>It doesn't have to be rational. Vaccines mandates are already common for school children, nurses, (and maybe teachers, but I'm not sure about that one)
Even this argument ignores nuance.
The vaccines in these schedules are mandated for 2 reasons
1. The diseases they treat directly impact their population in a major way in large numbers
2. Immunization not only prevents the negatives impacts of 1, but also prevent the spread.
As an exmaple for #2. Take Pertussis and TDAP. Even adults that have children will often get a booster. The reasoning is sound there, you reduce the chance of transmitting pertussis to an infant. This is especially true for premature babies that may not have had the chance to get the anitbodies from the mother, assuming she got a booster during pregnancy.
As of right now. COVID-19 has a pretty small impact on children directly ( hospitalization rates at their peak were like 1.9 per 100k for under 18 [2]) . And even nationally its much smaller than any of the diseases used to compare it to (like Measles which has pretty severe complications in like 30% of those that contracted it, regardless of age [1])
AND the vaccine isnt particularly proven to reduce spread [3]. To add insult to injury, CDC specifically stopped even recording breakthrough infection rates unless they were severe as of May 1, 2021.
So it would make sense to question a vaccination mandate for those under 18...
Yes basically. Major complication rates for those under 18 are very low, especially when compared to other diseases in these vaccine schedules (in my example I used measles which was closer to 30%) [1][1.1][1.2] .
By far most of the major complications as a result of COVID are in populations over 45 OR with those with pre existing conditions. This qualifications are almost nonexistent in the under 18 population. At best, the hospitalization rate for those under 18 was about 1.9 per 100k. There have been, according to CDC data, 499 deaths as of 10/6/21 for those 0-17 yo [2][3].
Add to that there is evidence that vaccination doesn’t necessarily prevent transmission, and there have been breakouts where up to 70% of those involved were vaccinated it’s not entirely unreasonable to question a vaccine mandate for that population [4]. Additionally as of May 1, 2021 the CDC stopped really tracking breakthrough rates and only tracks them if they result in hospitalization, which makes it hard, if not impossible to really gather data on how effective the vaccinations used in the US are at preventing transmission.
So theres plenty of arguments to be had about being skeptical of even this argument "vaccines are mandated for kids" as it applies to THIS specific vaccine.
That’s a pretty silly assumption. Those numbers are low enough it could just as easily be exigent reasons (autoimmune diseases, compromised immune systems). 2x more kids die from congenital anomalies. About the same number for heart heart defects per year. [1]
Those numbers can easily be intermixed. Not to mention kids with severe asthma or other respiratory diseases.
There’s no data that would say vaccinations would have done anything for those 499 people.
Not to mention the way many did a lot of these stats is if someone had covid and died from any cause, they were often included in the numbers.
There's something horribly wrong with your link [3].
"The first study saw a drop of 78%, and the second 41%, in infectiousness — with the large difference in numbers perhaps explained by the fact that the estimates are based on a very small number of vaccinated people who were infected and then infected others. ... The results correspond well with studies conducted elsewhere. One analysis3 of some 365,000 households in the United Kingdom, published on 23 June, estimated that individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 were 40–50% less likely to spread the infection if they had received at least one dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, UK, at least three weeks previously. A study4 from Finland, posted as a preprint on 10 July, found that spouses of infected health-care workers who had received a single dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that produced by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were 43% less likely to get infected than were spouses of unvaccinated health workers." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z)
"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. ... Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y)
Even this argument ignores nuance.
The vaccines in these schedules are mandated for 2 reasons
1. The diseases they treat directly impact their population in a major way in large numbers
2. Immunization not only prevents the negatives impacts of 1, but also prevent the spread.
As an exmaple for #2. Take Pertussis and TDAP. Even adults that have children will often get a booster. The reasoning is sound there, you reduce the chance of transmitting pertussis to an infant. This is especially true for premature babies that may not have had the chance to get the anitbodies from the mother, assuming she got a booster during pregnancy.
As of right now. COVID-19 has a pretty small impact on children directly ( hospitalization rates at their peak were like 1.9 per 100k for under 18 [2]) . And even nationally its much smaller than any of the diseases used to compare it to (like Measles which has pretty severe complications in like 30% of those that contracted it, regardless of age [1])
AND the vaccine isnt particularly proven to reduce spread [3]. To add insult to injury, CDC specifically stopped even recording breakthrough infection rates unless they were severe as of May 1, 2021.
So it would make sense to question a vaccination mandate for those under 18...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html [2] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html [3] https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do....