As a parent of a 5-year-old kindergarten kid, I’ve basically turned my life upside down to become my kid’s homeschool teacher. Thankfully, she’s a good homeschool student and we are doing well (better than the school system), but even if she weren’t, there’s no way in hell I’d let her get anywhere near a school right now.
12 Likes
There are charter school homeschool programs, too. I’m in California and that’s what we are doing; I bet this is also available in other states. It’s “homeschool with training wheels” - the school helps you pick a curriculum for each subject and every two weeks, you check in with a teacher (on Zoom) to see how you’re doing. My daughter is in kindergarten and I’m very impressed with this program so far.
6 Likes
two words: institutional racism
1 Like
When they have trial data for children 5-12, thats because the parents “volunteered” for them?
Children can’t consent as such, have no idea of the risks/benefits.
That’s a weird take for a parent to volunteer their children, even if it was “for science.”
There are two situations:
-
When the child is dying and there is an experimental drug/technology that might have potential lifesaving benefits. Then, sure. YES. 100% Although, in that case, you have 50% chance of getting a placebo! And you really just want the experimental drug, now now now.
-
When the child is healthy and the CDC (or whomever) wants to run a drug/vaccine trial because its not efficacy/safety are unknown. And in that case, without any scientific knowledge of what is being injected, its, hard NO, no way, 0%. I’ll wait for the actual vaccine/drug.
Yes, I’m very aware.
Yes, because children NEVER come into contact with vulnerable adults. Ever. /s
It’s not just about children, who can and do get sick, who can and do suffer from long term consequences of Covid. Just because LESS of them do, doesn’t mean we should ignore this reality.
We know who is primarily responsible for the politicization of this pandemic. We know WHO to blame. We know WHO should be brought up on chargers.
10 Likes
There are all sorts of studies on kids. The parents need to provide the informed consent. It feels weird because COVID is such a huge thing but it is not.
6 Likes
This.
I’ve got a less than 12 year old, and our options are non-local based remote schooling (which proved last year to be a bit of a shitshow), or risk having her back in physical school with kids of antivaxxers etc… in her “gifted” program. Not really much of a choice.
Our school does have a mask mandate, but kids are filthy beasts, and poor hygiene and mask protocols are reinforced when the parents refuse to mask up.
We are waiting for 5-12 kid vaccine availability with bated breath. It may not be as great at preventing infection with Delta, but it seems to be doing a bang up job of keeping the severity of disease down when people do get it.
Can’t wait for the shitshow that’s inevitably going to happen when schools start requiring the vaccine…
12 Likes
I hope it comes soon. It’s the only way now to protect kids that age from sociopaths hell bent on spreading an infectious disease. I’m sorry that you and other parents are being subjected to all this, though. It’s bad enough my now college aged kid is forced to be on campus, but she’s diligent at masking up and is fully vaccinated… I can’t imagine having to send her to a school with no vaccine and people unwilling to do the minimum to protect others…
16 Likes
Our kid is a kid of two doctors, and is pretty diligent as well, but she’s also just barely into the double digits. There are going to be lapses.
Luckily, even with the noted uptick in pediatric delta cases, the disease really does seem to cause lesser effects in children (as a group. I’m well aware of the documented cases of the smaller proportion of kids who have severe effects, those case studies are what keep me up at night).
The other consideration that the anti-science a-holes don’t consider is that even if the disease isn’t going to be that bad in you (because you’re a child, or you’re vaccinated, or conversely if you’re an idiot and think “it’s not even as bad as the flu”…), you can still carry it, even unknowingly, to someone like my father in law, who is not in good health by any measure.
If our kid got it (or we did), and unknowingly passed it on to “Papa”, who, given all of the comorbidiites has a good chance of not surviving it, the guilt would be shattering. We try to keep things safe (the in-laws are vaccinated) by doing outdoor distanced visits with n95 masks all around, but the community around here definitely makes it a non-zero risk.
16 Likes
Which, again, points in favor of making sure children can get vaccinated! Remember that my comment was in response to you saying:
The are millions of Americans refusing to get vaccinated, that’s the problem…Full stop. We should stop pretending it’s anything OTHER than that.
I don’t think we actually disagree on this point, which is that children should be able to get vaccinated and that even if we forced all adults to be vaccinated it still wouldn’t necessarily help children, or the vulnerable adults some of them come into contact with. Many sufficiently contagious viruses against which almost all adults are immune still manage to circulate through children, and delta isn’t far off from being able to do that in terms of contagiousness.
