Weighing risk over safety
Beth Thielen, MD, PhD, pediatric infectious disease specialist and virologist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, said she had not followed the committee’s discussions, but about once a month she treats kids who are very sick because of the virus – either because of a COVID infection or because of multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), an inflammatory reaction that strikes after infection.
She’s worried about how the virus has already changed. She said the kind of disease she’s seeing in kids now is different than what she saw in the early months of the pandemic.
“In the last couple of months, I’ve actually seen a few cases of severe pulmonary disease, more similar to adult disease in children,” Dr. Thielen said. “I see on the horizon that we could start seeing more significant disease in young people, and then the risks of being unvaccinated go up substantially.”
But she also knows nobody has a crystal ball, and right now, everything seems to be trending in the right direction with COVID. That makes the risk-to-benefit consideration murkier.
“The question in my mind is, what is the risk of side effects from the vaccine?” she said. “I think we really need to know what the safety profile of vaccine looks like in children because we do have a decent understanding now what risk from disease looks like, because it’s small, but we are seeing it.”
Dr. Thielen said she’ll be keeping an eye on the next meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for more answers.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.