Health care workers answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
Shaquita Bell, MD explains how the COVID vaccines keep us healthy by preventing serious illness and death from COVID.
I really start with, what do you hope for your child to do with their day-to-day life? Do you want them to go to school in person? Do they want to go to summer camp? Do they want to visit grandma and grandpa? Did they want to visit their family reunion? All of those, each and every one of those things, is a risk of coronavirus exposure for them. So, they could get sick from coronavirus, but it also is an opportunity when they could spread coronavirus to other people.
And so, when we talk about vaccinating children and we talk a lot about what lifestyle you want to have and sort of the risks and benefits. So, we all put a seatbelt on when we ride in the car and no, we don’t want to be in a car accident, but we know if we wear the seatbelt, we’re going to be safer. And we wear helmets when we ride bikes because, you know, we don’t think we’re going to fall off our bike. It’s really probably rare that we’ll fall off a bike, but a car might hit us while we’re biking because they’re text messaging on their phone. So, we wear the helmet to protect ourselves and I really put coronavirus vaccine on that same plane. Like, it is a tool to keep your child safer and to also keep other people safe as well. So, it has low risk. It has really high reward and we know that it’s very effective. So, it is, it makes sense if you’re going to wear seatbelts, if you’re going to wear helmets, you should also get your coronavirus vaccine.
