The life the COVID-19 vaccine saves may be your child’s
It is heartening to see that at long last children under age five are being vaccinated against COVID-19. And while we welcome this development as an overdue step forward in bringing the pandemic closer to an end, we also hope that many more parents are planning to have their children vaccinated than current projections indicate. As The Washington Post noted this week, polling done by the Kaiser Family Foundation found last April that “just 18 percent of parents of children under five” plan to have their children vaccinated, a figure, the Post notes, that “has actually fallen from 31 percent earlier in the year.”
The reason for vaccinating children is very simple: doing so means they will face a much lower risk of infection, hospitalization, and death. According to the The New York Times, hospitalization rates for children up to age four during the peak of the Omicron wave “were five times higher than during the Delta wave, and more than 400 in that age group have died in the United States since 2020.”
As an organization committed to ensuring that all children in the United States receive the healthcare they need to thrive, we at Children’s Health Fund encourage every parent to consider vaccinating their child. And while parents may have their concerns that are holding them back from getting their children vaccinated—whether out of fear or lack of information—we hope they’ll put their worries aside long enough to have a conversation with their child’s doctor. What they learn could be life-saving.