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.
On May 13th, scientific and medical experts will discuss and answer questions about the vaccine for those under 16.
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.
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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.
Would You Want to Know a Decade Early If You Were Getting Alzheimer's?
The author pictured with her husband Dallas, who has Alzheimer's.
Editor's Note: A team of researchers in Italy recently used artificial intelligence and machine learning to diagnose Alzheimer's disease on a brain scan an entire decade before symptoms show up in the patient. While some people argue that early detection is critical, others believe the knowledge would do more harm than good. LeapsMag invited contributors with opposite opinions to share their perspectives.
I first realized something was wrong with my dad when I came home for Thanksgiving 20 years ago.
I hadn't seen my family for more than a year after moving from New York to California. My father was meticulous, a multi-shower a day man, a regular Beau Brummell. He was never officially diagnosed with dementia, but it was easy to figure out after he stopped leaving the house, stopped reading, stopped being himself. My mother knew, but she never sought help. After his illness showed itself, I asked her if she considered a nursing home. "Never," she told me. "I can take care of him." And she did.
She gave herself a break once to visit me, and it was the first time she traveled separately from him since they eloped at seventeen. My brother watched my father, and it was not smooth. Dad was angry, hallucinating, and demanding his gun, which had been disposed of long ago. While Mom was visiting me in California, we played some board games. One demanded honest answers. The card read, What are you most afraid of? "Dementia," she said.
My father never saw this coming, none of us did.
Dementia ran on my mother's side. Her mother, my Nana, was senile, the popular diagnosis for older folks back then. My grandfather tried his hardest to take care of her, but she kept escaping their tidy 6th floor apartment to run away. My mother would go over every day to take care of them, but once my grandfather became ill, she took her mother into our apartment. She had two small children, Nana, and her husband in a two-bedroom flat. Nana talked to people under plates, wore tissues on her head, and tried to escape. We were on the first floor, so she could run into traffic if all eyes weren't on her. Soon, it was too much, even for my Wonder Woman mom. Nana was placed in a nursing home and died soon after.
My mother dropped dead on a NYC sidewalk two years after my father started to deteriorate. She was probably going to the store to buy milk and cigarettes. A kind stranger called 911, and a cop came to my parent's door soon after to tell my dad the news. My father cried for death, raged and ranted, then calmed down enough to come back as the dad we remembered for the week of mourning. He even ordered a Manhattan at dinner. His death came exactly a week and an hour after my mother's. He died of a broken heart. My husband cried with all his body after we left the cemetery, weeping, "Poor Buck. Poor Buck." I never saw him cry before.
Now, 18 years later, I sit here with my husband, 59 years old, as he suffers from the same hideous disease.
He is talking to someone I can't see, even laughing with him. He holds a Ph.D. in literature, taught college, had a single handicap golf game, and ate well. We never saw this coming. One day he went to type and jumbled letters came on the screen. He would show up late or early for his classes, wondering what was wrong with the students. He started running red lights. He was graciously counseled to retire, and he did, at 55. His doctor told him it was depression. The second opinion agreed. He was told to do nothing for a year, and he did. He played golf a bit, then one day he couldn't speak or think clearly. I came home from work to find him roaming the neighborhood, eyes ablaze, muttering to himself. I went on family leave. Many tests later we got the working diagnosis, but it meant nothing to him. He never reacted to the words Primary Progressive Aphasia or dementia. I was glad. If he was lucid, I knew what he would talk about doing. He told me after my dad's death that he did not want that life for himself.
I worry I may get it, too. It almost seems inescapable. Dementia has no cure, and the treatments for the symptoms are hit and miss. I thought about getting the full flight of predictive tests, but I know myself, and I scare myself into bracing for the worst. Others scare me, too, when I read their online statements about ending their lives if they learn they have it: I told my children to take me to a state where assisted suicide is legal; it's easy to overdose; I don't want to be a burden on my children. These are caregivers on social media forums. They live with the terror, eyes wide open. We have no children, but who would I burden? My sisters? My brother? Do I stay or do I go? This disease invites pandemonium. Assisted murder-suicides with caregiver spouses of those with dementia don't merit headlines, but their stories are on the sidebars. No thanks. I work on God's timeline.
