Kids are back in school. The federal government seems to be on the verge of approving vaccines for younger children. And as more adults are fully vaccinated, much of the US is slowly returning to normal.

But there remains a lingering question, particularly for parents of young children: What is the risk of Covid-19 to kids, especially after the rise of the delta variant?

There were reports this summer of more children under 18 falling ill with Covid-19, and some pediatric hospital wards filling up, leading many to believe that the pandemic is now a serious threat to children, too. At the very least, it’s abundantly clear now that children can be infected by and transmit the coronavirus.

But experts maintain that the risks most children face from Covid-19 are low, even with the delta variant. “The risk in children has not changed with the new variant as far as we can tell,” Betsy Herold, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told me.

Herold estimates that less than 2 percent of children known to be infected by the coronavirus are hospitalized, and less than 0.03 percent of those infected die. It’s difficult to draw direct comparisons to American adults now that two-thirds in the US are vaccinated, while most kids aren’t. But before widespread vaccination, about 10 percent of people infected with Covid-19 were hospitalized, and around 1 percent died.

While there isn’t as much research on children and Covid-19 as experts would prefer, the data we do have suggests the risk of longer-term consequences, like long Covid or MIS-C (in which several organs become inflamed), is also very low.

The delta variant is both more transmissible and more widespread than earlier variants, which has meant that even a low-risk disease has filled up many pediatric wards. But while delta has made more children sick, it has not made infected children sicker — it doesn’t appear to be linked to worse disease among kids, experts said.

That’s still a public health problem. If the risk of death for children is around 0.01 percent and 1,000 children are infected, you would expect no deaths. But if 1 million are infected, you would expect 100 deaths. Increased transmission, not a deadlier virus, helps explain why pediatric wards are more crowded now than they were earlier in the pandemic, and shows that even a low-risk disease could lead to many deaths if enough children catch it. With nearly 5 million children with confirmed infections in the US so far, we are seeing that in the real world.

It’s become a time-honored tradition in certain segments of American society: two families cross-reference their respective calendars to find a spot free of school or soccer or other obligations. On the appointed day, one child travels to the other’s house, typically accompanied by a parent. The children build a Lego village or glue googly eyes on felt or participate in some other ostensibly wholesome activity. Snacks are consumed. The parents, meanwhile, hang out and complain lightly about their children or spouses, stopping periodically to intervene in tantrums or boredom or failures of sharing.

This is — or was — the playdate. Prior to 2020, it had become the primary mode of non-school social life for a lot of American kids, replacing the more unstructured play that many millennials and Gen X-ers remember from their childhoods. As Charis Granger-Mbugua, a Georgia mother of two, put it, “that’s how children play now.”

The pandemic, of course, put a stop to playdates for a lot of families. Granger-Mbugua’s two children, now 7 and almost 5, barely saw anyone outside the family from March 2020 until this spring. “They were super isolated for that entire school year,” Granger-Mbugua said.

Now that adults and teenagers can be vaccinated, and shots for younger kids are on the horizon, families are starting to have playdates again. “We’re already seeing birthday parties, we’re already seeing weddings and funerals,” Tamara Mose, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and the author of The Playdate: Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play, told Vox. As more kids get vaccinated, “people will feel more comfortable, and so the playdates will continue.”

The return of the playdate, though, may not be an unalloyed good. Some fear that parent-organized socializing deprives kids of the chance to explore and build self-sufficiency. “It’s a lost childhood,” Stacey Gill, a mom of two who has written about playdates, told Vox.

The rise of the scheduled, structured “date” for children in the decades preceding the pandemic also increased the burden on parents, especially moms, who were expected to spend their weekends curating social experiences for their kids.

Then there were the social implications. For middle- and upper-middle-class families, playdates could be exclusionary — a way for parents to shore up connections with others they saw as “like them” in terms of class, race, politics, and a host of other factors. “You’re basically selecting the friends of your children based on the networks you’re creating as adults,” Mose said.

Now that children’s play, like so many other sectors of society, has been disrupted by Covid-19, some say there’s a chance to rethink what it should look like. We might not go back to the days when kids “went outside and didn’t come in till the streetlights came on,” as Granger-Mbugua remembers from her childhood. But there’s an opportunity to make play more equitable, less labor-intensive for parents, and maybe even more fun. As Gill put it, “kids need a little more freedom to just be kids.”

The playdate as we know it was invented in the ’90s

The playdate is a fairly new phenomenon. Growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Gill remembers spending Saturday mornings playing in the basement and watching cartoons with her sister. At a certain point, their mom would send them outside to play — and lock the door. If they got together with other kids, it wasn’t anything organized: “You just hung out,” Gill said.

Beginning in the ’90s, however, middle- and upper-middle-class parents, especially in cities, began pulling their kids back from unstructured play in public spaces out of concerns about crime. Highly publicized kidnapping and child murder cases such as that of Polly Klaas in 1993, along with the rise of crime shows like America’s Most Wanted, helped contribute to a climate of fear among more affluent American parents. Over time, more play took place inside families’ homes and other private spaces. “It felt safer for parents to have something that was organized and looked after,” Mose said.

By the 2000s, the word “playdate” — meaning organized play for children, typically directed by parents — was in common parlance. For parents, such a date wasn’t just a time for kids to get together: “It was a presentation of self,” Mose said. “You wanted to present yourself in a particular manner so that parents would know that you were a ‘good parent.’”

That meant providing the right kind of food — “people really snubbed their nose at fast food or junk food,” Mose said. It also meant offering not just supervision but, ideally, a fun yet wholesome activity to keep kids entertained. Far from locking them out to play in the street, Gill joked, “You have to have, like, a craft fair at your house.”

All this was also, of course, a performance of a certain class status. It’s no accident that the concept of playdates started with upper-middle-class families and trickled down to the middle class, remaining less common among working-class people. The requirements of a playdate, from healthy food (ideally organic) to art supplies to a private indoor space big enough for multiple kids, could get expensive quickly.

That performance of affluent, “good” parenting wasn’t for kids — it was for other parents, who often joined their kids on playdates, especially at younger ages. “Kids might be in one room playing together but the parents are socializing in another room,” Mose said.

