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Women and Children Last?
Mar. 8th, 2021 04:18 pmToday is International Women's Day. A year into the pandemic, there's already talk of a "she-cession" and we know that on average, women have been more severely affected by lockdowns and other restrictions.
With a limited supply of vaccines now available, it falls to policymakers (a majority of them men) to set priorities as to who should be first in line to receive them. Are the priorities appropriate?
For Phase 1, I'd say for the most part they are. People over 80. and those living in congregate settings. The homeless and those living in financially strapped neighbourhoods. Front-line health care workers.
I don't necessarily think women should take priority over men when it comes to their place on the vaccination waiting list, although just satisfying the other criteria like age, poverty and personal caregiving duties will no doubt mean that more women qualify in Phase 1.
But what about children and teens under 18? While their symptoms are typically less severe, some do become seriously ill with the virus. They may be asymptomatic spreaders of Covid-19. The collateral damage in terms of their mental health tends to be quite severe too, especially in terms of older children and teens in the intermediate and secondary grades. Under non-pandemic conditions (the old normal), they would be at the stage of establishing a life and a future outside their immediate household. Not just full-time in-person schooling but all the extracurricular stuff - sports, ski trips, theatre, movie nights, part-time jobs, drop-in centres and community centre events, rock concerts, coffee houses, parties... their lives have been turned upside down. For people in their thirties, forties or fifties, a year or two may be fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things. Not so for young people at a crucial stage in their personal and social development.
That doesn't mean they should be at the head of the lineup for getting vaccinated but I do think we should at least be thinking about it and planning for it. And yet with rollout of vaccination schedules already underway, the under-18 set has been getting remarkably short shrift. Here's one of the few Canadian articles I've read about it:
https://globalnews.ca/news/7588097/covid-19-vaccine-children/
And then there's the New York Times take on things:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/health/covid-vaccines-children.html
And finally from Oxford, this study in the U.K. being conducted on kids aged 6 and up:
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210214/oxford-launches-covid-vaccine-study-in-children
They say it's not a question of IF we get another pandemic but WHEN. Let's keep in mind that those who make decisions about future pandemics for future generations are the children of today.
Shouldn't we at least try to do right by them?
With a limited supply of vaccines now available, it falls to policymakers (a majority of them men) to set priorities as to who should be first in line to receive them. Are the priorities appropriate?
For Phase 1, I'd say for the most part they are. People over 80. and those living in congregate settings. The homeless and those living in financially strapped neighbourhoods. Front-line health care workers.
I don't necessarily think women should take priority over men when it comes to their place on the vaccination waiting list, although just satisfying the other criteria like age, poverty and personal caregiving duties will no doubt mean that more women qualify in Phase 1.
But what about children and teens under 18? While their symptoms are typically less severe, some do become seriously ill with the virus. They may be asymptomatic spreaders of Covid-19. The collateral damage in terms of their mental health tends to be quite severe too, especially in terms of older children and teens in the intermediate and secondary grades. Under non-pandemic conditions (the old normal), they would be at the stage of establishing a life and a future outside their immediate household. Not just full-time in-person schooling but all the extracurricular stuff - sports, ski trips, theatre, movie nights, part-time jobs, drop-in centres and community centre events, rock concerts, coffee houses, parties... their lives have been turned upside down. For people in their thirties, forties or fifties, a year or two may be fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things. Not so for young people at a crucial stage in their personal and social development.
That doesn't mean they should be at the head of the lineup for getting vaccinated but I do think we should at least be thinking about it and planning for it. And yet with rollout of vaccination schedules already underway, the under-18 set has been getting remarkably short shrift. Here's one of the few Canadian articles I've read about it:
https://globalnews.ca/news/7588097/covid-19-vaccine-children/
And then there's the New York Times take on things:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/health/covid-vaccines-children.html
And finally from Oxford, this study in the U.K. being conducted on kids aged 6 and up:
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210214/oxford-launches-covid-vaccine-study-in-children
They say it's not a question of IF we get another pandemic but WHEN. Let's keep in mind that those who make decisions about future pandemics for future generations are the children of today.
Shouldn't we at least try to do right by them?
