The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes

A Covid-19 vaccine is finally available in the United States for kids aged 5-11. should your youngsters – especially those with diabetes – sign up for their shot?

The answer from scientific and health authorities is a resounding “yes.”

Diabetes, Kids, and Covid-19

While offspring are much less at peril of intense and serious illness than adults from Covid-19, the disorder is more dangerous to men and women with diabetes. The evidence suggests that that includes most youngsters.

It has been known since the earliest days of the pandemic that patients with diabetes are especially susceptible to Covid-19. Initially, most of the data pertained to patients with type 2 diabetes, many of them elderly and afflicted with other comorbidities such as obesity and high blood pressure, danger factors not present in most tots with diabetes. But it soon became clear that type 1 diabetes is just as powerful a peril as type 2.

More importantly, targeted studies have shown that children with type 1 diabetes have a severely higher risk of poor consequences than their non-diabetic peers.

The risk of depressed outcomes from Covid-19 in tots with type 1 diabetes is strongly related to effective blood sugar control. The best data shows that tots with A1C’s below 7% have the same risks as their peers without diabetes. But the risk quickly rises as the frequency and degree of hyperglycemia rises: those with an A1C over 9% are about 10 instances as likely to suffer severe complications as children without diabetes, and the risk rises even further in children with A1C’s over 10%.

There is less data for children with type 2 diabetes. Still, given the strong relationship between that condition and other metabolic risks for bad outcomes (e.g. obesity, high blood pressure, dyslipidemia), it seems safe to assume that children with type 2 diabetes are also at significantly increased risk. In 2020, both the rate and severity of childhood type 2 diabetes increased significantly, suggesting that Covid-19 affects blood sugar so intensely that it can exacerbate diabetes in the previously undiagnosed, and possibly even cause diabetes.

The Vaccine and Side Effects

Rigorous trials have not identified a single case of severe negative outcomes related to the newly approved Pfizer vaccine. In the trial of 4,647 children that led to FDA authorization, there were five severe health outcomes recorded, and not a single was attributed to the vaccine. (Three were broken bones, and one was a tiny tot that ingested a penny!)

If you’ve already had the vaccine yourself, you probably realize that the shot can come with unpleasant side effects. Most children will report no side effects. Among those that did feel bad, the most commonly experienced minor side effects were fatigue, headache, and muscle pain.

While post-marketing safety and efficacy studies will continue, at the moment there is absolutely no evidence that the vaccines cause any significant disorders in children.

Does the Vaccine Have Long-Term Effects?

The trials of the Covid-19 vaccine in children have not been long enough to completely rule out the possibility that the vaccine will do some long-term harm that may take many months or even years to appear.

However, there is no evidence that mRNA vaccines (such as the Pfizer vaccine) have ever caused such issues. These types of vaccines have been studied since 1961 and administered in clinical trials since 2001. Experts have little fear that any such issues will ever be encountered.

By now, billions of adults and teenagers have been fully vaccinated, and despite what is likely the most robust safety monitoring effort in the history of medicine, there is essentially no evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines cause side effects that are serious enough to outweigh the likelihood of complications from the virus itself. Myocarditis – discussed in more detail below – is rare and typically mild. Two effects associated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine – Guillain-Barré syndrome and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome – are similarly rare, and have not been observed in the Pfizer vaccine.

By contrast, millions of people have reported symptoms weeks and months after contamination with Covid-19. It is not yet clear how serious “long Covid” is in children, but at least one predominant problem specific to children has emerged. Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) is a potentially dangerous but treatable complication of the disease that strikes some children weeks after initial infection. About 5,000 situations of MIS-C have been reported in the United States. It is most common in 8- and 9-year olds.

What About Myocarditis?

There has been a lot of talk in the media and on social media about myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart that has been observed in some adults after vaccination.

This risk is real, but extremely low – two major recent studies of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel identified a total of 190 cases of myocarditis in a sample of more than 7.5 million vaccinated adults. The vast majority of those cases were mild and resolved without issue. (Other studies from around the world have returned similar results.)

This very rare side impression may be concerning to some parents, but it is important to know that Covid-19 also causes myocarditis, and does so at a significantly higher rate than the vaccine. The two studies in Israel showed that fully vaccinated men were about twice as likely to develop myocarditis as unvaccinated men. But children infected with Covid-19 are 37 times more likely to develop myocarditis than uninfected peers.

In the trial of nearly 5,000 children receiving the Pfizer vaccine, not a single one developed myocarditis.

If you’re worried about myocarditis, the evidence is plain: the vaccine protects far more than it harms.

Natural Immunity

Many parents are also hesitant because they believe that the natural immunity conferred by infection is sufficient or superior to the immunity triggered by the vaccine. However, this may be false. The latest data shows that the Covid-19 vaccines offer far more protection than natural immunity. Unvaccinated adults that had already contracted the virus were five times more likely to be infected a second time than adults that had only received the vaccine.

Authorities universally recommend that people that have already been infected should still get the vaccine.

Addressing Hesitancy

We understand that some parents and caretakers in the diabetes community may be skeptical of the necessity of the vaccine in children. It is true that the coronavirus is not very dangerous to most children. A high percentage of children do not feel any symptoms, and even those who do get ill are unlikely to experience major health issues.

But the scientific evidence and guidance from health authorities are crystal clear: at the same time as Covid-19 is not likely to be dangerous to most children, the virus is still significantly more dangerous than the vaccine. Even if the risk of negative outcomes is low in children, those that receive the vaccine will have an even lower risk.

The risks are low, but children are not completely safe from the novel coronavirus and the disease that it causes. Thousands of American children ages 5-11 have been hospitalized with Covid-19, and about 150 have died. And if your little lad or children have diabetes, they are likely at a greater risk.

Diabetes Daily

The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes