Kids in the United States between 5 and 11 years old are now eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, and it’s going to make a difference. Millions more people are now eligible to receive a vaccine that’s been ruled safe and effective by an intensely cautious group of doctors and other health experts than were previously eligible.
It’s not going to get America to herd immunity, though.
Currently, roughly 58% of the United States population is fully vaccinated. Kids 5-11 make up somewhere around 8.5% of the overall population. If their uptake is similar to that of 12-15 year-old’s (something like 47%, so far), we’re only looking at a four percentage point jump, and given that the 12-15 age group has a lower vaccination rate than 16-17 year-olds, it’s reasonable to expect the 5-11 age group’s to be lower still, at least at first. All of them are climbing—they do nothing but climb, at least given the current definition of “fully vaccinated”—and climbing from 58% to 62% fully vaccinated would be a nice dent (nearly ten percent of the problem), but this authorization isn’t going to be a sea change in overall American immunity, at least if I’m understanding the numbers correctly (I’m neither a doctor nor a health expert, but I do understand fractions).
