Children who get Covid shot are infectious for same amount of time as non-vaccinated, study finds
Children vaccinated against Covid are contagious for as long as their unvaccinated peers, a new study from California shows.
Whether or not students had received their bivalent Covid booster made no difference to the length of time they lost bits of the virus after testing positive.
According to the results from April to September 2022, both groups of children aged seven to eighteen were contagious for an average of three days.
The study casts further doubt on the importance of giving Covid booster vaccines to children. Until earlier this year, several states, including California and Illinois, required the vaccines in schools.
Experts from Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the study: “Return-to-school policies may not need to discriminate based on vaccine or booster status.”
Crucially, lead author Dr Neeraj Sood said the team did not look at the vaccines’ potential to prevent infection in the first place.
Children who had been vaccinated were contagious for three days, just as long as children who had not been vaccinated
Booster dose uptake among the youngest Americans started low and remains low, in part because parents don’t see the benefit of giving their children the shot when they are less likely to become seriously ill
The study also took place before Pfizer’s original bivalent booster was approved.
That vaccine offered better protection against the Omicron subvariants that were in circulation at the time.
The youngest children in the study likely did not receive a booster, but rather the standard two-dose vaccination course.
The level of immunity and protection has evolved and flowed through the different combinations of vaccines and virus variants.
The report was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
The 76 children involved in the study were from the Los Angeles area and included in the study, ranging in age from seven to 18 years old.
The aim was to measure the impact of the virus on the children’s cells to better understand how it behaves and how long it is contagious.
The researchers studied their level of virus excretion, the number of virus particles that a child emits by coughing, sneezing or talking and that are then spread through the environment.
Every child tested positive for the Covid-19 Omicron variant. Of the 76 children, including 41 seven to twelve year olds, 52 were vaccinated.
Children who had been vaccinated were contagious for three days, just as long as children who had not been vaccinated.
Researchers did not say whether they were surprised by their results. But what they found was similar to a study in adults with the Omicron variant, which also found no link between the length of time someone is contagious and their vaccination status.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all children, including infants six months and older, receive a bivalent booster shot containing components of both the original strain of the virus and the omicron variant.
Yet uptake has remained low. A July 2023 study published in the journal Annals of Medicine reported that only 39 percent of children aged five to 11 and 55 percent of teenagers have received a booster dose.
Bivalent boosters have been shown to be very effective at preventing cases severe enough to land a child in the hospital or emergency clinic, but it’s not clear to what extent the injections can prevent infection at all.
Covid vaccines are very effective at preventing serious illness in the elderly, but protection against initial infections is often much weaker.
And children mostly not becoming dangerously ill with Covid, leading many parents to believe there are not enough benefits to justify the shot.
Fears of a pandemic prompted many state and local officials in 2020 to close schools to protect children.
However, children are generally not nearly as vulnerable to serious illness as older adults, especially seniors.
This fact has contributed to a general lack of enthusiasm among parents for booster injections in children, as many parents simply don’t believe they are worth it.
There is a small risk of heart inflammation in younger people after they are vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines, but the majority of cases are mild and go away on their own.
Still, the small risk of a serious Covid infection has made many parents wary.
Widespread school closures are blamed for fueling a mental health crisis among school-age children and causing a downward spiral in overall academic performance.
a Brookings Institute study Last year, it was found that average math test scores in fall 2021 in grades three through eight were 0.20 to 0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower than those of peers at the same level in fall 2019.
Standard deviations are used to indicate how much test scores deviate from the overall mean, and a decrease of 0.20 to 0.27 SDs indicates a large decline in math performance.
At the same time, reading test scores decreased by 0.09 to 0.18 SDs.
Supporters of keeping schools open comprises approximately 60 percent of American parents have cited declining academic performance as a clear indication that in-person instruction is far superior to having kids learn from home via Zoom.