A top physician at Children’s National Hospital hailed approval of a vaccination for younger children, but said parents will always need to weigh “risk benefit.”
In an interview on CBS News’ "Face the Nation," Claire Boogaard, medical director of the COVID-19 vaccine program at Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C., said the data on the Pfizer shots for children is “the best news.”
“There are no serious side effects given this lower dose of the vaccine to this lower group of kids, and it still protects kids from getting the infection,” she said.
“Everything is risk benefit,” Boogaard said. “So, you need to think about your own individual family situation. You also need to think about the community around you.”
“For us as parents, we don't want anything bad to happen to our kids, right?” she continued. “COVID has bad complications with children, doesn't have it with all children, but has many. And it also has the complications in this young group of having long term issues, whether it's having symptoms that last longer than two months, which is the long COVID that people talk about, or developing a very serious, life-threatening condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children.”
But she said for herself as a mother, “if I have a choice, I'd rather use this super safe vaccine to get them back into school and back to their normal life.”
“I also know that scientists take this very seriously,” she added. “They do not want to offer something that's going to harm people. Myself as a doctor, I don't want to go out advocating for something that I don't think is safe. So, I promise hope is coming. We're almost at the end of this.”
The doctor said there is no guaranteeing that a pregnant or breast-feeding mother will be able to pass along immunity from the virus.
“We anticipate that if someone was infected during pregnancy or given the vaccine, that there is a chance that they have some protection with the antibodies that mom made that are shared to the child,” she sad,
“There's also a protection if you're breastfeeding. What we don't know is how protected that child is. What we don't want you to do is assume since you had it as a pregnant lady or a breastfeeding woman, that your child is protected because we can't guarantee that, but it's all something we recommend.”
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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