Why we leapt at the opportunity to vaccinate our 12-year-old

I got an email from a longtime reader today, who asked politely and perceptively about how a person with my earthy-crunchy history finds herself racing to obtain the first possible appointment for a child to receive a new vaccine. 

As you will know if you've been around for a while, I have a granola streak: homebirths, cloth diapers, long-haul breastfeeding, natural foods co-ops, NFP, a homeschooling stint. I've carried my sling-bound babies many miles in my Birkenstocks, and I've dispensed a lot of Rescue Remedy. As you might expect, I had a number of acquaintances who didn't want to vaccinate their kids. And I have a modicum of sympathy -- a teeny modicum -- for their perspective. I was not persuaded about the merits of the chickenpox vaccine when it was first offered to one of my children in 1997; I was aghast in 1999 when the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn because of concerns about potentially fatal side effects. And while my children always got every dose of every vaccine with a reasonable track record, I did decline some of the recommended shots that were new to the market. Is a healthy full-term baby staying home with mom at high risk for pneumonia? Could this be another rotavirus situation in the making?

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be so eager to get Stella a shot that only a few thousand people in her age group had received, a shot featuring new technology that was only available under an emergency use authorization, I would have wondered what happened to Future Jamie. A concussion, perhaps?

The answer, of course, is that Future Jamie had lived through 14 months of a global pandemic, which changed a lot of things. There are four major reasons why we opted for immediate vaccination for our 12-year-old.

1. Children are vectors. My mom, whom I haven't seen in 22 months, seems to have a fair amount of COVID anxiety, and I don't want her to be worried about seeing a kid who is spending four days a week in full classrooms. I really, really don't want my daughter to pick up COVID in one of those full classrooms and pass it along to anyone else in the community. I have often thought about an elderly couple dear to me, who have taken on a lot of responsibility for their grandchild. Their daughter, his mother, seems to view the pandemic from the "I'm going to live my life" perspective, and as I have prayed for their safety over the past year I have also been thinking about the importance of stopping the virus on all fronts. I know the science seems to say that kids aren't the most important vectors, but I feel kind of like Smokey Bear here: a single match can start a forest fire. Let's extinguish the matches, even the small ones.
2. Children are vulnerable. Early in the pandemic our local NPR affiliate ran an interview with a young woman who developed post-COVID neurological symptoms. Her memory loss was evident in the interview; she was not going back to college any time soon. I know that's not the norm. I know the numbers of children with post-COVID multisystem inflammatory syndrome are small; I know the death rates are low (though not in Brazil -- eek!). But even for kids, COVID is a whole lot more serious than rotavirus. For that reason, I'm willing to accept a higher level of vaccine-related uncertainty.
3. Children are future adults. We're too close to COVID right now to say "oooh, that's really interesting!" but one day we will, in the same way that we can find buboes intriguing now that they're unlikely to kill us. (I thought about adding an image link to that sentence, but I did not. You're welcome!) Viruses are sneaky and unpredictable. The varicella exposure that left me poxy and itchy at age 4 caused another round of illness more than three decades later, resurfacing as shingles when I was 37. Kids who survived polio were regarded as lucky in the 1950s; no one knew then about the post-polio syndrome that loomed in their future. What does post-COVID syndrome look like? Nobody knows here in 2021, but I think it might be naive to assume that the kids who have recovered from COVID are all done with the virus now.
4. Children (and adults) need the pandemic to end. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is a situation unparalleled in living memory. Our usual heuristics don't really apply, because this is uncharted territory. The most frustrating part of this situation has been my certainty that we need sustained coordinated sacrifice for the common good, in the face of overwhelming evidence that sustained coordinated sacrifice for the common good is not a universally acceptable option. I am impelled by the extent of the COVID-inflicted suffering and death to modify my normal risk-benefit calculations. That's why I think we should be vaccinating our kids.