Kids’ shots help protect all from new variants

Cadell LOUISVILLE, KY. — Walker rushed to get her 9-year-old daughter Solome vaccinated against COVID-19 not just to protect her but — 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 mem- bers and want to model that thinking for our daughter,” said the 40-year-old Louisville woman, who recently took Solome to a local middle school for her shot.

“The only way to really beat COVID is for all of us col- lectively to work together for

the greater good,” she said. Scientists agree. Each infection — whether in an adult in Yemen or a kid in Kentucky — gives the virus

a nother opportunity to mutate. Protecting a new, large chunk of the popula- tion anywhere in the world limits those opportunities.

That effort got a lift with 28 million U.S. kids 5 to 11 years old now eligible for childsized doses of the Pfizer-BionTech vaccine. Moves else- where, like Austria’s recent decision to require all adults to be vaccinated, and 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 Univer- sity of Wisconsin-Madison, likens infections to “lottery tickets that we’re giving the virus.” The jackpot? A vari- ant even more dangerous than the contagious delta currently circulating.

“The fewer people who are infected, the less lottery tick- ets 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 har- bor the virus for a long time.