What Is the Number Needed to Vaccinate to Prevent COVID Fatality in Kids?
At a meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) the CDC said just 94 children have died of COVID-19-related illnesses. Later, they said it was 170.
Using those numbers, the ACIP determined that it would be appropriate to give all 5- to 11-year-olds a COVID shot. But what does that mean in scientific terms, called “number needed to vaccinate,” i.e., NNTV?
What is the science behind the ACIP’s decision that all children in the U.S. need this experimental injection to possibly save another 94 — or 170, depending on which number you use — from dying?
For those who don’t understand how this works, Toby Rogers, Ph.D., puts it in plain language for laypersons. “First, the number needed to treat (NNT) in order to prevent a single case, hospitalization, ICU admission, or death, is a standard way to measure the effectiveness of any drug,” he explains.
Knowing that number is important in evaluating the tradeoffs between a new drug’s possible benefits versus its risks in negative side effects. The number of benefits should outweigh the risks Rogers couldn’t find any evidence that the CDC and the FDA had done this calculation for the COVID-19 injections, so he asked Twitter users to help him.
Rogers was met with an onslaught of attacks online for even daring to ask the question, yet he persisted. The answers soon followed, and many scientists and informants from around the world sent him numbers.
Once all the variables were factored in from the number of reported adverse reactions to the number of children saved from a COVID-related death, “the NNTV was 1,261,550,” Rogers says.
In other words, to save just one child from COVID, over 1.2 MILLION need to be vaccinated. If you look at the number of children injured or killed by the mRNA shots, the Biden administration plan would likely “kill 5,248 children via Pfizer mRNA shots in order to save 45 children from dying of coronavirus.”
Put even more simply, “for every child saved by the shot, another 117 would be killed” by it, Rogers says.