Click Here:

When planning play for their kids, parents would select people they wanted to get to know better, often because they shared common traits from neighborhoods to values. “People tend to find people like themselves,” Mose said. “That’s who they feel comfortable with.”

That tendency, coupled with the expense of playdates, led to a stratification along race and class lines. While kids organically coming together at a playground might form friendships across such divisions (at least within the limits of America’s segregated neighborhoods), playdate culture instead reinforced socioeconomic rifts as wealthier parents encouraged their kids to socialize within a carefully curated social bubble.

For those able to afford them, though, playdates essentially became a form of networking — the kid-friendly version of having the boss over to dinner. “In an office, you tend to network with certain types of people and exclude other types of people, and it’s a similar type of interaction when we have a playdate,” Mose said. “We tend to create an environment that’s sanitized in order to facilitate certain social networks.”

The creation of such an environment may not have been conscious — few parents would say they set out to segregate their children’s social worlds. But it led to the concentration of a number of advantages — from the small, like organic snacks, to the large, like a group of well-connected and affluent parent-friends — among those who could afford the entry fee to the playdate in-crowd. It may not be the most glaring example, but playdate culture belongs in any conversation about “nice white parents” and privilege-hoarding.

It was also just a huge amount of work for parents. Most of that work fell to moms, who historically have shouldered not just the majority of child care responsibilities but also the mental load of juggling kids’ schedules. The demands of playdates are probably part of the reason that parents today spend significantly more time on child care every week than they did in the 1960s, even though many more moms are also working outside the home.

The demands of kids’ social calendars meant parents could “no longer have a life,” Gill said. “I understand when the kids are young, they need constant attention and supervision. But it just extended indefinitely, to forever.”

Yet throughout the 2000s and 2010s, parents kept shuttling their kids to playdates. Even if you weren’t consciously trying to “network,” the custom could be hard to break out of. After all, letting children play unsupervised is now deeply stigmatized — and for low-income people and people of color, who already face discrimination as parents in America, it can even lead to arrest. For middle- and upper-middle-class kids, meanwhile, opportunities to just “hang out” have fallen victim to the rise of extracurricular activities like organized sports.

In her neighborhood outside New York City, “there’s a million kids you could play with,” Gill said. “Only now you can’t play with them because they’re all scheduled.”

The pandemic put a stop to playdates — for a while

That is, they were scheduled. Then, in March 2020, millions of Americans began sheltering in place to help limit the spread of Covid-19. “For many people, playdates simply ceased,” Mose said. “We were all afraid of people spreading germs, and as we know, children are very germy.”

Not everyone took Covid-19 protocols seriously, and there has been widespread disagreement over how to weigh the risks of the virus among children, who are less likely than adults to become severely ill. Still, for many American children, the first year or so of the pandemic was a very isolated time. Granger-Mbugua’s son and daughter, for example, didn’t have playdates, and other social outlets like in-person school, church, and storytime at the local library were on hold as well. “We didn’t have a lot of interaction with friends,” Granger-Mbugua said. Her kids “have some family, but that’s about it.”

As the pandemic wore on, however, families started experimenting with socializing again. Some formed “pods” with one or two other families so that kids could play while still limiting exposure. Others allowed their kids to see friends, but only outdoors. “Playdates changed in terms of location,” Mose said.

Now, as American society inches toward reopening, playdates are fraught terrain for a lot of parents. It’s not just the risk of Covid-19, it’s also the etiquette — do kids wear masks in the house? Do adults? What about snack time? What if your approach to Covid-19 safety doesn’t align with that of your hosts (or guests)? Arguments among adults over Covid-19 protocols — and the politicization of those protocols — have caused a lot of anxiety among kids, Eugene Beresin, executive director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Vox. “It’s put a great deal of tension into certain situations.”

Tension or not, playdates are returning. “I think most people have already gone back” at least in some capacity, Mose said. And vaccines for children aged 5-11, which could arrive as soon as November, are likely to accelerate the process. “There will be a lot more freedom once everybody’s vaccinated,” Mose said. “Or a sense of freedom, anyway.”

The time may be ripe to rethink play

Many parents are looking forward to that day with bated breath. But rather than going back to playdates-as-usual, this time, when many families are rebuilding their social lives from scratch, could be an opportunity to reimagine what play should look like.

Part of that is rethinking who’s in charge of a child’s social life. “I think if we allowed it to be somewhat children-led, we would see a difference in how children play together,” Mose said. Adults may gravitate to people they perceive as being like them, but “children don’t have that lens yet when they’re little,” she explained. “They truly just want to play with whoever is nice to them.”

Giving kids more of a say in who they play with can make playdates less exclusionary, and open up the social world of the whole family to new people and experiences. “Our kids naturally have a diversity about them that they’re interested in exploring in terms of their outlook on social life,” Mose said.

Letting kids choose what they do at a playdate, within reason, is also important, Beresin said. Rather than setting up a craft fair in the living room, parents can let kids pick out their activities and work out any disagreements about what to play on their own (again, within reason). Offering choices helps kids feel empowered and like they have control over the situation, Beresin said.

After all, kids’ play is “a very, very important part of development,” Beresin said. “Play is the way they work out their anxieties, it’s the way they work out their conflicts, it’s the way they share with each other, it’s the way they learn how to be respectful of other kids.” Learning to be independent and make your own choices is part of that process, too.

It’s hard to imagine a return to the world that Gill or Granger-Mbugua remember from their childhoods, when kids ran around with little interference from adults. But even before the pandemic, some efforts were afoot to give kids a bit more autonomy in their play. “Adventure playgrounds,” for example, which deemphasize traditional play structures in favor of more interactive (and chaotic) elements like old electronic equipment and hammers, have spread across Europe and popped up in the US. One such playground on New York’s Governors Island explicitly bans parents.

The Free-Range Kids movement, meanwhile, advocates for more independence for children, including unsupervised play. Started in 2008 by a mom who was criticized for letting her 9-year-old take the subway alone, the movement has helped inspire laws in Utah and elsewhere that protect parents from prosecution if they let kids play or walk home by themselves.

Individual parents are also finding less regimented ways to help their kids socialize. “There’s a lot of anxiety that I feel around structured, organized play,” Granger-Mbugua said. “I really prefer more organic play in spaces where children are naturally together,” whether that’s a church function or a birthday party with extended family.

