Encourage child infections to boost adult immunity?

[XFool]

Letting their children become infected with chickenpox at an early age had two benefits

1) The disease was usually more serious in adults than children (something shared with Covid)

Interesting. Have you more details of that? (I had chickenpox around 11, I think. I believe it caused me to take a postponed 11+ exam)

and
2) Infection at an early age seems to provide pretty close to lifetrime protection from chickenpox (albeit with a slight risk of developing shingles later in life).

And there is a vaccine for that! Had it this year, taking my vaccination score for 2021 to five. Three x COVID, 1 x Flu, 1 x Shingles.

[ursaminortaur]

Letting their children become infected with chickenpox at an early age had two benefits

1) The disease was usually more serious in adults than children (something shared with Covid)

Interesting. Have you more details of that? (I had chickenpox around 11, I think. I believe it caused me to take a postponed 11+ exam)

and
2) Infection at an early age seems to provide pretty close to lifetrime protection from chickenpox (albeit with a slight risk of developing shingles later in life).

And there is a vaccine for that! Had it this year, taking my vaccination score for 2021 to five. Three x COVID, 1 x Flu, 1 x Shingles.

https://www.nfid.org/infectious-disease ... hickenpox/

Adults are 25 times more likely to die from chickenpox than children.

The risk of hospitalization and death from chickenpox (varicella) is increased in adults.

Chickenpox may cause complications such as pneumonia or, rarely, an inflammation of the brain (encephalitis), both of which can be serious.

[zico]

I would imagine it is much easier to find evidence of lifetime protection in an illness that has been around for a long time than one that is reasonably new though.

Exactly. Covid is a new virus, so we can have absolutely no idea what the long-term effects are. Given this, it seems blindingly obvious to me that it's far better to take every effort to avoid infection until a lot more is known about it, whatever your age-group. Of course, the older you are, the more important it is to avoid being infected, but we don't yet know what'll happen to infected children over the long-term, though of course we'll now find out in the next few years, thanks to the high levels of infections amongst schoolchildren.

Anti-vaxxers make the same point about vaccinations (but not about infections) - that we have no idea about possible long-term effects.
It's a fair point to raise, but the obvious counter-argument is that vaccinations have been designed to minimise harm to recipients, whereas Covid is a virus, so doesn't have any interest in minimising harm to infected people. (That's why we get, for example, yellow fever vaccinations, rather than trying to pick up the disease before travelling to a yellow fever area).

The statistics have shown that short-term, all possible forms of harm from the vaccination (such as heart problems) are far more likely to occur from getting infected with Covid, rather than being vaccinated.
So we already know vaccination is much better for a person's health in the short-term, and have no reason to believe vaccination is more harmful long-term (indeed, the opposite is far more likely).

We also know that people can be re-infected, so getting Covid once doesn't give you long-lasting immunity from future infection, though it clearly provides some protection. But getting infected to reduce the chances of getting infected again isn't the smartest strategy!

[zico]

Also, how is it even "vaguely plausible"? Can you see a way in which allowing wider circulation of the virus amongst children actually helps adults, which is the argument being made here?

If adult vaccination protection is known to wane, and become progressively less effective, and if stronger immunity arises from natural infection than it does through vaccination, and if children are known to be unlikely to suffer relatively as a group, then an argument can be made it is best to "encourage" (your word not the committee's, who use "allow") speedier transmission across the sub set of the population known as children, at the time of greatest vaccination protection of adults, and particularly so in the summer months when it is felt Covid generally is less problematic. The alternative of waiting for adult vaccination effectiveness to wane, and for winter conditions, and greater numbers of children transmitting infections potentially at that time is worse (for society, and adults).

Thanks for providing a considered and thoughtful reply to provide a mechanism in which "allowing" speedier transmission amongst children would benefit adults. I've tried to think of a realistic scenario where this would actually be of benefit, not just to adults, but also to children.
(The JCVI minutes do actually make an argument for diverting vaccinations from UK children into vulnerable adults in other countries - which would save lives, but not in our population)
I think the only scenario that makes sense for our UK population is the assumption that children being infected with Covid is virtually inevitable, the "if not now, then when?" argument (or in other words, "natural herd immunity").

To provide a long series of "if's"
- If children will inevitably be infected sometime;
- if there are no improvements in treating serious Covid cases;
- if there are no long-term adverse health impacts to children from getting Covid;
- if loss of classroom education time (1-2 weeks) doesn't matter;

then it makes sense for allow speedier transmission amongst children, because as you say, when some of them subsequently pass it onto more vulnerable adults, the adults have more effective vaccine protection, so there will be fewer deaths across the whole population.

