The Defender | 9 Dec 2022
Any potential benefits of the COVID-19 booster fail to outweigh the harms for young people ages 18-29, according to a peer-reviewed study published Monday in The BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics.
Any potential benefits of the COVID-19 booster fail to outweigh the harms for young people ages 18-29, according to a peer-reviewed study published Monday in The BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics.
Researchers performed a risk-benefit assessment and ethical analysis using data from Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They concluded that “booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm.”
More than 1,000 U.S. universities and colleges mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for residential students and more than 300 mandate the booster. Students who do not comply risk disenrollment.
The authors of the BMJ study concluded universities should not enforce booster vaccine mandates.
The researchers estimated that over a six-month period, 31,207 to 42,836 young adults ages 18-29, previously uninfected with COVID-19, would have to receive a third mRNA vaccine — a booster — in order to prevent a single hospitalization.
They also anticipated there would be at least 18.5 serious adverse events among the boosted group during that time, including in males, 1.5-4.6 booster-associated cases of myopericarditis, typically requiring hospitalization.
For 32 hospitalizations prevented, there would be 593.5 serious adverse events.
The researchers also anticipated that for every hospitalization averted there would be 1,430 to 4,626 cases of adverse events serious enough to stop people from carrying out regular daily activities.
Any vaccine mandate must be based on the public health principle of “proportionality” — the benefits must outweigh the relevant risks — the authors said. Until now, no risk-benefit assessment had been done.
In April, Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine advisory board, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine called on the CDC to conduct a risk-benefit analysis of vaccines for young people.
The CDC has not yet carried out such a study. In response, lead author Kevin Bardosh, Ph.D., explained on Twitter that their team of bioethicists, epidemiologists, legal scholars and clinicians “took up the challenge.”
Building on their empirical risk-benefit assessment, the authors argued mandates are “unethical” because they may result in a net expected harm to young people.