There are no survivors – yet.
A diagnosis today would paralyze me and create melancholy for all who know me. I would second guess everything, I would read everything, I would cry, I would hardly live. I would be tempted to pick up that first drink after 20 plus years sober. I would even think about ending my life. It would be difficult not to consider. As a high school English teacher, I talk about suicide when I teach Hamlet. I tell the students suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Dementia isn't temporary. There are no survivors – yet.
I often think what my relatives would have done with an advance diagnosis. My grandmother was a classic worrier. She would have been beyond distraught. My father might have found that gun. My husband would have taken the right number of pills.
An advance diagnosis would paralyze me.
I appreciate the arguments for early diagnosis. Some people are made of sterner stuff. They have the mindset I lack. I admire so many who are contributing to the current conversation about dementia and are active advocates for a cure. They have found a purpose in their fate.
I don't need a test to get my ducks in a row. Loving those with dementia has prompted me to be prepared. I have a different type of bucket list: reset my priorities, slow down, be present, educate others, and make my legal plans. If and when it happens, there will be time for toast and tea and a walk along the shore. There will be time to plan for the inevitable and unenviable end. I am morbid enough to know I will recognize the purple elephant in the room. I don't want the shock and awe now. I can wait. My sisters agree. We will keep our elbows out.
Editor's Note: Consider the other side of the argument here.
Slowing Aging Could Transform Society As We Know It
A young woman portrayed next to her old counterpart.
People's lives have been getting longer for more than a century. In 1900, in even the wealthiest countries, life expectancy was under 50, according to the World Health Organization. By 2015, the worldwide average was 74, and a girl born in Japan that year could expect to live to 87. Most of that extra lifespan came from improvements in nutrition and sanitation, and the development of vaccines and antibiotics.
People's lives have been getting longer for more than a century. In 1900, in even the wealthiest countries, life expectancy was under 50, according to the World Health Organization. By 2015, the worldwide average was 74, and a girl born in Japan that year could expect to live to 87. Most of that extra lifespan came from improvements in nutrition and sanitation, and the development of vaccines and antibiotics.
The question is, how will slowing aging change society?
But now scientists are trying to move beyond just eliminating the diseases that kill us to actually slowing the aging process itself. By developing new drugs to tackle the underlying mechanisms that make our bodies grow old and frail, researchers hope to give people many more years of healthy life. The question is, how will that change society?
There are several biological mechanisms that affect aging. One involves how cells react when they're damaged. Some die, but others enter a state called senescence, in which they halt their normal growth and send out signals that something's gone wrong. That signaling causes inflammation at the sight of a wound, for instance, and triggers the body's repair processes. Once everything is back to normal, the senescent cells die off and the inflammation fades. But as we age, the machinery for clearing senescent cells becomes less efficient and they begin to pile up. Some researchers think that this accumulation of senescent cells is what causes chronic inflammation, which has been implicated in conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
The first clinical trial in humans of senolytic drugs is happening now.
In 2015, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the Scripps Research Institute in Florida tested the first so-called senolytic drugs, which cause senescent cells to die. After the scientists treated mice with a combination of an anti-cancer drug and a plant pigment that can act as an antioxidant, some of the senescent cells shrank away and caused the mouse's heart function to revert to that of a much younger mouse.
"That suggests that senescence isn't just a consequence of aging, it's actually a driver of aging," says Paul Robbins, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps and one of the researchers involved. Other animal studies have found that reducing the number of senescent cells improves a variety of age-related conditions, such as frailty, diabetes, liver disease, pulmonary fibrosis, and osteoporosis.
