On Monday, Tom Weber wrote about vaccines from a young person’s perspective, saying he felt vaccine envy for being at the end of the queue. Here, Stephen Lowe takes a different perspective: what’s the best choice for my children?
As a parent, you only want the best for your kids. Even when the ‘best’ sometimes means taking their mobile phones away and insisting they eat their greens (the latter remains a work in progress).
Although children becoming infected with Covid-19 usually results in milder symptoms than in adults, some children do end up getting very sick and have complications or long-lasting symptoms.
These effects on their health and well-being are pretty scary for parents who have already had to deal with the guilt and fear of sending their kids to school and keeping them away from the elderly and at-risk relatives.
The fact that the coronavirus (and its Greek alphabetised variants) can cause death in children, although this is rarer than for adults, is not something that has been hammered home in the media as often as the risks posed for older generations.
For my wife and I, getting the jab is a no-brainer. Though we acknowledge the rights of those who wish to refuse a vaccine shot with a withering shrug, for us, we see it as the easiest way forward. The path of least resistance, if you want. It is the straightest route to getting things back to normal which is available to us at this rate.
We, as so many others, have not seen our relatives outside of wifi reliant pixelated reproductions, for the best part of two years and now need to consider the ramifications of a spot-vaxxed family.
Last week, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) authorised use of the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15 year olds. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have also recently expanded the emergency use authorization (EUA) for the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine to adolescents ages 12 – 15. This means the EMA, FDA and the CDC determined that clinical trials show this vaccine is safe and effective for kids in this age range.
As it currently stands, my wife and I will receive jabs at different times. My role being viewed as requiring a higher priority - something I spoke about here.
While Germany has yet to specify exactly how they will vaccinate all 12-18 year-olds by end of August, it is entirely feasible that our newly teenaged and increasingly hormonal son will be vaxxed-up before either his mother or father.
I have no issue with that timeline, save for the fact that I would like to be able to show my son that there is nothing to worry about, that he need not be the first and, for a while at least, only member of the household to get jabbed.
