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This week, the CDC Director endorsed a recommendation that children ages 5-11 should be vaccinated against COVID-19, clearing the way for immediate vaccination for up to 28 million children in the U.S.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Shane Crotty, PhD, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, explains the risk-benefit ratio calculated in this decision.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

People sometimes ask about the risk-benefit for vaccinating kids, saying, "Well, you know, kids do a lot better with COVID than adults do, so why vaccinate them?"

The quick answer is lots of kids still get serious illness from COVID-19. And there are lots of concerns about long-term consequences in kids from a bad COVID-19 infection -- i.e., lung damage or heart damage or damage to some other organ -- as well as there being certainly meaningful amounts of hospitalizations of kids.

And I think the challenge people have is it being so different than adults. And you really have to stop and say, well look, we're talking about a disease that has caused 750,000 deaths of American adults. And so that's worse than all the wars of the 20th century combined. So clearly that's an incredibly horrible disease, and yes, it's not nearly that bad in kids, but it's still a bad disease.

And so overall, what FDA advisers and CDC advisers looked at was to say, "All right for the kids, let's calculate out those risk-benefit ratios, is it worth vaccinating kids?" And the answers were really clearly yes. There's very real value to the kids, for the kids getting vaccinated.

And then obviously on top of that, there's dramatic value to the community and to the adults around them and the rest of the population to get kids vaccinated, to reduce transmissions, right, so make it so schools don't close, etc.

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