As pandemic restrictions lift, “I would like my children to get to know the people in the neighborhood, I would like to get them to know the people in their classes that they feel most comfortable with and pursue friendships and relationships that way,” Granger-Mbugua said. “I want my children to seek out friendships that feel good to them, and let me know, and then I will do my part to support that.”

Such a kid-centric approach may find adherents at a time when a lot of the strictures of pre-pandemic society, from wardrobes to office jobs, are being questioned. And for anyone wanting to reevaluate their own kids’ social lives in our new reality, Gill, for her part, advocates a back-to-basics approach: “Let them be. Let them figure it out. Let them use their brains.”

In other words: “Just let them play.”

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a natural jump from animal to human. And while the US intelligence community’s current best guess is that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” the theory has been the subject of much debate and has not been definitively ruled out.

The many unknowns we confront underscore the need for a much bigger toolkit to deal with pathogenic threats than we currently have — which is why a recent paper about a new advance in tracing genetic editing is particularly exciting.

Bioengineering often leaves traces — characteristic patterns in the RNA or DNA of an engineered organism that are a product of a plethora of design decisions that go into synthetic biology. That fact about bioengineered genomes raises an interesting question: What if those traces that gene editing leaves behind were more like fingerprints? That is, what if it’s possible not just to tell if something was engineered but precisely where it was engineered?

That’s the idea behind genetic engineering attribution: the effort to develop tools that let us look at a genetically engineered sequence and determine which lab developed it. A big international contest among researchers earlier this year demonstrates that the technology is within our reach — though it’ll take lots of refining to move from impressive contest results to tools we can reliably use for bio detective work.

The contest, the Genetic Engineering Attribution Challenge, was sponsored by some of the leading bioresearch labs in the world. The idea was to challenge teams to develop techniques in genetic engineering attribution. The most successful entrants in the competition could predict, using machine-learning algorithms, which lab produced a certain genetic sequence with more than 80 percent accuracy, according to a new preprint summing up the results of the contest.

This may seem technical, but it could actually be fairly consequential in the effort to make the world safe from a type of threat we should all be more attuned to post-pandemic: bioengineered weapons and leaks of bioengineered viruses.

One of the challenges of preventing bioweapon research and deployment is that perpetrators can remain hidden — it’s difficult to find the source of a killer virus and hold them accountable.

But if it’s widely known that bioweapons can immediately and verifiably be traced right back to a bad actor, that could be a valuable deterrent.

It’s also extremely important for biosafety more broadly. If an engineered virus is accidentally leaked, tools like these would allow us to identify where they leaked from and know what labs are doing genetic engineering work with inadequate safety procedures.

The fingerprint of a virus

Hundreds of design choices go into genetic engineering: “what genes you use, what enzymes you use to connect them together, what software you use to make those decisions for you,” computational immunologist Will Bradshaw, a co-author on the paper, told me.

“The enzymes that people use to cut up the DNA cut in different patterns and have different error profiles,” Bradshaw says. “You can do that in the same way that you can recognize handwriting.”

Because different researchers with different training and different equipment have their own distinctive “tells,” it’s possible to look at a genetically engineered organism and guess who made it — at least if you’re using machine-learning algorithms.

To be clear, this work, called genetic engineering attribution, is very different from genetic engineering detection: it’s not about determining whether a sequence is engineered, but looking at sequences already known to be engineered and figuring out who built them.

The algorithms that are trained to do this work are fed data on more than 60,000 genetic sequences different labs produced. The idea is that, when fed an unfamiliar sequence, the algorithms are able to predict which of the labs they’ve encountered (if any) likely produced it.

A year ago, researchers at altLabs, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and other top bioresearch programs collaborated on the challenge, organizing a competition to find the best approaches to this biological forensics problem. The contest attracted intense interest from academics, industry professionals, and citizen scientists — one member of a winning team was a kindergarten teacher. Nearly 300 teams from all over the world submitted at least one machine-learning system for identifying the lab of origin of different sequences.

In that preprint paper (which is still undergoing peer review), the challenge’s organizers summarize the results: The competitors collectively took a big step forward on this problem. “Winning teams achieved dramatically better results than any previous attempt at genetic engineering attribution, with the top-scoring team and all-winners ensemble both beating the previous state-of-the-art by over 10 percentage points,” the paper notes.

The big picture is that researchers, aided by machine-learning systems, are getting really good at finding the lab that built a given plasmid, or a specific DNA strand used in gene manipulation.

The top-performing teams had 95 percent accuracy at naming a plasmid’s creator by one metric called “top 10 accuracy” — meaning if the algorithm identifies 10 candidate labs, the true lab is one of them. They had 82 percent top 1 accuracy — that is, 82 percent of the time, the lab they identified as the likely designer of that bioengineered plasmid was, in fact, the lab that designed it.

Top 1 accuracy is showy, but for biological detective work, top 10 accuracy is nearly as good: If you can narrow down the search for culprits to a small number of labs, you can then use other approaches to identify the exact lab.

There’s still a lot of work to do. The competition looked at only simple engineered plasmids; ideally, we’d have approaches that work for fully engineered viruses and bacteria. And the competition didn’t look at adversarial examples, where researchers deliberately try to conceal the fingerprints of their lab on their work.

How genetic fingerprinting can help keep the world safer

Knowing which lab produced a bioweapon can protect us in three ways, biosecurity researchers argued in Nature Communications last year.

First, “knowledge of who was responsible can inform response efforts by shedding light on motives and capabilities, and so mitigate the event’s consequences.” That is, figuring out who built something will also give us clues about the goals they might have had and the risk we might be facing.

Second, obviously, it allows the world to sanction and stop any lab or government that is producing bioweapons in violation of international law.

And third, the article argues, hopefully, if these capabilities are widely known, they make the use of bioweapons much less appealing in the first place.

But the techniques have more mundane uses as well.

Bradshaw told me he envisions applications of the technology could be used to find accidental lab leaks, identify plagiarism in academic papers, and protect biological intellectual property — and those applications will validate and extend the tools for the really critical uses.

The past year and a half should have us all thinking about how devastating pandemic disease can be — and about whether the precautions being taken by research labs and governments are really adequate to prevent the next pandemic.

