Central Florida doctors urge vaccination as parents debate whether to get COVID-19 shots for kids

Orlando Sentinel - 11/5/2021

Joanne Respress called her daughter’s pediatrician last Friday eager to find out how she could get her 6-year-old the vaccine. The Orange County mother is expecting an email from the practice soon telling parents how to schedule an appointment.

A nurse who works in a local hospital, Respress said she has seen the damage COVID-19 has done to patients, including children, and feels confident the vaccine is both safe and necessary to keep the virus at bay.

“It’s what I need to do for the community, for our world and for how we’re going to get out of this,” Respress said. “Hopefully it will help bring us back to some sort of normal.”

She won’t have to wait much longer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday approved a kid-sized dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children 5 to 11 — about 28 million Americans. Vaccination sites are already popping up around Central Florida, and can be located at vaccines.gov.

Tuesday’s decision followed a unanimous vote by the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and was endorsed by children’s medical groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“At least with the delta variant, we saw kids that were incredibly impacted. We saw a significant number of children coming in sick, children that were missing school, were missing their regular activities,” said Dr. Federico Laham, medical director for Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children Infectious Diseases. “We saw COVID as one of the major causes of hospitalization in this age group.”

More than 490,000 Florida children under 16 have gotten COVID-19, according to the Florida Department of Health’s Oct. 29 weekly report. More than 7,680 were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 from Aug. 1 to Nov. 1, according to CDC data. The FDOH said 29 have died in Florida as of Oct. 28.

Bethany Backes and her husband scheduled their 8-year-old daughter to get her shot as soon as they heard the vaccines had been approved. The second-grader will get her first dose on Sunday.

Backes, who lives in Oviedo and is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, read about the vaccines and feels confident the risk of COVID-19 far outweighs any risks to her daughter from the shot.

“We trust in the scientific process,” she said.

Vaccine hesitancy persists

But other Central Florida parents are uninterested in the vaccines or remain unconvinced they are safe.

Rebecca Sarwi, a nurse who works as a lactation consultant and childbirth educator, said she will not get her children, ages 8 and 11, vaccinated. The Volusia County mother won’t get the shot herself, either.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Sarwi developed concerns about vaccine safety and decided not to get either of her son or daughter the full slate of recommended childhood shots, using medical and religious exemptions to enroll them in school.

Sarwi does not see the need for a vaccine against COVID-19 because she does not think it is safe and does not think the virus poses serious risks to most children. She said the illness is often asymptomatic or mild in kids.

“There is a real and actual risk to the vaccine,” she said, citing cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. She said those cases are rare but still added to her conviction that her children would never get the COVID-19 vaccine. “I just feel like this is too dangerous.”

She’s not alone. In a survey of 1,000 parents, 57% said they were willing to vaccinate their young kids against COVID-19, meaning more than 40% were not, according to unpublished survey data collected by the CDC and several partners in September.

The survey found many of those who are hesitant were worried about long- and short-term side effects, said they want to wait to see if the vaccine is safe or said they did not trust it.

At school board meetings in both Orange and Seminole counties parents who lobbied against face mask mandates also sometimes criticized the vaccines, making it clear that they would not get their children the shots.

“We’re definitely not going to give experimental vaccines to our children,” one mother told the Orange County School Board.

Doctors, data support vaccination

When asked why children should get vaccinated even though they die at lower rates than adults, Laham emphasized that vaccines are an important tool in stopping community spread and allowing the region to get back to normal.

At one point during the delta surge’s August peak, children 5-14 were the largest contributors to new COVID-19 cases in Orange County, shared Florida Department of Health epidemiologist Alvina Chu at a COVID-19 briefing.

“It is easy ... as our transmission has come down, to think that this is all done, but I don’t think that we’ve heard the last word with COVID,” Laham said. “Don’t forget that we have all the holidays upcoming in which families and people tend to congregate.”

Hong Yang, a Food and Drug Administration advisor, said the benefits of vaccination almost always outweigh potential risks. He estimated the number of hospitalizations the vaccine could cause. It was less than the number of hospitalizations COVID could cause in all but one scenario.

Clinical trial data indicate these vaccines are safe and highly effective. Out of 1,450 children who got both doses, three got COVID-19. Out of about 740 who got a placebo, 16 got COVID-19 in a clinical trial submitted by Pfizer to the Food and Drug Administration for approval. Vaccine efficacy, which compares the percent reduction of disease in a vaccinated versus an unvaccinated group in a clinical trial, was 90%.

Side effects were typically mild. There were no serious side effects or deaths related to the vaccine in Pfizer’s clinical trial. The CDC decided that the benefits outweighed the risks.

Scientists think the vaccine could prevent multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, a rare but serious condition that can develop several weeks after a child gets COVID-19, Laham said.

“We can be painfully honest. The only way you’re going to know 100% sure about long-term side effects is to wait 20 years,” said Dr. Kenneth Alexander, Nemours Children’s Health Orlando chief of infectious disease. “Now, having said that, are there any examples of vaccines that have had deleterious long-term side effects? No.”

For those vaccines that have produced severe reactions, those have occurred soon after vaccination, Alexander said.

“The decision [for parents] is this: Am I willing to lose or pass on ... disease prevention and the safety of my child because of a theoretical probably very, very, very unlikely long term, unknown adverse event?” he concluded.

Correcting misinformation is key

New polling from YouGov on behalf of ParentsTogether found that social media may be playing a part in parents’ reluctance to get the vaccine.

The polling found 75% of unvaccinated parents get most of their information from social media and distrust mainstream media sources. In contrast, 58 percent of vaccinated parents prefer mainstream media. Curbing misinformation is therefore crucial, the report concludes.

One of the keys in vaccinating 5 to 11-year-olds will be making clinicians available to answer questions, said Pam Gould, a member of the Orange County School Board and president and CEO of Shepherd’s Hope, which gives free health care to the uninsured.

“Unfortunately, the data is sometimes at the bottom of the communication pile instead of the top of the communication pile,” she said.

Alexander decried unqualified people on social media who take strong stances against the vaccine.

“Listen to the experts. Look carefully at the information you’re getting,” said Alexander. “Unfortunately, immunization has become a political statement, and we don’t let politics get in the way of our love of our children.”

ccatherman@orlandosentinel.com; lpostal@orlandosentinel.com