While Washington, DC mandates Covid-19 vaccination to attend school, Denmark ends vaccination of most healthy children under 18.
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Different places have different child vaccination policies.
It’s interesting to compare policies across different states or countries, because we realize that things aren’t quite as black and white as we expected or might like.
Washington, D.C. public schools will require all children 12 and older to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to attend school in the fall and Denmark is ending vaccination of most healthy children:
Children and adolescents only very rarely have a serious course of illness due to covid-19 with the omicron variant, which is why the offer of primary vaccination for children between 5 and 17 years will not be a general offer, but can be given after a specific medical assessment, cf. the Danish Health Authority’s guidelines.
While it is true that a majority of Danish youth between 12 and 18 have already been vaccinated — and Denmark’s prime minister believes it was the right call at the time — the head of the Danish Health Authority has said that it may not have been necessary in retrospect, because “vaccination of children last autumn and winter did little to slow the spread of the virus.”
According to Brostrøm, the vaccination of children last autumn and winter did little to slow the spread of the virus.
PM Mette Frederiksen has stood by the decision, saying that no harm was done, and that it was the best decision given the information available at the time.
Of course, vaccination policies aren’t developed in a vacuum and Denmark is a very different place than the United States and Washington, D.C.
For example, unlike the U.S. vaccination strategy, Denmark’s updated vaccination strategy is explicit that preventing infections is no longer a primary purpose of the program.
In the future, the primary purpose of the covid-19 vaccination programme will be to prevent serious illness, hospitalisations and death, not to prevent infection.
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