One example is in the article I linked. It doesn’t specifically compare heart issues from covid, but I’d say hospitalizations roughly equal “all the other bad shit that can happen with covid.”
At the June 23 FDA meeting, Tom Shimabukuro, MD, gave a vaccine safety update, and two CDC doctors (Megan Wallace, DrPh, and Sara Oliver, MD) gave a benefit-risk discussion of mRNA vaccines in young people.
They both used many slides. Yet I need only two data points to support my argument that parents and adolescents should be allowed to make judgments based on their unique situation.
The first is slide 13 of the benefit-risk presentation, which shows the risk for hospitalization in a young person in the last 3 months fromCOVID-19 as less than 1 in 100,000. The other comes from slide 27 ofthe Shimabukuro talk, which shows the rate of myocarditis in 12- to 17-year-old boys after the seconddose of mRNA as 132/2,039,871, orabout 6/100,000.
Again from that article. Well stated IMO.
Some might argue that shared decisions don't apply to communicable disease prevention. Vaccination of an individual helps others by reducing transmission and promoting herd immunity.
I see two problems with this argument in the case of SARS-CoV2.
The mRNA vaccines are so effective at preventing severe COVID-19 disease that US citizens need not depend on others for protection. If someone wants to be protected, they can simply get the shots. Recent reports from Israel on the rise of cases due to the Delta variant support my point: these were cases , not hospitalizations.
The second problem with the societal-good argument is that the signal of myocarditis from the vaccine is strong enough to be more than correlation. I am not an ethicist, but it seems dubious to force young people to expose themselves to a risk for an unknown benefit to society. Once again, data from Israel are instructive: cases and hospitalizations plummeted earlier in the year without mandating vaccinations in the young.