Barely a month after the Food and Drug Administration authorized COVID-19 vaccines for very young children, a large number of them will actually receive the shots, according to a new survey of parents released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The forecast looks bleak. Which has monitored the vaccine perspective during the pandemic.
Most of the parents surveyed said that they consider this vaccine to be a higher risk for their children than the coronavirus.
For children in the age group of 6 months to 4 years, the administration has rarely used COVID shots till now due to parental apprehension. Since June 18, when they became eligible, only 2.8 percent of those children had received the shots, the foundation found in a separate analysis of recent federal vaccine data. By comparison, 18.5 per cent of children aged 5 to 11, who have been eligible for COVID shots since October, were vaccinated at a similar point in their rollout of shots.
The new survey found that 43 percent of parents with children under the age of 5 said they “definitely would not” get them vaccinated. About 27 percent said they would “wait and see”, while another 13 percent said they would get their children vaccinated “only when needed”. Even some parents who were themselves vaccinated against Covid said they would not allow their youngest children.
The new analysis of parental views comes as the pace of vaccines for older children has been quite slow. So far, only 40 percent of children aged 5 to 11 have been vaccinated. In the new survey, 37 percent of parents said they would “definitely not” get a COVID vaccine for their child in that age group.
Parents’ main concerns were the potential side effects of the vaccine, its relative novelty, and what they felt was a lack of adequate research. Many parents said they were willing to take the risk of their children contracting COVID, rather than getting a vaccine to prevent it.
Childhood immunization experts said they viewed parents’ hesitation with alarm, coming at a time when Covid cases are on the rise once again and are expected to worsen during the colder months, and new and The potential for potentially more dangerous coronavirus variants remains.
Although most children who come down with Covid recover easily, “some children get very sick from it and some die,” said Patricia A., president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Stinkfield said. She was not involved in the Kaiser study.
How a child will deal with COVID is unpredictable, said Ms Stinchfield, a nurse practitioner who coordinated vaccine administration for Children’s Minnesota, a children’s hospital system in St. Paul and Minneapolis. “We don’t have a marker for that,” she said. “Half of the children who come down with severe COVID are healthy children with no underlying condition. So the idea of saying ‘I’ll skip this vaccine for my baby, we’re not worried about Covid’ is really a risk to be taken.”
The latest report is based on an online and telephone survey of 1,847 adults from June 7 to June 17, of whom 471 were children under the age of 5. 8 percentage points for parents with a child below 5 years of age.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the partisan divide around vaccinations for children was particularly sharp, with Republican parents being three times as likely as Democratic parents to “definitely not” vaccinate their child. will do.
Most parents said they received confusing information about vaccines for their children from the federal government. Yet 70 percent said they had not yet discussed shots with a pediatrician. Only 27 percent of parents who are considering a vaccine said they would make an appointment for that conversation.
Parents who may be predisposed for their children to receive COVID shots said lack of access was a significant barrier, a concern expressed by more black and Hispanic parents than white parents. Nearly 44 percent of black parents were concerned about taking time off work to get their children vaccinated or to care for children if they had side effects. Among Hispanic parents of young children, 45 percent said they were concerned about finding a trustworthy location for shots, and nearly a third feared they would have to pay a fee.
Ms Stinchfield said she understood her concerns: Her own daughter had to work to vaccinate Ms Stinchfield’s grandchildren, aged 1 and 3. Ms. Stinchfield went to a clinic with him. “The message to clinics is to make vaccines available for children in the evenings and on weekends,” she said.
Did his grandchildren have any side effects? No, said Ms. Stinchfield, laughing. “They liked it so much that we put them in a little kiddie pool,” she said. “And now my granddaughter got a tan line from a Band-Aid shot of her foot.”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)