Almost all teens needing ICU care for Covid-19 are unvaccinated: US study

Healthcare workers treating a Covid-19 patient in the ICU at Sharp Grossmont Hospital in San Diego, California, on Jan 11, 2022. PHOTO: EPA-EFE

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Jan 13, 2022, 06:41 AM

NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - Almost all teenagers who needed intensive care for Covid-19 were unvaccinated in a study that bolsters the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot in youth.

The vaccine prevented 98 per cent of ICU visits and 94 per cent of Covid-19-related hospitalisations in the real-world study of more than 1,000 adolescents aged 12 to 18 in 23 states, published on Wednesday (Jan 12) in the New England Journal of Medicine.

While adolescents can develop severe Covid-19 complications, it is relatively rare that they do, making it harder to study vaccine efficacy than among older adults, and leading to some controversy about use of the shots in younger people.

For example, the trial data Pfizer submitted for authorisation of its shot for 12- to 15-year-olds did not include enough cases to assess efficacy in preventing severe Covid-19.

The research from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and a network of 31 hospitals is one of the most detailed yet showing that vaccines can prevent severe Covid-19 complications in teenagers.

The results show that "nearly all hospitalisations and deaths in this population could have been prevented by vaccination", Vanderbilt University Medical Centre paediatrics professor Kathryn Edwards wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.

The study compared 445 adolescents hospitalised with Covid-19 to a control group of 777 admitted for other reasons, including those with Covid-19-like symptoms who tested negative.

It ran from July 1, 2021, to Oct 25 last year, when the Pfizer-BioNTech shot was widely available for adolescents and the Delta strain was dominant. Most of the children hospitalised with Covid-19 in the study were in the South, where the Delta wave first hit the United States.

Overall, the researchers found that 96 per cent of the adolescents hospitalised with Covid-19 and 99 per cent of those who received life support had not been fully vaccinated.

All seven patients who died of Covid-19 and all of the 13 patients who received a last-ditch treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation were unvaccinated, according to the findings.