Click Here:

The answer, to my mind, is that we’re not doing enough, but more sophisticated biological forensics could certainly help. Genetic engineering attribution is still a new field. With more effort, it’ll likely be possible to one day make attribution possible on a much larger scale and to do it for viruses and bacteria. That could make for a much safer future.

Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

Four executives from Big Oil — “the richest, most powerful industry in human history,” according to environmentalist Bill McKibben — testified before Congress on Thursday at a hearing meant to reveal how the oil business has undermined government action on climate change.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform questioned the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell, alongside the presidents of two powerful lobbying groups, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce. The Democratic lawmakers who control the committee interrogated the executives about how their institutions misled the public and funded misinformation campaigns that questioned the severity of climate change.

But the executives, testifying virtually, were evasive. “As science has evolved and developed, our understanding has evolved and developed,” said ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, answering a question about why his company rejected climate science throughout the 2000s, when scientists already agreed that global warming was an urgent threat. Republican lawmakers argued the hearing was a farce, a distraction from other issues, and a veiled attempt to ban oil production.

Big Oil’s big secrets about its climate change activities may begin to unravel in any paperwork committee staff can get their hands on. For 40 years, the oil industry has worked to delay and obstruct policies that would hurt the profitability of its products, even when their own scientists warned that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. Thousands of pages of documents in the public record — obtained through lawsuits, leaks, and undercover videos — patch together a portrait of how the oil industry has fostered climate change denial.

The Oversight committee requested additional documents dating back to 2015, but so far witnesses “have failed to adequately comply with the Committee’s request,” according to a statement by Democratic lawmakers. When reached for comment, an API spokesperson countered that the group has been actively working to comply “and has already produced thousands of pages responsive to their request.”

After nearly five hours of questioning, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) closed the hearing by announcing she would issue subpoenas for the documents the committee did not receive, saying it had received only financial reports, social media posts, and press releases that were already publicly available. Maloney called for detailed funding information, board memos, and senior executive communications to help the committee “understand their payments to shadow groups and to over 150 public relations companies and advertisements on social media, payments that today’s witnesses seem intent on continuing.”

“I do not take this step lightly,” Maloney added, saying that the committee’s goal is to “get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas we will.”

Climate activists hope that this moment could be an inflection point for accountability in the oil industry, similar to when Congress investigated other industries that have profited from misleading the public, including tobacco, asbestos, and lead companies. “There’s ongoing pressure to get these companies to fess up in one way or the other, or pay up,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the advocacy research group Climate Investigations Center, who has collected his own database of oil documents. “How and when that comes, and how much they can do to blunt that, is the drama that’s playing out this week.”

What secrets are oil companies still keeping from the public? There are at least five key areas Congress can dig into to discover the truth about Big Oil’s activities on climate change. The documents Democrats are after could also paint a fuller, more recent picture of the oil industry’s own climate change goals. Some purport to aim for net-zero emissions in the coming decades, but they could turn out to be hot air.

How much has the oil industry spent trying to undermine climate legislation?

In the words of one ExxonMobil lobbyist, the company has worked with “shadow groups” against early efforts to regulate the fossil fuel industry.

In June, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace published a video of then-lobbyist Keith McCoy speaking on what he thought was a recruiting call. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy said. “Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.” McCoy no longer works for ExxonMobil.

Similarly candid admissions about oil’s attitude toward climate action may lurk in their internal records.

Oil companies are finally promising to change, but how much of their climate commitments are just greenwashing?

According to McCoy, the ExxonMobil lobbyist in Greenpeace’s exposé, the company had also been feigning support for a carbon tax, a policy that would increase the cost of fossil fuels to reduce demand.

“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point that we can say, ‘Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,’” McCoy said.

There are other ways oil companies have inflated their records on climate, a tactic known as greenwashing. As of December 2019, the world’s five biggest oil companies had spent a combined $3.6 billion in advertising over the previous 30 years. One of Exxon’s recent marketing pushes has been in promoting its investments in research for using algae for car fuel. Someone who watches these ads might assume Exxon spends a significant portion of its budget on algae, when it accounted for 0.2 percent of its refining capacity.

Despite the rhetoric, the oil industry seems likely to stay true to its core products. As BP America CEO David Lawler said in the hearing, “This doesn’t mean BP is getting out of the oil and gas business.”

Who is calling the shots for the politicians and groups that deny climate change?

Astroturfing is the “practice of creating an illusion of public support for a cause,” according to the environmental news outlet Grist. Instead of expressing skepticism of climate science or promoting controversial policies directly, oil companies and their allies have spent big sums on other organizations that promote its priorities.

One example is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has received more than $1.7 million from Exxon and its affiliates before the company left the council in 2018. ALEC has helped reverse renewable portfolio standards and plastic bag bans by pushing model legislation in states. Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon also led corporate donors in giving almost $31 million to special interest groups that promote climate change denial.

This is only a small glimpse into the grants Big Oil has given to third-party groups. The public doesn’t yet know what, exactly, the grants were for.

How much current polarization on climate change can be traced back to early disinformation campaigns by the industry?

In 2015, the LA Times and Inside Climate News published separate investigations showing that scientists in the oil industry had urged companies to consider how its products were fueling global warming via internal memos dating all the way back to the 1960s. Instead of heeding these calls, Exxon worked with other top oil companies to form a coalition that would sink a binding global climate agreement in 1998, according to documents.

From the LA Times:

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

What are the end goals of Big Oil’s enormous marketing push?

One of the mysteries of the oil industry is the type of work it contracts out to consulting and public relations groups, which have helped Big Oil craft a benevolent public image.

Davies, of the Climate Investigations Center, wonders what the oil industry deems a PR “success.” “Who’s measuring the success of these ads? You’re spending millions of dollars on these ads, how do you measure the win?” he added.

Shedding light on the PR world’s activities could pressure the biggest firms to consider severing their ties with oil giants.

The efforts of oil companies to market themselves also loom large in a growing number of lawsuits alleging malfeasance. Rep. Ro Khanna said Thursday’s hearing is likely just the first part of a series getting to the bottom of oil industry campaigns, with a second focused on the PR industry’s role working with oil companies.

“We have a huge amount of documentation going back 40 years,” said Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes ahead of the hearing, during a call with the progressive group Our Revolution.

