A2 THE BULLETIN • MONDAY, JUNE 21, 2021
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LOCAL, STATE & NATION
DESCHUTES COUNTY
COVID-19 data for Sunday, June 20 :
Deschutes County cases: 10,015 (13 new cases)
Deschutes County deaths: 82 (zero new deaths)
Crook County cases: 1,292 (1 new case)
Crook County deaths: 23 (zero new deaths)
Jefferson County cases: 2,368 (1 new case)
Jefferson County deaths: 39 (zero new deaths)
Oregon cases: 206,774 (200 new cases)
Oregon deaths: 2,754 (1 new death)
New COVID-19 cases per day
129 new cases
(July 16)
EMAIL
100
June 10*
50
new
cases
*Jan. 31: No
data reported.
*June 10:
Number
includes several
days of data
due to a
reporting delay.
60
50
40
31 new cases
(Oct. 31)
30
16 new cases
20
(May 20)
1st case
10
(March 11)
March 2020
90
70
(Sept. 19)
9 new cases
ONLINE
110
80
(Nov. 14)
8 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.
74
new
cases
(April 10)
(Feb. 17)
28 new cases
120
(May 8)
7-day
average
(Nov. 27)
130
115 new
cases
(Jan. 1)
47 new cases
541-382-1811
bulletin@bendbulletin.com
(April 29)
108 new cases
90
new
cases
BULLETIN
GRAPHIC
125 new cases
(Dec. 4)
Vaccines are available.
Find a list of vaccination
sites and other information
about the COVID-19
vaccines online:
centraloregoncovidvaccine.com
If you have questions, call
541-382-4321.
GENERAL
INFORMATION
www.bendbulletin.com
SOURCES: OREGON HEALTH AUTHORITY,
DESCHUTES COUNTY HEALTH SERVICES
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Not all experts are ready to vaccinate kids
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BY ARTHUR ALLEN
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Lucien Wiggins, 12, arrived
at Tufts Children’s Hospital by
ambulance June 7 with chest
pains, dizziness and high lev-
els of a protein in his blood
that indicated inflammation of
his heart. The symptoms had
begun a day earlier, the morn-
ing after his second vaccina-
tion with the Pfizer-BioNTech
mRNA shot.
For Dr. Sara Ross, chief of
pediatric critical care at the
Boston hospital, the event
confirmed a doubt she’d been
nursing: Was the country
pushing its luck by vaccinating
children against COVID-19 at
a time when the disease was
relatively mild in the young —
and skepticism of vaccines was
frighteningly high?
“I have practiced pediatric
ICU for almost 15 years and I
have never taken care of a sin-
gle patient with a vaccine-re-
lated complication until now,”
Ross told KHN. “Our standard
for safety seems to be different
for all the other vaccines we ex-
pose children to.”
To be sure, cases of myocar-
ditis like Lucien’s have been
rare, and the reported side ef-
fects, though sometimes se-
rious, generally resolve with
pain relievers and, sometimes,
infusions of antibodies. And
a COVID-19 infection itself is
far more likely than a vaccine
to cause myocarditis, including
in younger people.
Lucien went home, on the
mend, after two days on in-
travenous ibuprofen in in-
tensive care. Most of the 800
or so cases of heart problems
among all ages reported to a
federal vaccine safety database
through May 31 followed a
similar course. Yet the pattern
of these cases — most occurred
in young males after the sec-
ond Pfizer or Moderna shot —
suggested that the ailment was
caused by the vaccine, rather
than being coincidental.
At a time when the vacci-
nation campaign is slowing,
leading political conservatives
are openly spreading disinfor-
mation about vaccines, and sci-
entists fear a possible upsurge
in cases this fall or winter, side
effects in young people pose a
conundrum for public health
officials.
The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s vac-
cine advisory committee met
Friday to discuss the possi-
ble link and whether it merits
changing its recommendations
for vaccinating teenagers with
the Pfizer vaccine, which the
Food and Drug Administra-
tion last month authorized for
children 12 and older. A simi-
lar authorization for the Mod-
erna vaccine is pending, and
both companies are conduct-
ing clinical trials that will test
their vaccines on children as
young as 6 months old.
At a meeting of an FDA ad-
visory committee this month,
vaccine experts suggested that
the agency require the phar-
maceutical companies to hold
larger and longer clinical trials
for the younger age groups. A
few said FDA should hold off
on authorizing vaccination of
younger children for up to a
year or two.
Interestingly, Lucien and his
mother, Beth Clarke, of Roch-
ester, New Hampshire, dis-
Oregon will miss this week’s original vaccine goal
123RF
The safety of COVID-19 vaccinations for children has proved contro-
versial. “We all want a pediatric vaccine, but I’m concerned about the
safety issue,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious dis-
eases at Tufts Children’s Hospital in Boston.
agreed. Her son’s reaction was
“odd,” she said, but “I’d rather
him get a side effect (that doc-
tors) can help with than get
COVID and possibly die. And
he feels that way, which is more
important. He thinks all his
friends should get it.”
COVID-19’s toll on youths
Data regarding COVID-19’s
impact on the young is some-
what messy, but at least 300
COVID-19-related deaths and
thousands of hospitalizations
have been reported in chil-
dren under 18, which makes
COVID-19’s toll as large or
larger than any childhood dis-
ease for which a vaccine is cur-
rently available. The American
Academy of Pediatrics wants
children to receive the vaccine,
assuming tests show it is safe.
