With rates of severe disease now much lower in children than at the start of the pandemic—due to higher levels of natural immunity and lower rates of severe disease caused by omicron—trials would have needed to enroll hundreds of thousands of children, if not over a million, in order to detect a significant impact of the pediatric vaccine against severe disease.
That paragraph comes from an ironic article called “The CDC Is Breaking Trust in Childhood Vaccination” Drs. Leslie Bienen and Tracy Hoeg. The article states:
With its unscientific push to vaccinate all infants and toddlers against COVID, the agency will harm vaccine uptake for more significant diseases.
….
First, I agree that since that severe COVID is mercifully rare in young children, it would take an expensive, time-consuming trial of hundreds of thousands of children, if not over a million, in order to detect a significant impact of the pediatric vaccine against severe disease.
…
With this in mind, I disagree with Drs. Bienen and Hoeg that it is possible or necessary to conduct an RCT of a million children before vaccinating them. I think they know this too.
Related on the SLP
…
Not only would running a million-child RCT would be impossible in a reasonable time-frame, it would also be unethical to allow unvaccinated children to suffer grave harms from the virus. This is why scientists with actual skin in the game unanimously voted to authorize these vaccines.
