HomeMy WebLinkAbout2022_06_17 KGould_Risks of child vaccine_responseFrom:Berry, Allison
To:Kincaid Gould
Cc:Board of Health; contactus@kptz.org
Subject:Re: Question for Dr. Berry
Date:Friday, June 17, 2022 2:39:06 PM
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Hi Mr. Gould,
I’m happy to address your question around vaccine safety in children on air next Tuesday.
I always have and continue to support full discussions of risks and benefits of medical
interventions with the patients and their families. I think where you and I often differ is in ourunderstanding of the relative risks of the disease and the intervention.
Since I probably won’t read Dr. Meissner’s remarks in full on the air, I wanted to let you know
that he was incorrect when it comes to his lightning strike analogy. The number of Americanskilled last year in lightning strikes was not 270 it was 17. And that includes adults and children
so the actual accurate comparator if you’re wanting to compare deaths in a specific age cohortlike children under 5 would be even smaller. Now this was a long meeting and he may have
misspoke but since you’re citing his statement as a source, I wanted to make sure you hadaccurate data.
Thanks so much for your question and engaging in this process.
Allison Berry, MD MPH (she/her/hers)
Clallam & Jefferson County Health OfficerOffice: (360) 417-2437
allisonberry@clallamcountywa.gov
On Jun 17, 2022, at 12:01 PM, Kincaid Gould <kincaidgould@protonmail.com>wrote:
*** EXTERNAL EMAIL *** This message was sent from outside our County network.
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 orthe 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 tochildren in this age group very clearly known to people attempting to vaccinate
their child?
Thank you,
Kincaid Gould