On Thursday, the company executives claimed their position reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuels cause climate change. But the industry has not focused on climate-friendly policy in its lobbying.

The four oil companies present at the hearing, along with API, have spent nearly $453 million combined to lobby the federal government in the past decade, according to an analysis released Thursday by Democrats on the House Oversight committee. The analysis suggests the industry has been far more concerned with protecting tax breaks for fossil fuels than it has protecting the planet.

For example, the industry has publicly said it supports the Paris climate agreement, but in the halls of Congress, it lobbied on the matter only eight times out of 4,597 lobbying examples in the analysis. The industry devoted more than half its time lobbying on tax-related issues.

“I don’t think we really need more research … on what these companies have done, and the way they have misrepresented the truth, the facts, and continue to propagate dangerous practices,” Oreskes said on the Our Revolution call. But she thinks the hearing can help the public realize this. “We’ve been lied to … we have work to do to really get that message out.”

Click Here:

Corporations and countries around the world are promising to eliminate their contributions to climate change. But many of their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are prefaced by a slippery phrase: “net-zero.”

More than 130 countries have set or are considering net-zero emissions goals, and many are stepping up as they prepare for next week’s COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The United States, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Japan, and Argentina all aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The European Union aims to be “climate-neutral,” another way of framing net-zero. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia (the world’s top oil exporter) now have net-zero emissions targets.

Private companies are getting into the game, too. At least 20 percent of the 2,000 largest companies have set net-zero emissions targets, including giants like Apple, Ford, and Microsoft.

But “net-zero” is different from zero emissions, and this nebulous term can obscure a lot of important differences in how countries and companies actually plan to limit their contributions to climate change.

There are no standards that govern what activities actually count as net-zero. “The ‘net’ is always there in front of the ‘zero,’ but the ‘net’ part is a bit vague, especially with country-level commitments,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Vox.

When a country aims for net-zero emissions — as opposed to simply zero emissions — it’s essentially promising to balance out its climate pollution, so that overall, it doesn’t harm the global climate.

For example, if a factory owner can’t figure out how to eliminate their emissions with current technologies, they can pay to restore a mangrove swamp that will absorb an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If the mangrove absorbs roughly what the factory pollutes, the factory theoretically won’t contribute to warming. (The idea of net-zero sometimes goes beyond carbon dioxide and accounts for other heat-trapping gases, like methane.)

In principle, the idea of net-zero offers countries and companies flexibility in meeting climate goals. But in practice, critics say that net-zero pledges delay meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases and provide cover to those unwilling to take immediate steps to limit emissions.

“On the road to COP26, corporations are using ‘net-zero’ to block effective climate policy and greenwash their image while maintaining business-as-usual,” according to a report from the nonprofit group Corporate Accountability.

Not all net-zero commitments are equal. So the question is: How seriously should we take a given net-zero target? And how do we separate the good ones from the bad ones? If bad net-zero targets take root, they could shield the worst emitters from scrutiny and allow greenhouse gases to continue to rise, even as the window for averting climate catastrophe slams shut.

What makes a good net-zero emissions target

To stop the planet from warming further, all of humanity will need to achieve a version of net-zero emissions. Any greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere will need to be sucked out again, whether by trees, microorganisms, or carbon-scrubbing machines.

That’s because carbon dioxide, the main human-produced greenhouse gas, can linger in the atmosphere for centuries. Even if CO2 emissions slow to a trickle, they will still accumulate and continue warming the planet, albeit at a slower rate.

The Paris climate agreement, for instance, set a goal for limiting warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, with a more optimistic goalpost of staying below 1.5°C (compared to global average temperatures before the industrial revolution). Reaching either of these objectives would require humanity to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions, but on different timelines. The longer it takes, the worse the warming.

In the context of climate change, the atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions are coming from or where they go, just the overall quantity that makes it into the sky. So in theory, matching greenhouse gas outputs with withdrawals can eliminate impacts on the climate.

However, it takes a lot of work to truly counter the damage of emissions. “I think just saying, ‘I’m going to be net-zero,’ with no concrete plans to achieve that goal, is not legitimate,” said Kelley Kizzier, vice president for global climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. “We have to understand what that company or country is going to do to make that a reality.”

Here are questions to ask about net-zero commitments.

Is the country or company making actual reductions in emissions?

There is no substitute for reducing overall emissions. Preventing greenhouse gases from spewing into the sky in the first place is the most meaningful and straightforward way to curb humanity’s impact on the climate. That means phasing out fossil fuels like oil and gas as completely as possible, as quickly as possible.

This also has positive effects beyond mitigating climate change. A smokestack can pollute its neighborhood and make people sick, even if a forest is counteracting its CO2 emissions, for example. Compared to net emissions reductions, “The marginal benefits of [total] emissions reductions and avoided emissions are far higher,” according to Broekhoff.

Another concern is that there are only so many options out there for balancing emissions. If too many companies and governments try to buy their way to net-zero emissions without making their own reductions, there won’t be enough carbon-absorbing tactics to go around. The largest burden of reducing emissions may then end up falling on the people with the fewest means to do so.

A strong net-zero emissions plan should therefore have large and immediate reductions in absolute emissions at its core.

Are they setting interim targets?

Many countries and companies have set their net-zero finish line in 2050. That’s less than 30 years away — 2050 is closer to us than 1990. And meeting the 1.5°C goal of the Paris agreement requires action on an even shorter time frame. Hitting this target would require halving global emissions as soon as 2030, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018.

That’s why emissions reductions have to begin now. A credible net-zero plan should have concrete benchmarks between now and the middle of the century. Milestones also provide opportunities for observers like citizens and investors to gauge progress and hold institutions accountable. For instance, in April, the US set a goal of cutting 42 percent of its current greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

How much money is being invested, and where?

There are few better ways to show you’re serious than by spending money. How much a business or government is willing to spend on reducing emissions and the clean-energy transition reflects the strength of their commitment.

But where that money is spent matters too. Deploying zero-emissions energy to displace fossil fuels, capturing leaking methane, and phasing out hydrofluorocarbons yield immense climate benefits over the near term. Funding research and development could lead to breakthroughs that mitigate climate change over decades.

