Your Questions Answered About Kids, Teens, and Covid Vaccines
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
This virtual event convened leading scientific and medical experts to address the public's questions and concerns about Covid-19 vaccines in kids and teens. Highlight video below.
DATE:
Thursday, May 13th, 2021
12:30 p.m. - 1:45 p.m. EDT
Dr. H. Dele Davies, M.D., MHCM
Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean for Graduate Studies at the University of Nebraska Medical (UNMC). He is an internationally recognized expert in pediatric infectious diseases and a leader in community health.
Dr. Emily Oster, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a best-selling author and parenting guru who has pioneered a method of assessing school safety.
Dr. Tina Q. Tan, M.D.
Professor of Pediatrics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. She has been involved in several vaccine survey studies that examine the awareness, acceptance, barriers and utilization of recommended preventative vaccines.
Dr. Inci Yildirim, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc.
Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Infectious Disease); Medical Director, Transplant Infectious Diseases at Yale School of Medicine; Associate Professor of Global Health, Yale Institute for Global Health. She is an investigator for the multi-institutional COVID-19 Prevention Network's (CoVPN) Moderna mRNA-1273 clinical trial for children 6 months to 12 years of age.
About the Event Series
This event is the second of a four-part series co-hosted by Leaps.org, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and the Sabin–Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group, with generous support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
:
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
Where would you turn if you wanted the best advice about trying a new drug? A doctor with years of specialized training? A website with opinions from leading experts in the field? Maybe a review article by a trustworthy medical reporter. Or, maybe even go right to the source — an article about the drug in the peer-reviewed medical literature.
Or you could choose to get advice from someone whose education ended with high school and who almost certainly has had no training in pharmacology or scientific methodology. In America the answer is, sadly, the high school graduate if he or she is a huge celebrity.
Kardashian appears to have blessed a drug she never used and had no basis to endorse.
Drug manufacturers know this. They turn to celebrities, no matter how ignorant, ill-informed, money grubbing or air-headed, to pitch their goods directly to you on TV and the internet.
The latest example of this reliance on the utterly unqualified is the use of the surgically reengineered, reality show TV star Kim Kardashian to endorse a pill for women suffering from morning sickness during pregnancy. Kim, whose science training, whatever it was, ended when she graduated California's Marymount high school, recently offered this assessment of the medication:
"You know how sick I was while pregnant; I could barely get out of bed. That was before I found a safe & effective med to treat my morning sickness when diet & lifestyle changes didn't help. I hear there's a new formulation of the drug combination I took that's made to work faster & longer. If you're pregnant & feeling sick & changing your diet & lifestyle doesn't work, ask your doctor about Bonjesta® (doxylamine succinate/pyridoxine HCl). Most common side effect is drowsiness. Bonjesta.com for info."
She appears to have blessed a drug she never used and had no basis to endorse. And whether she got all the possible important side effects out there is not clear. In 2015, her internet post lauding another morning sickness drug, Diclegis, made by the same company, Duchesnay, now pushing Bonjesta, earned her $500,000 and Duchesnay a warning letter from the FDA for false and misleading advertising. Duchesnay dealt with the FDA and went on its merry way coming up with new meds relying on confirmation of their value by Kim.
Artificial demand creates more expense downstream for insurers, payer programs, and patients.
It seems pretty likely she was handsomely paid for her kind words about Bonjesta--payment that, if it occurred, is not disclosed in her endorsement or in most commercials in which celebrities tout drugs, vaccines and devices.
Legislators and patients often wonder why the cost of drugs in America is so high relative to the rest of the world. Well, one reason is the rest of the world does not tolerate direct-to-consumer ads aimed at ginning up demand when touted by actors, soap opera stars, sports stars, reality tv icons, quiz show hosts and others selling their fame so you will use a company's drug. Increasing the demand through celebrity endorsement allows companies to jack up their prices. Duchesnay did just that! Artificial demand creates more expense downstream for insurers, payer programs, and patients.
We treat marketing drugs on a par with marketing cosmetics, dishwashers, and fast food. And we get what Kim and other media celebs are paid for: useless information from unqualified sources who can grab eyeballs and get you to pester your doctor about what your idols say works.
We all know the typical astronaut accessories—the EVA suit, the oxygen tanks, the radio assembly. But there's an invisible part of each space mission that's often overlooked: the trillions of microorganisms that hitch a ride.
Observing responses of pathogens in space could help scientists figure out how to outsmart them when they cause trouble on Earth.
Dr. Sarah Wallace is a NASA microbiologist who aims to keep microbes from causing problems for U.S. astronauts aboard the International Space Station. According to Wallace, research on microorganisms in space has more than cosmic importance. It can also reveal things about our health here on Earth:
1) Avoiding disease isn't all about maintaining a sterile environment.
NASA has a great track record of keeping the crew healthy on space missions. But surprisingly, it's not from having kept the space flight environment as sterile as possible.
Wallace says, "We [monitor] the environment but unless we find something that's medically significant, or [in] super high numbers, we're not going to do anything."
Not only is it impossible for astronauts to live in completely sterile quarters—crew members, after all, are microbe-shedding machines—but it may not even be desirable, given what we now know about the human microbiome. Scientists have found that the entire community of microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses) living in and on us likely have an active role in keeping us healthy. This means that down on the ground we need to let go of the germophobe idea that eradicating all microbes is always better for our health.
2) Disease-causing microbes change their behavior under different conditions.
Remember the recent E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to romaine lettuce? We're still grappling with a lot of pathogen problems here on Earth. One reason is that scientists are still learning which strategies these disease-causing microorganisms are capable of employing under different conditions.
Space missions are associated with a major shift in gut microbiome composition—as shown in NASA's twin study.
Wallace says experiments with Salmonella Typhimurium showed that the pathogen became more virulent in space. Yet curiously, the opposite seemed to happen to Staphylococcus aureus under space-flight-like conditions—it became more benign.
"The way these organisms have evolved, certain triggers [in the space flight environment] might be dictating how they're responding," Wallace says.
Observing these responses could help scientists figure out how to outsmart the pathogen when it causes trouble on Earth. "It's giving us some great insights into how we could target them differently in the future," she explains.
3) Major shifts in the gut microbiome could affect health in specific ways.
Scientists still have a lot to learn about which changes in an adult's gut microbiome actually cause a change in health status. In fact, microbiome-focused therapeutics companies are in hot pursuit of these connections.
Space missions are associated with a major shift in gut microbiome composition—as shown in NASA's twin study, which followed astronaut Scott Kelly during a year aboard the ISS while his identical twin brother Mark (a retired astronaut) stayed on the ground. Scott experienced simultaneous changes in telomere length and bone formation; were these related to the gut microbial differences?
Wallace says a soon-to-be-published study of nine additional astronauts could help answer this question. The research may reveal how closely gut microbiome shifts track health outcomes, and the reversibility of the changes.
She emphasizes the science from her lab isn't meant to help only the small minority of humans who will ever go to space: "That's always our goal—that our research is helping people on Earth."