Education Week - July 14, 2021 - 14

Vaccinating Kids Against COVID-19:
Why Families Are Afraid
And How Schools Can Help
By Arianna Prothero
As teenager Corey Ruth weighed
getting the COVID-19 vaccine, rumors
of computer chips and the legacy
of the Tuskegee experiments were
on his mind.
Even though his mom, a nurse in
New Orleans, had already received
her shot, he still wasn't sure about it.
Ruth started to come around to the
idea as he watched more of his high
school football teammates get the
vaccine.
" I wanted to protect my family and
teammates, " said Ruth, who will be a
junior at McDonogh 35 high school in
New Orleans. But what clinched the
decision for Ruth was talking over
his concerns with his team's athletic
trainer, and getting reassurances that
the vaccine was safe.
" Because I trust him with my body, "
said Ruth. " He provides for me so I
can be 100 percent on game day. "
As fixtures in their communities,
schools have long been a source of
public health information for families.
For that reason, schools are perfectly
positioned to play a vital role
in helping students and their parents
overcome uncertainty about the new
COVID-19 vaccines, say public health
experts.
The stakes are high: Strong vaccination
rates are seen as key to middle
and high schools returning to
anything resembling pre-pandemic
normalcy in many places this fall.
The importance of vaccinating children
extends well beyond the school
walls, too. Many public health experts
estimate around 80 percent of
the country's population needs to be
vaccinated to truly stall the spread of
the coronavirus, a task that is taking
on additional urgency as the more
infectious and deadly variant of the
coronavirus, called the Delta variant,
becomes the dominant strain
in the U.S.
" We're at the point where it's an allhands-on-deck
situation, " said WenYing
Sylvia Chou, a program director
at the National Institutes of Health
who studies health communications
and online discourse. " We all have a
role to play, including schools. I think
the question is how. "
But many parents, especially those
of younger children, are reluctant to
get their kids vaccinated with something
so new. So far, only one COVID19
vaccine, developed by drugmaker
Pfizer, has been given emergency approval
by the federal government for
adolescents 12 and older, and that was
only granted in May.
Approval for younger children
could come as early as this fall.
Forty-one percent of parents with
kids 12 and older said in a recent Kai14
| EDUCATION WEEK | July 14, 2021 | www.edweek.org
Corey Ruth, a student at
McDonogh 35 high school in
New Orleans, was unsure about
getting the COVID-19 vaccine until
his athletic trainer talked to him.
Ruth said talking to his high school
football teammates about their
experiences with the vaccine
helped convince him to get it.
ser Family Foundation poll that they
will get their child vaccinated immediately
or already have. Only about
a quarter of parents with children
younger than 12 said they will get
their kids a COVID-19 vaccine when
one becomes available.
Parents' vaccine hesitancy fueled
by different factors
Whether it's with the COVID-19
vaccine or routine childhood immunizations,
parental reluctance to get
their children vaccinated is something
all schools will deal with at some
point.
There are many different factors-
fear, misinformation, and apathy-
that can drive vaccine hesitancy, the
public health term for the delay in
accepting vaccines or refusing them
altogether.
Fears of unknown, long-term side
effects, especially with the COVID19
vaccine, are stoked by fast-spreading
misinformation on social media
and exacerbated by a lack of trust
in the government, science, and the
media.
Among the de-bunked rumors circulating
online: that the vaccine can
cause infertility (there is no scientific
backing for this and no evidence
from the vaccine trials and ongoing
monitoring of the vaccine in the
general population that this is happening),
that the COVID-19 vaccine
changes your DNA (the messenger
RNA in the vaccines developed by
Pfizer and Moderna does not interact
with a person's DNA), and that
the vaccine development was rushed
(the " new " technology, or the mRNA
used in the Pfizer vaccine approved
for adolescents, has been in development
for two decades).
Parents' gender, age, and race all
factor into how resistant they are to
vaccinating their children against
COVID-19.
Mothers are more reluctant to vaccinate
their children against COVID19
than fathers, and younger mothers
are significantly more resistant than
older ones, according to polling by
The COVID States Project, a research
partnership between Northeastern,
Harvard, Rutgers, and Northwestern
universities. Black, Hispanic, and
white parents are all about equally
resistant to the vaccine, and much
more hesitant than Asian American
parents.
Some groups of parents are becoming
more resistant to the vaccine over
time, the research group found, in
particular parents in households making
less than $25,000, parents without
a college degree, and parents who
identify as Republican.
Hyper-divisive discourse is contributing
to a reluctance to get the
COVID-19 vaccine, something Chou
has seen through her research.
" Not just anti-vax, but trying to
make vaccines a fightable issue, " she
said. " The information environment
has enabled a more polarized society.
That, in part, contributes to a tribal
mentality around, are you anti- or provaccine?
... There are a lot of worries
about identity and ideology that come
into play. "
Another issue at play: People hesitate
to get vaccinated if they don't
see it as doing them personally much
good, said Glen Nowak, the director
of the Center for Health and Risk and
Communications at the University of
Georgia's journalism school.
" You can believe that the vaccine
does have benefits, but that you yourself
don't really personally need those
benefits, " Nowak said, an issue public
health officials see every year with
younger, healthier people not getting
the flu vaccine.
So as parents weigh the unknowns
and risks, real or imagined, they may
feel it's not worth taking a chance
with their kids' health, especially
when most children do not fall as
seriously ill with COVID-19 as older
adults can.
Parents aren't the only ones making
that calculation. While there are
many, many medical experts who
believe vaccinating children against
COVID-19 as soon as possible is
important to protecting kids and
society at large, those beliefs aren't
unanimous.
Some have raised doubts over
whether the country should push to
immunize younger, healthy children
as aggressively as it did adults, especially
as case numbers around the
country are dropping and evidence
is growing that in rare instances the
vaccine has been linked to treatable
heart inflammation in adolescents
and young adults (COVID-19 can
also cause heart inflammation).
A pass from parents on the COVID19
vaccines now, however, doesn't
mean a pass forever, Chou and
Nowak emphasize. Most people are
somewhere on the spectrum between
enrolling their child in a COVID-19
vaccine trial and being a staunch antivaxxer.
They need good information,
time for that information to marinate,
and a sounding board for their concerns.
And
this is where schools can play
an important role in overcoming hesitancy,
and not just for the COVID-19
vaccine.
" Whether it's the school nurse, the
school event, the PTA, the schools
are embedded in the community, parents
trust the schools, " said Dr. Rani
Gereige, a pediatrician at Nicklaus
Children's hospital in Miami who also
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