How kids’ COVID shots help keep variants away

Infectious disease expert says world now swimming in ‘delta’ soup

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Cadell Walker rushed to get her daughter Solome, 9, vaccinated against COVID-19 — not just to protect her, but also to help stop the coronavirus from spreading and spawning even more dangerous variants.

“Love thy neighbor is something that we really do believe, and we want to be good community members and want to model that thinking for our daughter,” said the 40-year-old Louisville mom. “The only way to really beat

COVID is for all of us collectively to work together for the greater good.”

Scientists agree. Each infection — whether in an adult in Yemen or a kid in Kentucky — gives the virus another opportunity to mutate. Protecting a new, large chunk of the population anywhere in the world limits those opportunities.

That effort got a lift with 28 million U.S. kids aged 5 to 11 now eligible for child-sized doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Moves elsewhere, such as Austria’s recent decision to require all adults to be vaccinated, and even the U.S. authorizing booster shots for all adults on Friday, help by further reducing the chances of new infection.

Vaccinating kids also means reducing silent spread, since most have no or mild symptoms when they contract the virus. When the virus spreads unseen, scientists say, it also goes unabated. And, as more people contract it, the odds of new variants rise.

David O’Connor, a virology expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likens infections to “lottery tickets that we’re giving the virus.” The jackpot? A variant even more dangerous than the contagious delta currently circulating.

“The fewer people infected, the fewer lottery tickets it has and the better off we’re all going to be in terms of generating the variants,” he said, adding that variants are even more likely to emerge in people with weakened immune systems who harbor the virus for a long time.

Researchers disagree on how much kids have influenced the course of the pandemic. Early research suggested they didn’t contribute much to viral spread. But some experts say children played a significant role this year spreading such contagious variants as alpha and delta.

Getting kids vaccinated could make a real difference going forward, according to estimates by the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, a collection of university and medical research organizations that consolidates models of how the pandemic may unfold. The hub’s latest estimates show that, for this November through March 12, 2022, vaccinating 5- to 11-year-olds would avert about 430,000 COVID cases in the overall U.S. population if no new variant arose. If a variant 50% more transmissible than delta showed up in late fall, 860,000 cases would be averted, “a big impact,” said project co-leader Katriona Shea, of Pennsylvania State University.

Delta remains dominant for now, at more than 99% of analyzed coronavirus specimens in the U.S. Scientists aren’t sure exactly why. Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, said it may be intrinsically more infectious, or it may be evading, at least in part, the protection people get from vaccines or having been infected before. “It’s probably a combination of those things,” he said.

Ray said delta is “a big family” of viruses, and the world is now swimming in a “delta soup.”