The Lancet and JAMA publish articles on the need for children to be vaccinated against covid

Science journalist, geneticist Irina Yakutenko writes in her accounts about two important studies that appeared in the authoritative scientific publications The Lancet Children and Adolescent Health and JAMA. They concern multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) in children, a life-threatening complication that occurs after suffering covid.

The authors of an article in The Lancet during the delta strain wave compared how often MIS-C occurred in vaccinated and unvaccinated children in Denmark. In the unvaccinated, the incidence of MIS-C was 1 in 3400 people, in the vaccinated, who nevertheless became infected with the coronavirus, it was 1 in 9900, that is, three times less often. The effectiveness of vaccination in preventing MIS-C was 94%. “The most likely reason is that vaccination allows the child’s body to develop antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in a calm, so to speak, environment, and as a result, when it encounters a real virus, it begins to synthesize and modify them on a planned basis, and the virus does not have the ability to too multiply rapidly, provoking dangerous hyperinflammation,” writes Yakutenko.

The authors of the second work, Israeli doctors, compared the frequency of MIS-C and its outcomes during waves caused by alpha, delta and omicron strains of coronavirus. It turned out that with each new wave, MIS-C was less common, and the consequences were milder. Omicron caused MIS-C 13 times less than the delta strain and 14 times less than the alpha strain. There may be several reasons: firstly, the immune system generally copes better with the omicron, secondly, many children have already received vaccines, and thirdly, doctors have learned how to diagnose and treat MIS-C well.

“Does this mean you can relax about MIS-C? Yakutenko writes. - Hardly. If different variants do cause it with different efficiency, then there is no guarantee that a new variety will not hatch after the omicron, which will provoke hyperinflammation better than previous versions. If it is not only the properties of the virus variants themselves that matter, but also the previous diseases/vaccinations, then all children who are born now and will be born in the future are not protected from MIS-C. But there is a solution - it begins with the “vaccine”, and ends with the “nation”.

The research results can be found here and here.