by Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
The authors of the study published last month in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal used their results to recommend COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for children as young as 6 months and to conclude that unvaccinated kids were unhealthier to begin with.
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A U.S. government-sponsored study published late last month in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal reported that most young children hospitalized for acute COVID-19 had not received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and were sicker to begin with than vaccinated children.
The authors’ conclusions are true on the surface, but their analysis ignored that more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated children were enrolled in their study.
Only 4.5% of trial subjects completed primary COVID series
Investigators led by Laura Zambrano, Ph.D., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist, recruited 597 children ages 8 months through under age 5 hospitalized for COVID-19 at 28 U.S. pediatric hospitals between Sept. 20, 2022, and May 31, 2023.
Unvaccinated subjects outnumbered subjects who had received at least one COVID-19 shot by 528 to 69, a more than 7-fold difference.
Children were grouped by demographic factors such as race, sex and geographic location, vaccination status (no vaccine, incomplete vaccine series or fully vaccinated) and underlying non-COVID-19 illnesses, or comorbidities.
Only 4.5% of the subjects had completed their primary COVID-19 vaccination series and 7% had received at least one dose.
Cases varied widely in severity, with 174 (29.1% of all subjects) admitted to intensive care and 75 progressing to life-threatening illness.
Fifty-one (8.5% of all subjects) required life support via invasive mechanical ventilation, and three required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a life-support treatment involving a heart-lung machine.
Based on results from both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, infants 8 months to under age 2 were more vulnerable to serious outcomes than children ages 2 to 4 years.
For example, the youngest subjects had more life-threatening illnesses and the greatest need for high-level respiratory support involving vasoactive infusions — intravenous treatments to maintain normal blood pressure and heart rate. Yet they also had shorter hospital stays.
Investigators concluded that most children hospitalized for COVID-19, including most children with underlying medical conditions, were unvaccinated. On that basis, they called for “strategies to reduce barriers to vaccine access among young children.”
Read More @ ChildrensHealthDefense.org
