Healthy Children Don’t Need COVID Boosters, According To WHO

The latest from the World Health Organization: healthy kids don’t need COVID boosters, according to public health specialist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan. 

This statement comes in stark contrast to WHO and CDC recommendations of the last several months. Why this sudden change of heart?

World Health Organization Chief Scientist: Healthy Kids Don’t Need a Booster Shot

The World Health Organization’s chief executive scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, believes that healthy kids don’t need to seek out a booster shot.

You can hear Dr. Swaminathan’s press statement on the matter in this video; she presents in the video at around 27:31. Her words are heavy, but she sheds light on a few of the most misunderstood COVID prevention and management aspects that influence our uphill battle against Omicron.

According to her statement during this conference, healthy kids and teens don’t actually need to be boosted unless they’re immunocompromised or already extremely ill. Here are a few of the highlights from the media briefing linked above.

“There Is No Evidence Right Now That Healthy Children Need Boosters”

Along with this development in our understanding of the virus, she assured the public that research into the efficacy of all of our COVID-19 vaccines is intense and ongoing. This statement has nothing to do with any innate inability on the vaccine’s part.

For the most part, she reports that vaccines have been shown, statistically, to save lives and to prevent serious illness in the majority of the recipients that manage to procure them for themselves. However, she goes on to lay out three key factors that chart a patient’s destiny as soon as the virus has been contracted:

1. The individual’s health status
2. The variant in question
3. The efficacy of the vaccine itself

All of these factors, according to this line of thinking, may make prioritizing boosters in young people a misplaced effort. 

Kids and teens are usually much less likely to be immunocompromised than adults, for one. Secondly, and this is vital: our currently-practiced vaccine regimen does not appear to be effective long-term against Omicron, which is why we boost people in the first place. A booster after booster becomes futile with every additional dose required. 

At that point, she claims, we may as well be rooting out an alternative approach, one that remains valid in the body indefinitely.

She does not deny the fact that the majority of breakthrough infections post-Omicron have not resulted in severe, debilitating illness, which is nothing to sneeze at. More studies and trials will be needed in order to investigate where we stand against the coronavirus as it exists currently and how it will continue to change and evolve well into the future.

Herd immunity is something to strive for, but Dr. Swaminathan makes one thing very clear: in her opinion, better outcomes for the individual and the prevention of severe, life-threatening illness must be held above all else. 

Her aim, personally, appears to be to protect the world’s most vulnerable, whatever that may entail as we learn more about the coronavirus. The elderly, the immunocompromised, essential front-line workers, and those with underlying conditions may need a booster shot more urgently than a perfectly healthy teenager.

An Omicron-Specific Vaccine Is Not the Answer

Dr. Swaminathan was also very deliberate in aligning with another contentious topic: the development of an Omicron-specific vaccine. She qualifies these truths with the fact that, despite Omicron’s unprecedented surge in case numbers, our global death toll has not followed along proportionally. 

She says that focusing too intently upon Omicron-specific structures and proteins will “undermine” any theoretical vaccine’s potency when confronted with novel variants beyond Omicron, rendering the endeavor all but worthless in the long run.

Our current vaccination technology is based completely upon the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, as it was first detected several years ago. Another direction that Dr. Swaminathan suggests during this briefing would be to use a multivalent vaccine that incorporates two or more sets of epitopes or strains of the virus.

Her recommendation, though? A third option is a  “pan-coronavirus” vaccine, which is one vaccine effective against the disease at its absolute core. Such a vaccine would be just as effective against the original SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as it would be in any future iterations derived therein. The immunity conferred may even carry over to other beta-coronaviruses, including SARS.

However, Dr. Swaminathan urges public health leaders worldwide not to keep all of their eggs in one basket. Simultaneous research and vaccine development channels ensure that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel for us in any case, even in our worst possible scenario. We need solutions that are “efficient, affordable, and practical, above all else.”

COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy in a Changing World

Finally, Dr. Swaminathan laments the fact that we live in an incredibly unjust world. While some wealthy countries are distributing huge incoming loads of vaccines to their people, other, smaller nations are struggling to receive shipments of the primary doses that they’re still missing even now.

She asserts that we will never heave ourselves out of the pandemic unless our global outreach effort is completely comprehensive, even in the neediest countries with the fewest resources at their disposal. Anything short of this is an approach to the problem that is simply not scientifically valid.

What About Previous CDC Recommendations?

Less than two weeks ago, the CDC actually expanded its booster shot policy to include teens 12 through 15 years of age. Israel, India, and Germany are also very involved in their vaccine booster programs for minors. Where is the discrepancy?

All in all, the World Health Organization isn’t necessarily taking boosters off of the table for minors entirely. Instead, it’s simply walking its stance back, perhaps in light of these concerns regarding allocation and distribution. 

Prioritizing the needs of the immunocompromised may, in fact, be a much more effective approach, both economically and in terms of sheer pandemic impact. Those most at risk should probably be addressed before anybody else, vaccine, booster, or otherwise.

Suppose the goal is some semblance of herd immunity. In that case, we should be boosting those most in need of protection first, as opposed to administering booster after booster to people who were already pretty healthy to begin with.

At this point, Dr. Swaminathan places much more emphasis on COVID management than she does on blocking new infections. Primary doses to the underserved should, in her eyes, come before additional booster shots for those that simply don’t need them.