4 Reasons to Tell Your Kids, Grandkids to Get a COVID Vaccine

1. Vaccines provide strong protection from severe illness

Older adults have borne the brunt of severe illness and death from COVID-19, but younger adults and children can also get seriously ill from a coronavirus infection. More than 20,000 Americans under the age of 50 have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And some kids are winding up in the hospital with what pediatric infectious disease specialist Ashlesha Kaushik calls a “really dangerous and risky” COVID 19-related inflammatory syndrome known as MIS-C (multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children).

"So children are not immune to COVID,” says Kaushik, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

What we know about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines so far is that they are highly effective at preventing a coronavirus infection, as well as at preventing hospitalizations and death from COVID-19 in adults. “So, really, a lot of protection is offered by these vaccines,” Kaushik says. It's still not clear how effective the vaccines will be in children, but early reporting from Pfizer shows that its vaccine had even higher efficacy rates in participants 12 to 15 years old than it did in those 16 to 25 years old. Moderna has not published any preliminary data on its trials in children.

2. Widespread vaccinations can slow surges, variants

New cases of COVID-19 are on the rise. So are hospitalizations from the disease, and it's younger adults (people under age 55) who are driving the current surge, data show.

Unlike what was happening this time last year, hospitals in some areas of the country are overwhelmed “not with elderly, but with these younger individuals,” Wiedermann says. “While they may have less chance of being hospitalized and being ill, when they start to get infected in large numbers, you're going to see something like this, because no one is immune from severe illness from COVID-19,” he adds.