The vast majority of US parents are not in any rush to get their children under five years old vaccinated against Covid-19.
The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that only four or five percent of the more than 17 million US children under the age of five have been vaccinated against Covid, despite the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation more than a month ago that children in that age group recieve vaccines.
It’s not just parents of the country’s youngest children who are eschewing vaccines at a rate that is alarming public health officials. Many parents of children between five and 11 years old have also declined thus far to get their children vaccinated, with just more than 36 percent of kids in that age group fully vaccinated as of mid-July.
“Never before have we had a vaccine available for young children that has been in billions of people before it was given to a young child,” Kawsar Talaat, a vaccine expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, toldPolitico. “The distrust in government, the distrust in public health and the distrust in science is growing and is very, very worrisome.”
Some experts believe that parents are not in a rush to get their children vaccianted against Covid because the virus does not pose as great a risk to kids as it does to older adults and people who are immunocompromised.
But children, including toddlers, are not immune to the risk of adverse outcomes from Covid. A significant number of kids infected with Covid later developed multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a dangerous condition in which vital organs like the heart and lungs can become severely inflamed. Some scientists have argued there may be a link between Covid infection and cases of hepatitis in young children with no clear cause that surged this spring.
Children are also at risk, like all people, of developing Long Covid symptoms that do not dissipate within several weeks of contracting the virus.
Even in the country’s most liberal and most vaccinated states, vaccination rates for toddlers is low. In California, for instance, only 6.4 percent of children between zero and five have recieved a first shot — though that number is 30 percent in highly educated, wealthy Marin County.
A July survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of parents of children under five have found government guidance on vaccinations for their children confusing, while some do not know where to go to get their children the shots.
While more than 40 percent of parents in that survey reported that they have decided not to get their young children vaccinated, others have said that they will wait and see how the vaccine is working for other children before getting their own kids vaccinated. Others reported that will get their kids the shots if they are required to have them for school or childcare.
