The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine has been given emergency authorization for children 5 to 11 following the recent vote by the FDA advisory committee. A controversial and emotionally-charged topic, parents on all sides are watching closely the decisions made by health experts with regard to childhood vaccination. Unfortunately, those worried about the risk of vaccinating children are unlikely to find comfort in the statements made by Dr. Eric Rubin, a Harvard professor and member of the advisory committee.

Dr. Rubin’s explanation contains language many find surprising to see in a discussion of a new medical technology and its use on children. Dr. Rubin states that (italics added) the vaccine is “pretty safe” and the approval “is a relatively close call”. He says that “there are certain kids who probably should be vaccinated” and muses that “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it.”

Now, before rushing to condemnation, it is important to recognize the difficulty of making such decisions and to recognize that the advisory group did not vote to mandate vaccines for this age group. And, in a way, Dr. Rubin should be lauded for his honesty and for his attempt to speak in honest terms about nuanced data. It is also worth noting that what he is saying is almost certainly true. Of course we will learn more about the vaccine and its side-effects as it is rolled out to a larger sample size.

All of these caveats aside, to many average people the advisory committee’s decision feels premature, especially considering the lack of long-term data for use in children.

Contrast the decision of the FDA Advisory Committee with the decision of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation in the United Kingdom, which recently recommended against immunization of all 12 to 15 year-olds. The experts on this committee argued that the risk of side effects, like myocarditis, make a universal program of immunization inappropriate considering the minimal risk Covid-19 poses for children.

It is worth remembering that Covid-19 is rarely fatal for children. Hospitals are not being overrun with 5 to 15 year-olds, and childhood deaths are exceedingly low in the developed world. It has become obligatory when discussing this topic to acknowledge that any child’s death is tragic—something that perhaps does not need stating—but the sensitivity of the topic cannot be used to avoid discussion of whether it is wise to combat a very mild virus (for children) with the use of a vaccine that is probably safe.

One common argument in defense of vaccinating children is that countries cannot obtain herd immunity until all age groups are vaccinated. Upon hearing this, one cannot avoid making the observation that children as young as five years old are being asked to bear risk in order to decrease the burden of a disease that primarily affects the elderly.

While there are myriad reasons that this is concerning, it is perhaps sufficient to say that it does not seem like something a just society would do. We see emerging an inversion of the historical value of protecting children at the expense of the elderly as we instead ask children to bear unknown risks in order to protect grandma and grandpa. An old Greek proverb comes to mind:

“Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”

This inversion is just one of many normative changes occurring in Western countries that deserve our attention. Normative shifts tend to build momentum over time, gaining more and more weight until we find ourselves in a place where we’ve forgotten we used to be different. It may be worth taking a quiet moment now to reflect and evaluate the decisions we are making.