Opinion: How much did the 30-day delay to start vaccinating children against Covid-19 cost?

On December 16, 2021, Anvisa approved the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 for children between 5 and 11 years old. Surprisingly, federal government authorities launched a series of delaying measures to try to prevent the introduction of a vaccination schedule for this age group.

The unnecessary and absurd measures were proposed by the Ministry of Health. They included the need for a more detailed study than that carried out by Anvisa and which would be carried out by technicians from the Ministry of Health, the requirement of a medical prescription for the vaccination of children, and even an unprecedented and absurd public consultation on the advisability of vaccinating children.

This process culminated in a manifestation of the country’s highest authority minimizing the death of children by Covid-19 and completely ignoring the 308 deaths of children between 5 and 11 years old registered by the Ministry of Health until December 2021.

In addition, the federal government seems to ignore that children infected with Sars-CoV-2 can suffer from very serious effects, such as acute multisystem inflammatory syndrome.

The government claims that it ordered the vaccine as soon as Pfizer filed for authorization with Anvisa. However, it is difficult to believe this statement, because if that were the case and there were vaccines available from the manufacturer, vaccination of children could have started the day after authorization.

How many cases and deaths would have been avoided if the federal government had proceeded with the vaccination immediately instead of trying to delay its start?

To answer this question, we used a mathematical model that consists of a simulation in a computational environment of the dynamics of Covid-19 in the age group of 5 to 11 years. The results are the staggering figures of 23,000 cases and 37 preventable deaths in this age group for those 30 days of delay.

This same model proved its usefulness when it predicted, a week before the 2021 Copa América, that there would be 27 cases of Covid-19 among the participating athletes, a number very close to the 33 infections recorded.

Based on this case and a series of other examples, it can be said that this model has reliability and good predictive capacity.

This same type of model has already demonstrated for many years that when age groups above the average age at which people acquire the infection are vaccinated, this average age decreases and, as is the case, if infectiousness increases, it rises. the risk for individuals in the lower age groups.

In Brazil, the omicron variant of Sars-CoV-2 is already circulating, which is much more infectious, and each infected person can contaminate ten others, and the number of cases of Covid-19 in children can increase significantly, which explains the 23,000 cases predicted by the model.

If the Butantan Institute had the authorization for the application of Coronavac in the age group from 3 to 11 years, 5,000 more cases would have been avoided and five lives saved in those 30 days.

Although the fatality rate of the omicron variant is lower than that of the previous strains, the number of expected cases is so large that deaths would certainly accumulate, which explains the expected mortality, in these 30 days of procrastination, to be 12% of the total number of cases. deaths recorded until December 2021.

However, it should be understood that the model is sensitive to the contact rate between people and this changes according to measures taken by municipal and state authorities. These authorities, unlike certain federal authorities, listen to the opinion of expert groups to face the pandemic.

Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said, “If you don’t believe in God, believe in decency.” The president of Brazil says he believes in God (above all), but it’s hard to imagine greater indecency than trying to prevent the vaccination of our children against the disease that kills the most among vaccine-preventable infections.