However, if we assume infection is not virtually inevitable, the picture becomes very different. If we vaccinate schoolchildren, they avoid exposure to infection, and are therefore less likely to pass it onto vulnerable adults, thus reducing infections and deaths.
Fewer infections across the UK also reduces the chance of a more dangerous variant emerging (we've already produced the Kent variants, which was much more infectious than the Wuhan variants) - astonishingly (to me anyway) the JCVI completely ignored this possibility.
We'd also save the lives of children catching Covid - recently the grim milestone of 100 UK Covid child deaths was reached. I'm sure most of them will have had "underlying conditions", but they were still children who were alive and are now dead because they caught Covid.

The problem now is that a lot of the benefit of vaccinating children has been lost because of the high rates of infection amongst school children. In effect, we've wasted a lot of vaccinations because by the time they get vaccinated, many children will already have obtained some immunity from being exposed to the virus in an uncontrolled way in schools, when they could have been protected by vaccination, and as a result, infections across the population are higher than they needed to be.

[dealtn]

Covid is a new virus, so we can have absolutely no idea what the long-term effects are. Given this, it seems blindingly obvious to me that it's far better to take every effort to avoid infection until a lot more is known about it, whatever your age-group.

I doubt you really mean this.

You genuinely think it is better to hermetically seal yourself away, never meet another person, have all food delivered etc. living in a cotton wool wrapped bubble for the rest of your life as the virus remains in the population forever?

In practice you will at best risk assess your behaviours and consider the appropriate efforts in avoiding the probability of catching the virus. Very few, and I imagine precisely none, people will do as you suggest and take every effort to avoid infection.

Some, probably most, will undertake activities others will consider risky, and expose themselves to potential infection, even if that risk is considered low statistically.

Life is a balance of risks, and always has been.

[zico]

Covid is a new virus, so we can have absolutely no idea what the long-term effects are. Given this, it seems blindingly obvious to me that it's far better to take every effort to avoid infection until a lot more is known about it, whatever your age-group.

I doubt you really mean this.

You genuinely think it is better to hermetically seal yourself away, never meet another person, have all food delivered etc. living in a cotton wool wrapped bubble for the rest of your life as the virus remains in the population forever?

In practice you will at best risk assess your behaviours and consider the appropriate efforts in avoiding the probability of catching the virus. Very few, and I imagine precisely none, people will do as you suggest and take every effort to avoid infection.

Some, probably most, will undertake activities others will consider risky, and expose themselves to potential infection, even if that risk is considered low statistically.

Life is a balance of risks, and always has been.

I think you're taking my words over-literally, and maybe "every effort" was bad phrasing on my part.
What I mean to say is that when it comes to being vaccinated, from a health perspective, it makes sense for everyone (whatever their age group) to take the vaccine, rather than to take the risk of contracting Covid.

Again, I say "everyone", even babies? Well, why not? Having checked current child vaccinations, I was quite surprised, both by the numbers of vaccinations, and also how early some are given. A child 16 weeks old will have received 8 separate vaccinations, and a further 7 vaccinations before the age of 4. To me, it makes no sense to exclude Covid vaccinations from these, when most of the diseases in the link below are far less likely to cause harm to children - because they aren't that prevalent anymore. And why aren't they prevalent - because of vaccinations!
Let's just hope the JCVI doesn't hear about all these vaccinations on babies!

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... 020_03.pdf

Something I hadn't previously been aware of is that in 2015, the UK became the first country to offer a vaccination against MenB (which causes meningitis and septicaemia, has a death rate of 1 in 20, and survivors can experience long-term complications, such as epilepsy, hearing loss, and brain damage and amputation of limbs). Vaccination is given at 8 weeks of age, 16 weeks, and at age 1. The link below is for a study showing it prevented 277 cases over 3 years. (Death rate is 1 in 20, so that's a saving of just 5 babies' lives per year).

It's of personal interest to me because both my brother and I contracted some form of meningitis before the age of two. I permanently lost the hearing in my left ear, and my brother was affected far worse, suffering very extensive non-fatal brain damage and epilepsy. Vaccinations work. Anti-vaxxers have caused suffering and deaths through spreading their false anti-science rhetoric, which is sadly becoming more prevalent through social media.
My personal experience doesn't distort my views as I focus on logic and statistics. I'm just mentioning it as a personal example where a simple vaccination would have avoided health problems in my family.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new- ... -in-the-uk

[9873210]

(The JCVI minutes do actually make an argument for diverting vaccinations from UK children into vulnerable adults in other countries - which would save lives, but not in our population)

The "scarcity of vaccines" is becoming an increasingly cynical argument.

The number of vaccine doses administered worldwide has dropped from 39 million per day in August to 25 million per day in October. There is less a shortage of vaccine production capacity and more a shortage of will and money. If you care about vulnerable lives in other countries cough up the money.

[9873210]

Since natural infection produces anti-bodies against a large number of different proteins in the virus whereas the current vaccines are all just targeting the spike protein natural infection should provide greater protection.

Indeed, but there is a big gap between "should" and "does".

Decision have to be made with available information in real time. However some reasonable assumptions are already deeply embedded in public perception and policy. A few of these will turn out to be untrue, but they will be almost impossible to remove and will continue to kill people for decades.