10 October

Talking about vaccines for younger kids. Professor Cheng, co-chair of ATAGI, the group that will rule on safety: “When we are thinking about 80-year-olds, where the danger of COVID is really obvious, [about] a third of people die,” he said. “When we are looking at kids, who rarely go to hospital and as a rule don’t die from COVID, then that’s sort of a different equation.” My problem with this is, it would exclude pretty much all of the diseases we currently vaccinate kids for. Only tiny numbers of children ever got really sick from things like mumps, chickenpox, measles, even polio. I feel scientists here are absorbing the political slogans, like ‘kids don’t get really sick from Covid’, and it’s shaping their thinking inappropriately.