HomeMy WebLinkAbout2022_06_17 KGould_Risks of child vaccineFrom:Kincaid Gould
To:Board of Health; aberry@co.clallam.wa.us; contactus@kptz.org
Subject:Question for Dr. Berry
Date:Friday, June 17, 2022 12:02:54 PM
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Dear KPTZ,
Please submit this question to Dr. Berry for the upcoming BOCC Meeting.
On Day 2 of the recent VRBPAC Meeting, there was a recurring theme among the voting
members. Although they all voted to recommend approval of the vaccine for children six months
to five years of age, they consistently noted that it was very important that the risk of the disease
posed to children in this age group be clearly communicated to the public and to parents
specifically. Dr. Meisner, at 6:12:54, presented this opinion quite concisely. I have transcribed
what he said below. (I'm frantically typing this up to get it out before 12:00 and there may be a
typo here or there. I apologize if that is the case.)
"I think it's very important, as Dr. Cohen said yesterday, that the communication or the messaging
be made as clear as possible for parents to understand the relative risk and the relative benefit. I
think, we, for example, heard several times that there were approximately 442 deaths so far in the
pandemic among children less than 5. So that means about 220 deaths a year, approximately.
Now if you look at the number of people who are struck by lightning in the United States on a
year, it's 270. So we're talking about a very rare event.
If we talk about hospitalizations among children between 6 months and 5 years of age, the
hospitalization rate on the CDC website is 2.3 per 100,000, or 23 per million, and there about 20
million children in this age group, so 20 times 23 is 460 hospitalizations associated with COVID in
this age group that we're considering today, and probably only a fraction of those are because of
COVID-19 infection rather than a coincidental association. So really, we'd be talking about
vaccinating close to 20 million children in order to prevent two or three hundred deaths, and it's a
matter of how an individual weighs the risks and benefits. I think the vaccine should be available
for certainly high risk children and for families that are so concerned, they are troubled by that risk
ratio, and they should have access to the vaccine, but I again feel very strongly that parents
should understand how small these numbers are, it's a very low risk from the vaccine but it's also
a very low risk from the infection itself, and I think that has to be communicated clearly to parents
so they can participate in the decision about vaccinating a child in this age group."
My question to Dr. Berry is, will you commit to making the risk posed to children in this
age group very clearly known to people attempting to vaccinate their child?
Thank you,
Kincaid Gould