The COVID States Project #74: Parental Concerns Over COVID Vaccines for Kids
In the U.S., children ages 5 and older are now eligible for COVID-19 vaccination, after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine received emergency authorization from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in early November 2021. The vaccine had previously been authorized for youth ages 12-17 in Spring 2021. As of December 16, the CDC reported that more than 7 million vaccine doses had been administered to children ages 5-11, and adverse events of concern –those that were resolved with a mild clinical course– had only been identified in less than a dozen kids.How are parents feeling about childhood COVID-19 vaccination in the face of new authorizations and relatively few adverse events of concern? Previously, we examined parents’ concerns about vaccinating kids against COVID-19 in June 2021 and September 2021. In these earlier reports, we discovered that parents’ top five concerns regarding childhood COVID-19 vaccination were: how new the vaccine is, whether the vaccine has been tested enough, whether the vaccine actually works, the short term side effects of the vaccine, and long term side effects of the vaccine. We found that these five parental concerns increased from June to September across several demographic groups. Further, in a separate report we also found that COVID-19 vaccination rates for minors have plateaued from September to November 2021.Now, using survey data from November 2021, we provide an update on the prevalence of these five parental concerns regarding child COVID-19 vaccination, building on the descriptive report about parental intentions from November 2021 survey data. We also examine tendencies and shifts over time for subpopulations of parents, such as by political partisanship, race/ethnicity, gender and age, population density, education level, and likelihood of vaccinating their kids against COVID-19.