But healthy people under 18
have generally not suffered ma-
jor COVID-19 effects, and the
number of serious cases among
the young has tumbled as more
adults become vaccinated. Un-
like other pathogens, such as
influenza, children are generally
not infecting older, vulnerable
adults. Under these circum-
stances, said Dr. Cody Meiss-
ner — who as chief of pediatric
infectious diseases at Tufts con-
sulted on Lucien’s case — the
benefits of COVID-19 vaccina-
tion at this point may not out-
weigh the risks for children.
“We all want a pediatric vac-
cine, but I’m concerned about
the safety issue,” Meissner told
fellow advisory commission
members recently. An Israeli
study found a five- to 25-fold
increase in the heart ailment
among males ages 16-24 who
were vaccinated with the Pfizer
shot. Most recovered within
a few weeks. Two deaths oc-
curred in vaccinated men
that don’t appear to have been
linked to the vaccine.
Young people could expe-
rience long-term effects from
the suspected vaccine side
effect such as scarring, irreg-
ular heartbeat or even early
heart failure, Meissner said,
so it makes sense to wait until
the gravity of the problem be-
comes clearer.
“Could the disease come
back this fall? Sure. But the
likelihood I think is pretty low.
And our first mandate is do no
harm,” he said.
Ross said the biggest pan-
demic threats to children that
her ICU has witnessed are
drug overdoses and mental
illness brought on by the shut-
down of normal life.
“Young children are not the
vectors of disease, nor are they
driving the spread of the epi-
demic,” Ross said. While even-
tually everyone should be vac-
cinated against COVID-19, use
of the vaccines should not be
expanded to children without
extensive safety data, she said.
Moderna and Pfizer this
summer began testing their
vaccines in younger kids. A
Pfizer spokesperson said the
company expects to give about
2,250 children ages 6 months
to 11 years vaccine as part of
its trial; Moderna said it would
vaccinate about 3,500 children
in the 2-11 age range.
Some members of the FDA
advisory committee pro-
posed that up to 10,000 kids
be included in each trial. But
Marion Gruber, leader of the
FDA’s vaccine regulatory office,
pointed out that even trials that
large wouldn’t necessarily de-
tect a side effect as rare as myo-
carditis seems to be.
Balancing risk
At some point, federal reg-
ulators and the public must
decide how much risk they are
willing to accept from vaccines
versus the risk of a COVID-19
virus that continues to spread
and mutate around the world,
said Dr. Paul Offit, director of
the Vaccine Education Center
at Children’s Hospital of Phil-
adelphia.
“We’re going to need a
highly vaccinated population
for years or perhaps decades,”
Offit said at the meeting. “It
seems hard to imagine that we
won’t have to vaccinate chil-
Vaccination rates in Oregon have continued to plummet, with the
seven-day average number of doses dropping over 8% from June 19
to June 20.
Gov. Kate Brown announced earlier this month that Oregon would
end mask and distancing requirements when 70% of adults had at
least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. As of Friday, 68.5% of Oregon adults
had received at least one dose, leaving just 51,616 people in need of
vaccinations to reach the threshold, according to the Oregon Health
Authority.
Oregon will be unable to meet that goal by Monday, the date
Brown had originally targeted for the state to meet the metric. With
the number of daily vaccine doses administered rapidly declining, Or-
egon may not meet that metric by the time Brown’s COVID-19 emer-
gency order expires June 28, either.
The state reported 10,006 newly administered doses, which in-
cludes 5,675 Saturday and the remainder from previous days. The sev-
en-day average number of doses administered is now 12,724 doses
per day. To date, the state has reported 4,306,340 vaccine doses ad-
ministered, fully vaccinating 2,102,735 people and partially vaccinat-
ing 249,690 people.
Former FDA chief warns of an autumn virus surge
The transmission of the more contagious Delta variant in the
United States could spur a fall surge in coronavirus infections if only
75% of the country’s eligible population is vaccinated, former Food
and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said Sunday.
While Gottlieb cited one projection forecasting an increase in infec-
tions reaching as high as 20% of last winter’s peak, he called that an
“aggressive estimate,” saying he doesn’t “think it’ll be quite that dire.”
But he said states with low vaccination rates are already showing a
concerning rise in cases with the spreading of Delta, which is up to
60% more contagious than earlier variants.
“So Connecticut, for example, where I am, shows no upsurge of
infection, but Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri show very
substantial upsurges of infections. That’s based entirely on how much
population-wide immunity you have based on vaccination,” Gottlieb
said on CBS’s Face the Nation program.
He urged a renewed vaccination push closer to the fall, as people
prepare to return to school and work, when he said they may be more
open to the shots.
Gottlieb serves on the board of directors of Pfizer Inc.
— Bulletin wire reports
dren going forward.”
While authorities have a
duty to speak frankly about the
safety of vaccines, there is also
a responsibility not to frighten
the public in a way that dis-
courages them from seeking
protection. Focusing too much
attention on potential harms
from the Pfizer and Moderna
vaccines for children could
have a tragic result, said Dr.
Saad Omer, director of the Yale
Institute for Global Health and
an expert on vaccine hesitancy.
“Very soon we could be in a
situation where we really need
to vaccinate this population,
but it will be too late because
you’ve already given the mes-
sage that we should not be do-
ing it,” he said.
Eventually, perhaps next
year, K-12 mandates might
be called for, said Dr. Sean
O’Leary, a professor of pe-
diatric infectious diseases at
the University of Colorado.
“There’s so much misinforma-
tion and propaganda spread-
ing that people are reticent
to go there, to further poke
the hornet’s nest,” he said. But
once there is robust safety
data for children, “when you
think about it, there’s no logi-
cal or ethical reason why you
wouldn’t.”