Paying to offset emissions could yield climate benefits too, but if that’s the only pillar of a net-zero plan, it could just end up as a way for wealthy corporations and countries to buy their way out of their climate obligations.

Are the offsets measurable and lasting?

The transition to clean energy isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s also going to be more difficult for some places, like developing countries that need cheap fuel and remote regions with few renewable energy options.

Even for countries and companies that can aggressively ratchet down their emissions, the last mile of greenhouse-gas production may prove especially difficult to eliminate. That includes activities like steel, cement, and chemicals manufacturing. Sectors like international aviation are particularly difficult to decarbonize because cleaner alternatives are not yet available on large scales.

“We know that all emissions won’t be driven to zero, and we need to address those emissions through removals,” said Kizzier.

In these instances, countries and companies will have little choice but to pay others to reduce emissions on their behalf. This is the most contentious aspect of net-zero. There are a lot of ways to compensate for emissions, but some have serious drawbacks. Restoring forests that have been degraded is one popular mechanism. As trees and vegetation grow, they can take in vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the air, but the accounting has proven tricky. Many of these projects have failed to deliver the promised reductions and some have even backfired, leading to more emissions.

There are other strategies to balance out emissions. An emitter can finance clean energy sources and use them to drive coal, oil, and natural gas off the market, zeroing out their own emissions. They can also install carbon capture and storage systems on fossil-fuel power plants. There are even companies building machines that can suck carbon dioxide straight out of the air. Of course, many of these measures are expensive, technologically immature, and could run into the same accounting issues as nature-based offsets.

Despite these challenges, some experts say it is possible to create viable offsets with proper measurement and verification. And given the amount that humans have already polluted, it may soon be necessary not just to zero out human impacts on the climate but to achieve net negative emissions — that is, withdraw more CO2 from the air than goes in.

Every scenario for stabilizing the global climate around 1.5°C of warming involves net-negative emissions after the middle of the century, the IPCC reported in 2018. Its low-end estimate was that humanity would have to withdraw 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the air by 2100, roughly double the amount that humanity produces in a year today. The high-end estimate was 1,000 gigatons.

Click Here:

So the work needed to limit climate change won’t end in 2050 and can’t stop at net-zero.

Will net-zero pledges build a more just future?

The US is the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases and currently the second-largest emitter, behind China and ahead of India.

Many of the countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases have become some of the world’s wealthiest. Yet the countries that have historically emitted the least greenhouse gases, like island countries, stand to suffer the most from climate change.

A national net-zero target should therefore be evaluated on how well it addresses this discrepancy. “You could easily argue that the wealthy countries of the global north and companies operating in those countries should go well beyond net-zero to effectively net negative emissions,” said Broekhoff. “They need to reduce their emissions as much as possible, and they need to help the rest of the world get to net-zero.” And many environmental activists argue that 2050 is too late as a target.

Wealthier countries also have to ensure that they don’t hinder vital activities like food production or development in other countries. And again, offsets have to complement overall emissions reductions, not substitute them. Otherwise, rich nations and corporations could simply pay others to fulfill their obligations to reduce emissions.

Many net-zero climate targets have a dirty loophole: exports

The net-zero plans that countries are putting out ahead of the COP26 meeting provide an opportunity to test out these principles. At this meeting, countries are expected to come to the negotiating table with stronger climate change commitments than they presented when the Paris agreement was assembled in 2015.

But many of the newer commitments are inward-looking, focused solely on emissions within national borders and ignoring their exports of fossil fuels.

Australia, for example, published a proposal for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 that relies heavily on investments in low-emissions technologies. But its interim target for 2030 hasn’t budged. And while Australia’s government expects domestic greenhouse gas emissions to fall, it remains the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter and will continue selling coal and natural gas abroad. “Australia’s coal and gas export industries will continue through to 2050 and beyond, supporting jobs and regional communities,” according to the plan.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2060 and is investing $186 billion in cutting its emissions, but it expects to continue exporting oil in the meantime. Even the US has urged countries like Saudi Arabia to boost oil production to stimulate the global economy.

Norway, which is aiming to cut its domestic emissions by 55 percent by 2030, is also aiming to expand its oil and gas industry. As long as these countries are extracting fossil fuels and inviting other countries to burn them, they’ll never be able to credibly claim that they are having zero impact on the global climate. In fact, they’re profiting from this destruction.

While countries are only taking responsibility for the emissions within their borders, mitigating climate change requires looking beyond them. Getting these countries to reduce exports of dirty fuels looms as one of the biggest challenges of the upcoming climate talks.

Despite all the caveats and drawbacks, net-zero targets could still benefit the global climate. It will be hard to make progress without them. But these promises, and the steps countries and companies take to try to fulfill them, deserve intense scrutiny to ensure that they deliver.

Almost every country in the world signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a monumental accord that aimed to limit global warming. But it was forged on a contradiction: Every signatory agreed that everyone must do something to address the urgent threat of climate change, but no one at the time pledged to do enough.

In the years since the agreement, the emissions that trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere have continued to rise. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by humans, reached a record high of 419 parts per million in the atmosphere this year.

The Paris agreement aimed to limit global warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, compared to temperatures before the Industrial Revolution, with a more optimistic goal of staying below 1.5°C. Both of these goals would require rapid and radical shifts away from fossil fuels — and eventually, zeroing out emissions of greenhouse gases entirely.

Signatories did agree that they would set more ambitious targets for themselves over time and eventually get on track to meet global climate goals. Whether they will actually do so is about to be tested over the next two weeks at COP26, the most important international climate conference in years.

“This is definitely the biggest [climate meeting] since Paris, and it has to be a turning point if we’re going to be successful,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute.

As the White House revealed Thursday, President Joe Biden has stripped a lot from his Build Back Better framework to placate moderate Democrats. Free community college is out, as is Medicare coverage of dental and vision services, among several other priorities.

But there is one surprising area that’s so far survived the congressional gauntlet as part of a big climate spending proposal: forest management and conservation. The bill — which Democrats are trying to pass with a simple Senate majority using the reconciliation process — allocates roughly $27 billion for spending related to federal, state, and tribal forests.

While that’s just a sliver of the roughly $1.75 trillion spending package, it’s an enormous and historic number, said Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s the most significant investment ever in our national forests,” O’Mara told Vox. “It’s an astonishingly big deal.”

