We can't protect our kids from everything, but we can and must protect them against COVID-19 infection

This Opinion piece was written by Dr. Alexander Wong, an infectious disease physician in Regina.

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A few months ago, my three-year-old son asked to sit on the counter and watch as I prepared breakfast. I lifted him up next to the stove, not thinking twice, and he watched and laughed as I made scrambled eggs, his favourite. 

As I pivoted briefly to plate the eggs, I heard a terrible scream. My son had, in a fleeting instant, lost his balance and placed his right hand and wrist onto the hot stovetop. 

All I could think as I rinsed my screaming, crying son's hand under cold water was, "How could I let this happen?" 

No parent ever wants to let their children come to any harm, ever. 

With this in mind, in my dual role as a physician and parent of three young children, I was excited to learn last Friday that Health Canada had approved the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children aged 5 to 11. We expect doses to be administered to children across Canada beginning this week. 

Some parents understandably have questions and want to understand the latest evidence around the efficacy and safety of this vaccine for children.

I am an infectious disease physician. I also have another son who is five years old. I have reviewed all the current evidence carefully and am excited to vaccinate our five-year-old son at the first available opportunity with absolute confidence. 

I'm also encouraging all other parents to do the same. Here is why.

Health Canada's approval was based on a clinical trial done in the U.S. amidst a major surge in cases due to the delta variant. It found that being fully vaccinated reduced the likelihood of being infected with COVID-19 by more than 90 per cent, an impressive result.

Many parents question why younger children need this vaccination when the chance of death from COVID-19 is so low. Simply put, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Even if COVID-19 is very unlikely to kill children, vaccinating children will practically eliminate this risk. Additionally, COVID-19 infection carries the risk of serious consequences such as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) and long-term complications ("long COVID"), our understanding of which is evolving quickly.

It makes sense to prevent COVID-19 whenever possible through vaccination, especially in children.

The primary safety concern of the mRNA vaccines thus far has been incidents of heart inflammation, such as myocarditis. Recent Israeli data showed that the rate of myocarditis was highest in males between ages 16 and 29, at 11 per 100,000 vaccine recipients, or 0.011 per cent. This risk is likely even lower in children aged five to 11, given that myocarditis is typically a post-pubertal phenomenon, and the dose for children in this age group is one-third that of persons over age 12.