Children under 12 now remain exempt from vaccination requirements for travel to Europe, although changes can happen quickly and some countries – such as France – still require negative tests for unvaccinated over 12s. Potential deterioration still awaits in America, where parents may be required to certify that their unvaccinated children “will take a test three to five days [after arrival] and will self-isolate if any symptoms develop or if the test is positive.”
Then there is the long Covid. About two million people – more than three percent of the population – reported symptoms lasting more than four weeks, with about 600,000 doing so during the Omicron period. “Unfortunately, this also applies to the tens of thousands of children for whom the vaccine program has failed,” said Dr Stephen Griffin, Associate Professor at the University of Leeds School of Medicine.
Yet vaccination of five to 11-year-old children, as the JCVI itself states, “is not expected to have an impact on the current wave of Omicron infection.” This may be due to the fact that current vaccines poorly target BA.5. (Worse, updated Omicron-specific vaccines against the BA.1 variant have been developed and may be obsolete even before they are released later this year. “BA.1 is yesterday’s news,” says John Bagel of the National US Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is cited in Nature). Natural infection with Omicron also does not prevent rapid re-infection with the same strain, according to a new paper from Imperial College.
“Not only can it break through the vaccine’s defenses, [Omicron] it appears to leave very few of the distinctive marks we would expect on the immune system – it is more stealthy than previous variants and flies under the radar so the immune system is unable to remember it,” says Prof Danny Altman, from Imperial’s Department of Immunology and Inflammation.
Even officially, the main reason for vaccinating children is ignorance. The JCVI is happy to admit that Covid aside, the disease as we know it poses only minimal dangers to children. But can’t be sure about future strains.
Vaccination is a safeguard against the catastrophic day when this virus, which we have seen mutating too easily, becomes a nuisance to the young as well. Vaccination would then ensure that they would also be protected, as adults are today, from severe illness and death (if not from the infection itself) when a potentially terrible new strain emerges. “The more severe the future wave, the greater the likely benefits of vaccination [of children]”, JCVI points out.
Of course, such a dark day may hopefully never come. Meanwhile, researchers are hard at work developing new vaccines with broader protection against multiple strains of Covid and new delivery mechanisms – such as nasal sprays to the airways – that could better prevent transmission. But hesitant parents considering vaccination for their children now have another question to ask: What if Covid goes rogue? “We don’t see multiple waves for other viruses on this scale,” says Griffin. “The idea that this race was held … is nonsense.”
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