A large chunk of those funds would go toward preventing wildfires — which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and have devastated Western towns — and toward more equitable access to green spaces. The bill would also set aside billions of dollars for ecosystem restoration and more environmentally friendly farming practices.

Biden’s framework reveals that conserving forests and biodiversity is a core component of the nation’s plan to tackle climate change, as many scientists say it should be: Trees and soil are a natural sink for carbon dioxide, making forests a key solution for cutting climate pollution. Yet for decades, biodiversity conservation and climate change have largely been considered separate issues. The bill also shows that the US government has recognized the growing threat of climate-fueled wildfires and is willing to fund the Forest Service to do something about it.

But a few big questions remain, including whether the bill will pass. And some forest advocates fear that the boost in spending could actually increase commercial logging — which, in turn, fuels climate change.

The bulk of the money would go toward preventing wildfires

More than half of the $27 billion for forests would go toward reducing the risk of wildfires, such as through prescribed burns, largely within the wildland-urban interface. That’s where forests meet human developments and wildfires tend to do the most damage.

Putting billions into fire prevention isn’t a huge surprise. Climate change is making forest fires worse, and they spew a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the air. This summer, for example, fires in the American West belched 130 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere — that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 28 million passenger cars.

The past decade — and especially this past year — has made the risk of wildfires hard for Congress to ignore, O’Mara said. “There are so many members of the Senate that have been affected by these massive fires,” he said. “The lack of care and restoration [of forests] has had devastating consequences.”

In the past, the US Forest Service’s wildfire budget hasn’t matched the challenges posed by climate change. Biden’s framework would dramatically boost spending, according to Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy organization. “It’s a huge investment,” he said.

It also allocates $2.5 billion for urban forestry projects that seek to provide more equal access to forests and parks — roughly six times more than the government spends on those projects today, according to Joel Pannell, the vice president of urban forest policy at the nonprofit American Forests. “We’ve never seen this sort of investment in urban and community forestry,” Pannell said.

But while many conservation groups have responded positively, key questions remain about whether the Forest Service will spend the money for fire prevention effectively, Hartl said. The growing threat of wildfires is linked to both climate change and years of mismanagement of the nation’s forests, he said. Historically, the Forest Service has tried to manage forests and reduce wildlife risk partly through commercial logging, he added, which environmental advocates say increases carbon emissions.

According to Dominick DellaSala, the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forest advocacy organization, the Forest Service often uses fire prevention as an excuse to sell timber. “By putting more logging on the landscape, you are not going to reduce fire intensity,” he said.

The Forest Service told Vox it does not comment on pending legislation. A spokesperson for the agency said it “is committed to the thoughtful stewardship of our national forests and their carbon storage potential.” The spokesperson continued, “Our nation faces a forest health crisis due, in part, to the effects of a changing climate, including drought, unprecedented wildfires, and other stresses and disturbances.”

If the bill passes, the agency should instead direct that money toward hiring and training a new generation of forest stewards who will focus on restoring public land with ecological and climate goals in mind, Hartl said. (The bill does include funding for the Civilian Climate Corps, which would hire young workers for restoration, among other conservation activities.)

“It’s promising, but I think Congress has to have a laser-like focus on the implementation of this money in the years to come,” Hartl said. “It’s an enormous investment in these public lands. One would hope that there are no more excuses for doing a bad job.”

A lifeline for threatened plants and animals

President Biden’s framework would also provide billions of dollars for conserving biodiversity. The bill allocates $50 million for protecting old-growth trees and another $50 million for conserving and restoring habitats for threatened species in public forests. It would put another $50 million toward reducing human-wildlife conflict on these lands, such as between ranchers and wolves.

Click Here:

Remarkably, the framework also includes a huge and historic sum for conservation activities on US farmland, O’Mara said — another $27 billion or so. “We think it’s the biggest investment in climate-smart agricultural practices ever,” O’Mara said (meaning, farming practices that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions or make crops more resilient to climate change).

It includes $9 billion for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which helps farmers make their land more sustainable, such as by improving soil health, and $4 billion for the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the largest conservation program in the US, according to the government. The CSP helps farmers make habitats for wildlife, reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, and make their crops more resilient to extreme weather.

“This support can increase a farm’s adaptive capacity in the face of extreme weather events and other climate-related impacts,” the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said in a statement Thursday.

Efforts like these to make working lands including farms more sustainable are part of Biden’s push to conserve at least 30 percent of US land by 2030. The administration will have a hard time hitting that figure without including sustainably run farms and ranches.

The bill also includes several provisions that directly target the conservation of wildlife. It would allocate roughly $200 million for the Endangered Species Act — largely considered the most important law for wildlife in the US — and another $250 million for wildlife refuges and state wildlife management areas, according to the US nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. It even provides some money for conserving and managing wildlife corridors.

“We were worried that a diminished bill might cut imperative funding for endangered species recovery, but we are thrilled to see these provisions and many more have made it through,” Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement on Thursday. “This bill, as it stands now, would be a historic investment.”

More than 28 million children across the US are now eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations, a step that could relieve anxiety for families, bring more kids back to schools, and slow the spread of the disease.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 after an advisory committee voted 14-0 to recommend the shots. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration last week granted an emergency use authorization to the vaccine, concluding that its benefits outweigh the risks in young kids.

Distribution of these vaccines has already begun, and the CDC expects to reach “full capacity” for pediatric vaccines by the week of November 8.

Immunizing young children against Covid-19 would make it more difficult for the coronavirus to spread and protect kids from falling ill. It’s big news for parents and kids, in part because the vaccine could ease the return to in-person schooling. “Vaccinating younger children against Covid-19 will bring us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy,” said acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, in a statement.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine currently has full FDA approval for people ages 16 and older and a separate emergency use authorization for adolescents between 12 and 16. The emergency-use designation allows health workers to administer new vaccines during a public health emergency based on data from clinical trials. Full approval requires more clinical data and allows manufacturers to market vaccines and continue selling them after the public health emergency ends.

