Cadell Walker was quick to vaccinate her nine-year-old daughter Salomé against COVID-19, not only to protect her but also to prevent the spread of the virus and the emergence of new, more dangerous variants.
“Love your neighbor. I always believed in that and I want to be a good member of the community, and pass that way of thinking to my daughter, ”said this 40-year-old woman who recently took her daughter to a high school to get vaccinated. “The only way to defeat COVID is for all of us to work collectively for the common good.”
Scientists agree with her. Every new infection, whether from an adult in Yemen or a child in Kentucky, gives the virus a chance to mutate. By protecting new segments of the world’s population, those opportunities are reduced.
These efforts gained momentum now that 28 million children ages five to 11 in the United States can receive juvenile doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Measures taken in other countries, such as Austria’s decision to require all adults to be vaccinated, will help reduce opportunities for new infections.
Vaccinating children reduces the silent spread of the virus, as most of them have no symptoms or are very mild when infected. When the virus spreads unnoticed, scientists say, it is impossible to fight it. And the more people are infected, the more likely there are new variants to emerge.
David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that infections are like “lottery tickets we give to the virus.” The award? A more contagious variant than the delta variant currently in circulation.
“The fewer people that get infected, the less likely the virus is to win the lottery and new variants will emerge,” O’Connor said. He added that the virus will be more likely to mutate in people with weak immune systems, in which it survives for a long time.
Researchers disagree about the extent to which children can influence the course of the pandemic. Early investigations indicate that they did not contribute much to the spread of the outbreak. But some experts believe that children played an important role in the spread of contagious variants such as alpha and delta.
Vaccinating children could be important going forward, according to estimates from the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, which brings together information from universities and doctors that consolidates models of how the pandemic may unfold. The latest estimates from that center reveal that between November of this year and March 12, 2022, vaccinating children in the United States could prevent about 430,000 infections if no new variants emerge. If a variant 50% more transmissible than the delta appeared, 860,000 deaths would be prevented, which would represent a “big impact”, according to project coordinator Katriona Shea of Pennsylvania State University.
Delta remains the dominant variant for now. In the United States, it represents 99% of the cases analyzed. Scientists are not quite sure why. Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, a communicable disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, said it may be because it is more infectious or may be avoiding at least part of the protection that vaccines give people or those who have. they had already been infected once.
“It’s probably a combination of those things,” he said. “But there is also growing evidence that the delta is more effective, that it can grow faster than other variants.”
Ray said that the delta is “one big family” of viruses and that the world may be swimming in a “delta soup.”
“There are many strains of delta circulating in numerous sites, with no clear winner,” he said.
Experts, on the other hand, say there are dangerous variants that could emerge in under-vaccinated parts of the world and spread from there.
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for the content.
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