According to the Missoula City County Health Department, nearly 2000 children ages 5 to 11 already have appointments to receive the child dose of the COVID vaccine.

Dr. Laurie Carter, MD Pediatric Hospitalist at Community Children’s Hospital answered several commonly asked questions that concern parents and caregivers.

The first dealt with children who have already had COVID and recovered.

“The challenge with having had a natural infection is that subsequent immunity isn't well known,” said Dr. Carter. “It's going to be individualized based on how severe your infection was how much your body responded and produced the immune response and how long ago that infection was. The other part that is unknown is if you get infected with one variant or the Alpha strain, will you then have immunity to other variants that come up afterwards?”

Another question for Dr. Carter was the assertion that the death rate among children is so low that vaccinations aren’t necessary.

“When you look at the numbers for COVID deaths, it is ranked up there in the top 10 of reasons that children have died since the pandemic started and that includes all the accidents, car accidents, car crashes, etc,” she said. “So it is still a significant number even though the actual raw number itself is low and the likelihood is very low.”

Dr. Carter answered another question about the risk of myocarditis.

“So what we've seen is that after having vaccination, there is a rare adverse effect of developing myocarditis and it's been seen predominantly in the young, male population older teenager to young men, and it is rare,” she said. “It is more commonly seen after having had the infection itself.”

Dr. Carter then dealt with the issue of possible long-term effects from the vaccination on children.

“We know from decades and decades of other vaccinations that the adverse effects of vaccinations are really only seen in the first six to eight weeks after you've gotten the vaccination,” she said. “It's been over the six to eight weeks since children of the same age in the study groups have gotten the vaccination and there have not been the long term effects from the vaccination, period.”

All vaccinations are provided free of charge.

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