Thread by @WhitneyEpi

🧵1/n Game on! Sounds like FDA process for deciding availability of #CovidVaccines for 5 yo - 12 yo has kicked off

A couple thoughts on how I’m thinking about this decision for my 6 yo…

https://twitter.com/AmberSchmidtke/status/1442819266743619587

🧵2/n To my knowledge, my kids haven’t been infected with #SARSCoV2 - but I’ve accepted that they probably will at some point because of where we live (US)

🧵3/n So then my decision is whether I’d like that first infection to be in a naive immune system or in one already primed by vaccination for a quicker immune response

🧵4/n Also, I like the idea of knowing exactly when they are having their first immune response to #SARSCoV2 so I can watch for any symptoms and have a date for them to be able to reconstruct this aspect of their medical histories

🧵5/n One thing I notice in the debates over kids and this vaccine is failure to consider the full range of counterfactual scenarios if one doesn’t get vaccinated as a child

🧵6/n Lots of the conversation assumes that the only risks to compare are infection in childhood vs vaccination in childhood

🧵7/n But, when I consider risks of not vaccinating my kids, I weight the possibility that they *wouldn’t* get infected as kids, that they’d slip through #SARSCoV2 infection as children - and get their first infection as immune-naive adults

🧵8/n #LongCovid reminds me that many infectious diseases that are typically mild in school-aged children
& with extremely low vax risk
can have unexpectedly bad effects in adults who’ve never been vaxxed or infected earlier. I always think of FDR en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralytic…

🧵9/n And then there’s weird things like Shingles where previous infection gets reactivated much later in life. No, thank you, to that either. If I can cut the risk of something like that possibly happening by getting them vaxxed early, I want to do that cdc.gov/shingles/about…

🧵9/n And, if my kids were already infected, but so mildly that never noticed, I still think vax is a good idea bc I want them to have a better “shot”* at enduring, longterm protection

*see what I did there? 😄

🧵10/n I am *NOT* an immunologist.

I hope some experts jump in the thread and correct me about things I’m missing or misunderstanding.

And I’ll highlight that for others.

Just trying to think all this through ahead of time for my family