Thread by @DrZoeHyde

I'm shocked this piece was published. Not because I disagree, but because it contains statements which are misleading or inaccurate.

Do you think children should be offered vaccination?

Please vote in the poll accompanying the article, and leave a comment on the website.

https://twitter.com/MJA_Editor/status/1424520752095666177

The authors state about 2 per million children have died in England, but the denominator is the entire population!

Correcting for virus exposure, the death rate is 5 per 100,000.

One of the authors knows this because they analysed these data! @MJA_Editor
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

The authors also state that "[r]outine vaccination of well teenagers aged 12–15 years adds little to the reduction in COVID-19 transmission through the community."

This is false.

While there is some debate about how much children transmit, adolescents transmit just like adults.

I also dispute the figures cited for the proportion of children who will develop long COVID following infection.

Data from the UK's Office for National Statistics suggest it may be as high as 7%.

But even if the correct figure was only around 2%, as the authors suggest, a huge number of children would be affected.

Almost all children will likely be exposed to the virus over the next year or so. Infection is inevitable.

2% of the child population is a very big number.

Most important of all, the benefits and risks of vaccinating adolescents have already been quantified.

In our analysis, led by @dgurdasani1 and @chrischirp, we found the benefits by far outweighed the risks.
osf.io/grzma/