peter Daszak, who headed the WHO investigation, is not an impartial person in evaluating a lab leak possibility. Virologists who say the idea is nonsense understandably wouldn’t want funding cut or research curtailed, but supposedly other scientists who advocate for lab leak possibility sometimes are anti-GOF. And then there are all the conspiracy theories and the fact that the former US administration hinted it was from a lab. And now it’s a year and a half later. So it’s almost impossible to know what to think or even to talk about when considering all the different motivations.

No one knows whose hunch is right on this, because there aren’t any good studies showing a large effect. Not for self-protection, and certainly not as source control. I have to think it does something and there is a lot of suggestive evidence masks do something, especially when everyone wears them. But what I was trying to say in my post was in the context of thinking that masks = low risk; my sense is that some people assume it is more effective than even the experts think, practically full-proof. Even an N95 isn’t blocking everything, and most people that wear these do not wear them correctly, either. My hunch is that masks do not equal low risk indoors with poor ventilation for more than a few minutes, if a highly infectious person is nearby. Maybe lowER risk. But it doesn’t matter, since no one can show that this is true or false, and now we have vaccinations which are much more effective than masks.

I’m not sure that Pfizer will be before Moderna for the younger children. I’m pretty sure I heard that Moderna started out ahead for that age group. Here: They started phase 2-3 around the same time as Pfizer was beginning their phase 1 dosing study, in March. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/pfizer-launches-pediatric-trial-test-covid-vaccine-children-rcna500 https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/16/health/children-vaccinated-moderna-covid-19-trial-bn/index.html Of course who is first might depend on where the participants are and how much virus is going around, too.

I was thinking the same. I don’t think of my own risk as particularly low, and I am not even working outside the home at the moment. But otherwise I still do many of the things I did before, but masked and distanced. I don’t know how much the mask is helping anyone, because there has been a lot of masking in the last year AND a whole lot of infections, but I know that it can’t have super high effectiveness. There are plenty of people who have no idea how they got infected, mask and have no known exposure, so while I’m not an essential worker and have some privilege and am less at risk because of that, I don’t think risk is low. Right at the moment I feel at lower risk than I have for a long time, because of community spread being low, but also, I can see that people are loosening up more, so