Now the same researchers are moving those tests to humans in the first clinical trials of senolytic drugs. In July 2016, the Mayo Clinic launched what may be the first clinical trial of senolytic therapy, studying the effect of the two drugs, called dasatinib and quercetin, on people with chronic kidney disease, which they hope to complete in 2021. Meanwhile Mayo and Scripps researchers have identified six different biochemical pathways that give rise to senescence, along with several drug candidates that target those pathways. Robbins says it's likely that different drugs will work better for different cells in the body.
Would radical life extension lead to moral deterioration, risk aversion, and an abandonment of creativity?
In Robbins' work, treating mice with senolytic drugs has extended their median lifespan—the age at which half the animals in his experiment have died—by about 30 percent, but hasn't extended the maximum lifespan. In other words, the oldest mice treated with the drugs died at the same age as mice who hadn't been treated, but more of the mice who received senolytics lived to that ripe old age. The same may turn out to be true for humans, with more people living to the limits of the lifespan—estimated by some to be about 115—but no one living much longer. On the other hand, Robbins says, it's early days for these therapies, and it may turn out that delaying aging actually does push the limit of life farther out.
Others expect more radical extensions of human life; British gerontologist Aubrey DeGray talks about people living for 1000 years, and people who call themselves transhumanists imagine replacing body parts as they wear out, or merging our minds with computers to make us essentially immortal. Brian Green, an ethicist at Santa Clara University in California, finds that concept horrifying. He fears it would make people value their own lives too highly, demoting other moral goods such as self-sacrifice or concern for the environment. "It kind of lends itself to a moral myopia," he says. "Humans work better if they have a goal beyond their own survival." And people who live for centuries might become averse to risk, because with longer lives they have more to lose if they were to accidentally die, and might be resistant to change, draining the world of creativity.
Most researchers are focused on "extending the 'healthspan,' so that the people who live into their 90s are vigorous and disease-free."
He's not too worried, though, that that's where studies such as the Mayo Clinic's are headed, and supports that sort of research. "Hopefully these things will work, and they'll help us live a little bit longer," Green says, "but the idea of radical life extension where we're going to live indefinitely longer, I think that is very unrealistic."
Most of the researchers working on combatting aging don't, in fact, talk of unlimited lifespans. Rather, they talk about extending the "healthspan," so that the people who live into their 90s are vigorous and disease-free up until nearly the end of their lives.
If scientists can lengthen life while reducing the number of years people suffer with dementia or infirmity, that could be beneficial, says Stephen Post, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University in New York. But even increasing the population of vigorous 90-somethings might have negative implications for society. "What would we do with all these people who are living so long?" he asks. "Would we stop having children? Would we never retire?"
Adding 2.2 healthy years to the U.S. life by delaying aging could benefit the economy by $7.1 trillion over 50 years.
If people keep working well past their 60s, that could mean there would be fewer jobs available for younger people, says Maxwell Mehlman, professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University's School of Law in Ohio. Mehlman says society may have to rethink age discrimination laws, which bar firing or refusing to hire people over a certain age, to make room for younger workers. On the other hand, those who choose to retire and live another two or three decades could strain pension and entitlement systems.
But a longer healthspan could reduce costs in the healthcare system, which now are driven disproportionately by older people. Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, has estimated that adding 2.2 healthy years to the U.S. life by delaying aging would benefit the economy by $7.1 trillion over 50 years, as spending on illnesses such as cancer and heart disease drop.
For his part, Robbins says that the scientific conferences in the anti-aging field, which tend to focus on the technical research, should hold more sessions on social and economic impacts. If anti-aging therapies start extending healthy lifespans, as he and other researchers hope they will within a decade or so, society will need to adjust.
Ultimately, it's an extension of health, not just of longevity, that will benefit us. Extra decades of senescence do nobody any good. As Green says, "Nobody wants to live in a nursing home for 1000 years."