I’m not a fan of that either. I don’t want ANYONE to die from this.
I only object to the “from this.” A huge feature of the pandemic response has been the way we treat risk of harm and death from covid completely differently from the way we treat risk of harm and death from other disease and non-disease causes. I don’t want people to die or suffer permanent harm, full stop. This, I am told in many other contexts, is an unpopular, unwelcome, selfish, and irresponsible viewpoint. So, I ask only that people be consistent in how they regard different sources of similar kinds of risks, which is something almost everyone and every institution has been thoroughly unwilling to do.
We know who is primarily responsible for the politicization of this pandemic. We know WHO to blame. We know WHO should be brought up on chargers.
Yes, of course there is a big component we can lay at the GOP’s and Trump’s feet. But the roots are deeper, more pervasive, and still political but somewhat less party aligned: most of this country doesn’t trust leaders and institutions because they constantly lie, mislead, or are themselves ill-informed, and this is a problem that goes back a long time. If I could magically reach back in time and delete Trump from history and install Hillary Clinton in 2016, I would absolutely do it, and things would probably have gone somewhat better; at minimum, she wouldn’t have thrown out the pandemic response plan just because Obama was associated with it. But that wouldn’t have stopped the FDA from banning testing early in the pandemic, or state governments from being disorganized in the face of a challenge no living American government official has dealt with before. It wouldn’t have been enough to actually solve the problem.
2 Likes
The problem isn’t children who aren’t vaccinated, but grown ass adults who aren’t vaccinated. Full stop. That’s the problem. Trump politicized this pandemic, because he thought it would politically benefit him. Now we have over 630,000 dead.
I’m aware of this, as I have a phd in history with a focus on teh 1970s and 1980s… so yes… I KNOW. THIS resistance to the vaccine and mask mandates is DIRECTLY linked to Trump and his political actions. There is a direct connection between HIS actions as president, and HIS followers actions. If we keep pretending like it’s not so, we’re never going to hold ANY accountable.
But hey… it’s probably too late anyway. Maybe the disintegration of our country won’t be too painful and too destructive. At least we can hope that…
7 Likes
I’ve long since learned not to doubt your knowledge of history. I’m just much more inclined to look at the systemic forces that generated Trump as a phenomenon, just like obviously something analogous to WWII was very likely the moment Britain and France demanded infeasible WWI reparations payments, with or without Hitler. Trump deserves every ounce of… everything… that we can throw at him, and I wish we were charging him with all his crimes, not as a scapegoat but as an exampel of what is and isn’t acceptable in a leader. But I believe that in this case he’s a symptom, and I have no idea how to treat the underlying societal disease.
I think it was over the day our leaders decided not to prosecute Bush, Cheney, et al after Obama took office (or ideally before). If the Dems didn’t have the will to tackle obvious large-scale wrongdoing, then what’s left to stop anyone else?
As I have 3 children in the 5-12 range, this is welcome news.
7 Likes
Not much we can do to change the past. We have to deal with the outcome of that past. RIGHT NOW we have to deal with the fall out that’s happening all around us because of Trump specifically. Maybe we should let future historians make those connections.
Right now, we need vaccine mandates. That’s the only way to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
8 Likes
Organisation mondiale de la Santé?
1 Like
Expat sitting in Australia, impatiently awaiting my own jab in October. Will be extremely pleased when I can protect my (now) 4 y/o when sending her off to kindergarten.
8 Likes
There is literally no excuse to not trust the billion dollar biotech companies that clearly only want for our best interests! Certainly no excuse to mistrust the medical establishment; it’s not like there is a long history of them using people, particularly minorities, as test subjects in long-running unethical experiments. How dare.
To hell with all of modern medicine. /s
5 Likes
That doesn’t mean we should trust right wingers who have no background in medicine, infectious disease, or public health.
People need to get the vaccine or we’re going to reach a million deaths here in the US from this pandemic. The mainstay of reluctance to get vaccinated comes from right wing asshole who believe bullshit like the vaccine has a microchip or is causing miscarriages among women who get near vaccinated people - none of that is the case. NONE OF IT. None of them (or a small percentage of them) are in the category of people who have previously been subjected to programs like Tuskeegee. It’s really disingenuous to conflate the two. At this point millions of people have gotten one of the several vaccines, and the rate of serious problems are very low compared to the death rate when the disease spreads unchecked.
If you are not getting the vaccine and masking up in public, then you are part of the problem here.
14 Likes
