Doctors push for kids to get shots

Urgency comes as variant surges and school start nears

With Florida’s COVID-19 cases climbing over 200% in the past two weeks and hospitalization rates rising, leading health officials said Thursday the time is now to get middle- and high-school students vaccinated before classes start.

“School starts in early August. If you were to get a Pfizer vaccine [now], you’d have to wait two weeks for your second dose,” said Dr. Michael Keating, chief medical officer for AdventHealth for Children. “It doesn’t make you bulletproof against the COVID virus, but what it does is basically puts Kevlar on you.”

Peak immunity still won’t come for another two weeks beyond the second dose, but children will develop a hefty immune response from the first dose, said Dr. Vincent Hsu, AdventHealth’s executive director of infection prevention.

“Above all, if your child hasn’t been vaccinated and is eligible … please, really strongly consider getting your child vaccinated,” Hsu said. “That’s the best thing that you can do.”

School starts Aug. 10 in Orange, Lake and Seminole public schools, Aug. 12 in Osceola and Aug. 16 in Volusia. All have made mask-wearing optional for the upcoming school year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization only to the two-dose Pfizer COVID vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds, although Moderna requested authorization in June. The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been authorized only for adults.

No vaccine has been cleared yet for use in children under 12, and permission is not expected until late this year — a concern as students return not only to classrooms but to sports teams, birthday parties and crowded vacation spots.

Meanwhile, COVID outbreaks among young staff and children at

summer camps have been reported in Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Florida, including one camp near Ocala and another near Tallahassee.

Overall, children infected with COVID are still highly unlikely to suffer serious illness, but the number is rising as the more infectious delta variant spreads. Nationally since the pandemic began, children have accounted for 14.2% of total COVID cases. By July 8, they were 22.3% of reported cases for the week — in part because of higher vaccination rates for adults.

In Mississippi, where hospitalizations for adults have doubled since July 4, there were seven children with COVID in intensive care this week, including two children on a ventilator.

“Please be safe and if you are 12 or older — please protect yourself,” Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs tweeted Tuesday.

For children too young to be vaccinated, the AdventHealth doctors said wearing masks in the classroom is especially important, despite votes by local school boards to drop mask mandates.

“The answer is pretty straightforward,” Hsu said. “The CDC recommends that anyone who’s not vaccinated — teachers or children — wear that mask as a way to protect against infection and spread.”

And because the delta variant now accounts for well over half of new infections, Hsu added, he recommends that even children who are fully vaccinated continue to wear masks when possible, including at school — especially if a child already has a chronic health condition.

That suggestion is not likely to be popular among parents who have turned out in droves to protest mask policies at Central Florida school board hearings. There is also concern that vaccination with both Pfizer and Moderna has been linked to cases of myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle and its lining, respectively — mostly among adolescent boys and young men.

In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that of 300 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines administered, there had been 323 confirmed cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, 309 of those patients were hospitalized, with 295 of those hospitalized discharged. Although investigations continue, the academy, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association and a long list of other national health officials continue to recommend the vaccine.

“The facts are clear: This is an extremely rare side effect, and only an exceedingly small number of people will experience it after vaccination,” the officials said in a joint public statement in June. “Importantly, for the young people who do, most cases are mild, and individuals recover often on their own or with minimal treatment. In addition, we know that myocarditis and pericarditis are much more common if you get COVID-19, and the risks to the heart from COVID19 infection can be more severe.”

Keating agreed.

“As a surgeon, when I recommend surgery for a child, the benefits of the surgery better far outweigh the risk,” he said. “And I would tell you that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the extremely unlikely risks of the vaccination.”