While children are generally at much lower risk of severe illness from Covid-19 than older adults, at least 690 children from birth to the age of 18 have died from the disease in the US so far. About 8,300 5- to 11-year-olds have been hospitalized for Covid-19, and at least 146 have died. Vaccines will drastically lower the chances of that happening, while also whittling down the risk that children will pass on the virus to others.

Although vaccines are the most effective tool for containing Covid-19, the experiences of older adults show that they’re not always enough. Infections after vaccination, known as breakthrough infections, are usually mild, but they have sickened and killed some people. The protection offered by vaccines can also wane over time. Changes in the virus itself have created variants like delta, which spreads more readily and can evade immune protection. That’s why health officials have recommended that vaccinated people continue to wear masks and maintain social distance in high-risk situations, like crowded indoor environments.

It’s not clear yet how much longer such measures will remain in place in schools, but as more kids get their shots, the odds rise that students can go to class without masks.

Why Covid-19 vaccines for kids took so long to be approved

In the early days of the pandemic, doctors reported that adults were most vulnerable to severe illness from Covid-19, particularly older adults and those with preexisting health conditions like high blood pressure and other heart conditions. That trend has continued, and unvaccinated adults continue to experience the largest number of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease.

By contrast, children appeared to be at far lower risk of contracting the disease and seemed to have less severe outcomes, so young people became a lower priority for vaccinations than adults. However, as the vaccines rolled out and more adults gained immune protection, the relatively small number of infections in children started making up a larger proportion of Covid-19 cases.

“The focus was to get a vaccine for adults first,” said Kawsar Talaat, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who led a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial in children. “Once the trial in adults was finished, then it started going down in age.”

The initial clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, also known by the brand name Comirnaty, included participants aged 16 and up. Then the companies conducted further trials with the same vaccine formulation in kids as young as 12, which led experimenters to reconsider what dose of the vaccine was needed in young children.

“The incredibly robust immune response in the 12 to 15-year-olds made them think that maybe they didn’t need that high of a dose,” Talaat said. “There was a new study that started to look at the vaccine specifically in kids under 12, and we decided to test different doses.”

Researchers repeated the clinical trials in 5- to 11-year-olds, but with about one-third of the dose of vaccine that’s used in adults. The lower dose aims to minimize side effects and account for the fact that young children are both physically smaller and tend to have more robust immune systems than adults.

“Kids are not just little adults,” said Jennifer Nayak, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Their size is different, but their immune systems are also different.”

Children who received the low-dose Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, 10 micrograms, experienced an immune response comparable to adults who got the higher dose, according to the Pfizer/BioNTech trial. After the second injection, the trial showed, the vaccine was 90.7 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19.

The trials, however, included just 4,600 children, compared to the trial in adults that included 44,000 participants. The pool of children in the trial was smaller because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has already been administered to hundreds of millions of people around the world with a strong safety record.

However, some complications did emerge. For instance, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is not recommended for people who are severely allergic to any vaccine ingredient, or who had an allergic reaction to the first dose. Researchers have also found that some recipients of mRNA vaccines, like the one from Pfizer/BioNTech, may be linked to rare cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.

The trials in children showed no serious side effects, but some reported symptoms like pain at the injection site, redness, swelling, chills, and fever, with more side effects reported after the second dose.

While the wait for Covid-19 vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds has been agonizing for kids and adults alike, this is still a record-breaking pace for vaccine approval. The previous record for a pediatric vaccine was held by the mumps shot, which took four years to develop.

Only 18 months have passed since the World Health Organization declared the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 11 months have passed since the FDA granted its first emergency use authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine.

What vaccinating children means for the US epidemic

It’s clear that children have suffered greatly from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the kids who have been sickened and killed by the disease, millions more have lost caregivers and family members or struggled to keep up with their education as schools shifted to remote learning. The pandemic has also taken an enormous toll on mental health.

And though almost all children survive coronavirus infections, they can still infect others who are more vulnerable to some degree. That not only threatens to make other people sick, but also increases the chances that the virus will acquire dangerous mutations. So vaccinating children is likely important not just to protect them individually, but to limit the further spread of Covid-19.

Yet the current stage of the US epidemic is different from when Covid-19 vaccines began distribution to adults in December 2020. At that time, there were critical limitations on US supplies of the vaccine, so health officials debated exactly who should be at the front of the line.

Now, the US has stockpiled lots of Covid-19 vaccines, and some adults have become eligible for booster doses. Young children do remain at a lower risk of severe Covid-19 than adults, so health officials recommend that children receive their first injections at doctor’s offices rather than mass-vaccination sites.

“As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated,” said CDC director Rochelle Walensky in a statement.

Click Here:

One concern, however, is that families will decide whether to vaccinate their children, likely along the same fault lines that have defined Covid-19 vaccinations for adults. Age, income, ethnicity, and political beliefs are key variables shaping whether Americans get vaccinated, and some families seem especially hesitant about vaccinating young kids. (Having only an emergency-use vaccine authorization for young kids may contribute to hesitancy, despite safety data backing it.) School districts around the US will also come to different conclusions about whether to mandate, encourage, or remain indifferent about children getting their shots.

“I imagine there is going to be a huge amount of geographic variability on this,” said Nayak.

So far, vaccination rates are highest in older people and lowest in younger people, and if the pattern holds, it’s likely that 5- to 11-year-old children will have some of the lowest rates of vaccine uptake. Getting those numbers up will take time.

Another hurdle is that not every child has good access to medical professionals and can easily get to a doctor to receive a shot. Misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, like the myth that they cause reproductive harm, could interfere with the rollout as well, according to Nayak.

Still, the more people who are vaccinated against Covid-19, the harder it is for the virus to spread. As more children head back to schools in person and more people gather indoors, having 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated could blunt another winter spike in infections across the whole population. “We’re seeing that in places with high vaccination rates, transmission is lower than in places with low vaccination rates,” Talaat said. “I’m really excited about vaccinating my 10-year-old.”

Researchers are still planning to keep an eye on the children who participated in clinical trials for more than two years, to keep track of their level of protection and to monitor for any potential long-term complications. Some fraction of vaccinated children are also likely to experience breakthrough infections, and over time, protection from the vaccine may wane.

There are also Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials underway in children as young as 6 months old, so even more kids in the future may be eligible to get these shots. But again, even if they gain approval, the vaccines will only make a big difference if kids actually get them.