Covid-19: The Academy of Medicine recommends not to vaccinate all children

Europe 1 with AFP 12:25 p.m., November 17, 2021

Anti-Covid vaccines should not be given to all children but some of them should benefit from them, said the French Academy of Medicine on Wednesday, taking a middle position in the face of renewed controversy on the subject.

"The National Academy of Medicine recommends extending immunization against Covid-19 by the vaccine (from Pfizer / BioNTech) to children at risk of severe forms due to comorbidities, regardless of their age, as well as to other children living in their family and school environment ", said in a press release this body supposed to bring the consensus of medical knowledge.

Limited individual benefits

The Academy, whose opinions are only advisory, also recommends vaccinating "children living in the entourage of vulnerable adults, in particular the immunocompromised and people with chronic diseases". This position comes after several days of controversy in France over the advisability of extending anti-Covid vaccination to 5-11 year olds, as the United States and Israel have already done. Only those over 12 can currently be vaccinated against Covid in France.

The subject is delicate because the individual benefits are a priori very limited for children: severe forms of Covid and, all the more so, deaths are very rare among them.

However, the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines can occasionally cause cardiac inflammation, very rare side effects but to be compared with the questionable benefit of the vaccine in children.

However, the arguments for immunizing children are also collective.

It would aim to prevent the virus from circulating among them and, therefore, subsequently among the rest of the population.

A potential decision "at the start of 2022"

European health authorities are reviewing the matter after receiving positive data from Pfizer and then Moderna. They testify to the absence of serious effects but on a sample of a large thousand children, a priori insufficient to detect very rare but severe consequences. "If a decision must be taken", it could be "at the beginning of 2022", declared Jean-François Delfraissy, president of the Scientific Council, Wednesday on France Inter. In this context, several French pediatric and infectious disease societies reopened the debate at the start of the week by expressing their skepticism about childhood vaccination.

"The urgency of vaccinating children aged 5-11 does not appear for the moment to be obvious in France," said these bodies, including the French-speaking Society of Infectious Pathology.

This position in turn aroused outrage from supporters of childhood immunization.

The militant association "School and forgotten families", fiercely opposed to "natural immunity by disease", denounces a "betrayal" of children and calls for an analysis "risk benefit of the vaccine" for children.