Children vaccinated against the coronavirus with an mRNA vaccine experience fewer long-term symptoms after contracting the virus than their unvaccinated peers, a US research team has found. However, the work was based on children’s statements and not on clinical diagnoses.
After being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a person can experience so-called prolonged Covid symptoms for several months if not years. For example, a person’s sense of smell and taste may be disturbed for a long time, a person may feel tired, cough or suffer from breathing difficulties, Nature News reports.
Anna Yousaf, a doctor at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and colleagues initially included 1,600 children in the study. The team took nasal swab samples from them every week for more than a year to find the coronavirus.
For the study, the authors finally narrowed the sample to 622 participants: those children and young people aged between 5 and 17 who contracted Covid during the period studied were screened. Of these, 28 children, or almost 5%, developed long-term Covid. Based on the final sample, the researchers calculated how often long-term symptoms developed in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
An eloquent but painful result
The study results showed that vaccination reduced children’s chances of developing at least one prolonged Covid symptom by a third. The chance of developing two or more symptoms was almost half less in vaccinated children than in unvaccinated children.
According to Anna Yousaf, these quantities probably underestimate the real effect of the protective injection. That is, the final sample included only children infected with the virus. The consideration that the vaccine can already prevent the development of an infection and therefore also the possibility of Covid developing for a long time was therefore left aside.
According to Danilo Buonsenso, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Gemelli Polyclinic, not involved in the study, the study was rigorous in its structure, but defined long Covid in its own way. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) describes long Covid as symptoms that last at least two months. However, in the new job, symptoms lasting more than a month were considered prolonged Covid.
Buonosenso also emphasizes that the study is not based on a clinical diagnosis, but on young people’s statements regarding whether or not they have experienced long-term Covid symptoms. This is problematic because long Covid includes several fairly general symptoms that children may also have for other reasons.
Both of these circumstances represent limitations of the study: they make it difficult to calculate how often long-term Covid actually occurs in children. However, according to Common Sense, the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated children is still statistically unassailable. This confirms that vaccination can reduce the long-term cost of Covid, but not rule it out completely.
A child is not a small adult
The results of the new work coincide with the results of several recent studies. Other work also shows that vaccination reduces the likelihood of long-term Covid in adults. However, such data on children is lacking.
According to Jessica Snowden, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Arkansas who was not involved in the study, the lack of research on children is a problem because children are not small adults. Children’s bodies and immune systems are not yet developed and therefore react differently to infections and vaccines than adults.
Therefore, when the vaccines were developed, it was not taken for granted that they would work against long-term Covid in both children and adults. According to Snowden, the new study confirmed that it is worth studying children as separate age groups.
According to Bunosenso, the result of the study speaks in favor of vaccination. This, according to him, above all supports the idea that even young children who have not previously been exposed to Covid-19 could be vaccinated. At the same time, all European countries advise against vaccinating young children, and even in the US their coverage with the protective injection remains modest.
Anna Yousaf hypothesizes that the low coverage of children is due to the relative mildness of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. In this variant the disease proceeds like a mild cold and does not necessarily follow long Covid. A recent survey also showed that in 2022, only 1.3% of children in the US had long-term Covid. Considering the country’s population, this still means thousands of children.
The results of the study were presented at the Infectious Diseases Open Forum Health Conference and will soon be published in a scientific journal.
2023-12-21 10:00:00
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