Are COVID-19 vaccines accessible for children under five?
Reporting for Leaps.org shows otherwise
COVID-19 vaccination rates for children under five are very low and a major factor might be accessibility.
I recently reported on this for Leaps.org and the bottom line is there are various barriers to access including, but not limited to: paid time off work, vaccine deserts, masking policies, and internet access.
A common misconception is that children are not at risk from COVID-19. The data is pretty clear that this is not the case. From my reporting:
Data presented at the most recent FDA advisory panel on COVID-19 vaccines showed that in the last year infants under six months had the third highest rate of hospitalization. “From the beginning, the message has been that kids don’t get COVID, and then the message was, well kids get COVID, but it’s not serious,” says Elias Kass, a pediatrician in Seattle. “Then they waited so long on the initial vaccines that by the time kids could get vaccinated, the majority of them had been infected.”
A closer look at the data from the CDC also reveals that from January 2022 to January 2023 children aged 6 to 23 months were more likely to be hospitalized than all other vaccine eligible pediatric age groups.
“We sort of forced an entire generation of kids to be infected with a novel virus and just don't give a shit, like nobody cares about kids,” Kass says. In some cases, COVID has wreaked havoc with the immune systems of very young children at his practice, making them vulnerable to other illnesses, he said. “And now we have kids that have had COVID two or three times, and we don’t know what is going to happen to them.”
My life certainly was a factor in writing this piece, coming out of freelance hiatus for nearly three years. In December I took my two-year-old twins and at the time my 10 month-old to get their bivalent booster at a Vermont Department of Health vaccination site. (All of which have now closed down).
I thought if we were first in then there would have been less human traffic, and presumably less virus-laden aerosols. It was the best I could do to protect my youngest, who is unable to mask yet.
I entered to an entire staff, with masks off. Upon seeing me, they said, “Here we go!” and put their masks on. I was angry. Confused. I reached out to the department of health to understand why staff would be unmasked and was pointed to the most recent CDC guidance for healthcare settings that says masking only needs to happen in the presence of patients, during high transmission, or if there is a known covid positive patient.
This wasn’t rooted in science, and it increased his risk. We had driven 35 minutes one way for these doses because like many in our state, we live rurally. Still, I am lucky and privileged. I keep my kids home, and I watch them full time. This is not the case for every parent.
A working parent often cannot take an hour and a half (like I did) off from work, to vaccinate their young child, and travel times vary based on where locations are.
In unmasked settings (pharmacies), or poor masking policy sites (state or county run and pediatrician offices), an immunocompromised parent or a parent with an immunocompromised child is being forced to do the mental risk assessment gymnastics of vaccine benefit calculations vs. possible virus exposure just to get the shot.
Lower income parents who lack broadband access don’t have resources to find a site near them to begin with, and potentially have not had public health marketing telling them it’s a priority.
Parents of children under five are tired. The world unmasked long before vaccines were available for our children and every parent I spoke with who wanted their child protected feels betrayed.
“We can have data driven approaches to using evidence based policies like mask policies, when and where they're most important,” says Dr. Julia Raifman
There are solutions to these barriers - and I am so thankful to the handful of experts that spoke with me for this article. Please read what they had to say, and share.
Thank you to Leaps.org for giving this story a home.