MORGANTOWN – COVID-19 czar Dr. Clay Marsh offered an update on Pfizer vaccines for kids during Friday’s COVID briefing from the governor’s office.
Following the FDA’s approval of the vaccine for ages 5-11, Marsh said the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is set to meet this coming Tuesday, Nov. 2, and is also expected to approve it.
The dose, Marsh said, will be 10 micrograms, one-third of the adult dose.
He said the Kaiser Foundation predicts that only a quarter of U.S. parents will want to get their kids vaccinated. He urged West Virginia parents to strongly consider it. While the vast majority of kids who get COVID don’t die, there is a small risk of that.
And there is a risk of long-term consequences for kids, he said. One of those risks is multisystem inflammatory syndrome – MIS-C – which can occur about a month after development of the virus.
The CDC says MIS-C is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. “MIS-C can be serious, even deadly, but most children who were diagnosed with this condition have gotten better with medical care,” Marsh said.
The other risk is “long COVID,” which comprises a variety of post-COVID conditions such as difficulty breathing, fatigue, brain fog, difficulty sleeping and more, according to the CDC.
Marsh said infected kids can also spread COVID to others even though they may be asymptomatic.
Gov. Jim Justice read a list of 110 deaths since Tuesday, plus 44 reconciliation deaths that had occurred previously but hadn’t been reported to the state, and noted that 92.2% of those deaths were unvaccinated residents.
Marsh again took a few moments to address vaccine concerns among women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant. For those women and for those who have just delivered, he said, the vaccine is considered very safe.
He said 1 in 5 unvaccinated women who get COVID will have premature labor, or will need to deliver or threaten to deliver early in gestation, or will suffer consequences with pregnancy.
Justice again defended HB 335, the vaccine exemption bill, which takes effect Jan. 18, 2022.
“I felt wholeheartedly that we should abide by the Constitution,” he said. “We should abide by our freedoms. … Everybody, I believe, should get vaccinated. But I’m not in control of everybody. America wasn’t founded on those type of beliefs. We were founded on our freedoms of choice.”
Justice cited a Thursday action by a Washington, D.C., district court judge, who issued a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction prohibiting the firing of civilian and active-duty military federal employees while their religious exemption pleas are pending, as National Review summarized it.
Justice said the D.C. court “is probably the most liberal of the liberal of the liberal,” but nonetheless supported religious exemptions.
“It proves that our bill to enforce vaccine exemptions was the right move,” he said.
As The Dominion Post reported during legislative debate on the bill, it allows an employee to present a notarized certificate of religious objection. Bill opponents said employers generally have processes in place to verify “sincerely held religious beliefs” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the West Virginia Human Rights Act.
Opponents said HB 335’s simple certificate may conflict with federal law and existing state code and that notaries only verify the identity of the employee, they don’t vet the employee’s beliefs.
Tweet David Beard @dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
