Less than 325,000 of America’s youngest children are fully vaccinated as hesitancy continues to dog the pandemic response.
Why it matters: Health officials are sounding the alarm over the potential of low child vaccination rates fueling transmission and carrying the risk of severe illness for some of the youngest Americans.
- “What’s at stake really with this is that we’re going to be setting up a bunch of kids for risk of severe disease in the future,” Daniel Blatt, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the University of Louisville and Norton Children’s Hospital, told Axios.
- “We don’t really know what the next variant is gonna be. And the way to get ahead of that next variant is to give children a blueprint on how to fight it and that’s what the vaccine does.”