1. What kind of "careful risk assessment" do you propose? We already don't vaccinate people who we have reason to believe would have a higher chance of dangerous side effects (covid and other vaccines). What more can we do?
2. How is [0] unfortunate and what do you mean by "pushing for"? We know covid is extremely dangerous, we know that children in kindergarten are a huge transmission vector for all kinds of diseases. By all logic we should be vaccinating them. But a careful risk assessment was done, as you suggest, and there wasn't enough data to confirm the vaccine would be safe enough to give to children. Now that new data has been gathered that, Pfizer is asking the FDA to re-consider in light of new evidence.
I hate to be on the side of big pharma, but this all seems surprisingly reasonable...
1. We know covid is extremely dangerous for a small segment of the population. It makes sense to get vaccinated if you are in that group. For healthy young individuals however, taking a new vaccine comes with unknown risks. There have been plenty of problems with vaccines [0] and one could argue only severe health issues will ever surface as being vaccine related.
2. We know covid poses an extremely low risk to children [1]
We also know natural immunity is stronger than vaccine induced immunity [2]. Therefor in my opinion, vaccinating children does not make sense. We simply have not enough data to know if there are long term issues with mRNA vaccines. Why not take cue from history and err on the safe side?
1. That segment of the population isn't that small and dying isn't the only bad consequence. Many long-lasting health issues as a result of a covid infection have been identified. Your link contains only 3 cases of dangerous vaccines, a few isolated manufacturing mistakes and the rest were disproven in further research. Regardless, while there obviously are dangers associated with vaccination, mass vaccination is also the only way to stop the pandemic.
Every instance of an infected individual in contact with a vaccinated individual is another roll of the dice for a breakthrough infection, which risks a new vaccine-resistant variant emerging. Just like you shouldn't prematurely stop a course of antibiotics because the remaining pathogens can develop resistance, you should not vaccinate only half the population because it gives the virus remaining in the unvaccinated population somewhere to thrive while continuously mutating and attacking the vaccinated until a resistance to the vaccine develops and we're back to 2020.
2. Children are a huge transmission vector. I know they're unlikely to have serious consequences from it, but they will pass it on to parents and grandparents who likely will. While yes, some most sources seem to say natural immunity is stronger, unless you suggest we put a bunch of children in a two wrek quarantine and infect the intentionally that hardly matters. If the infection is natural then the child will be spreading the virus around for days before they notice any symptoms (if they even do) and get quarantined. Congrats, now the child is slightly more immune that if you'd vaccinated them, but also 20 new people now have the infection.
And how can you say we don't have enough data - the whole point of the re-review is that we have now gathered more data and it indicates it's not that dangerous. What do you mean "take a cue from history"? We essentially wiped out many extremely dangerous diseases exactly by everyone getting vaccinated. Taking a cue from history, we should all get vaccinated ASAP to swiftly eradicate the virus before it gets a chance to mutate and become resistant.
2. How is [0] unfortunate and what do you mean by "pushing for"? We know covid is extremely dangerous, we know that children in kindergarten are a huge transmission vector for all kinds of diseases. By all logic we should be vaccinating them. But a careful risk assessment was done, as you suggest, and there wasn't enough data to confirm the vaccine would be safe enough to give to children. Now that new data has been gathered that, Pfizer is asking the FDA to re-consider in light of new evidence.
I hate to be on the side of big pharma, but this all seems surprisingly reasonable...