Kids under 5 can now get COVID-19 vaccines. Here’s where in Sacramento
Sacramento-area drugstores and health care providers are beginning to offer the COVID-19 vaccine to children ages 5 and under this week, and families began arriving Thursday morning at Kaiser Permanente’s vaccination clinic in south Sacramento.
Perpetual Yeboah came to the clinic after taking her 3-year-old son Bryan to a doctor’s appointment across the street at Kaiser Permanente’s South Sacramento Medical Center on Bruceville Road.
“I had been asking his doctor when they were going to get it,” said Yeboah, who lives just a few miles from the Kaiser center. “Just last week, I saw the approval (by U.S. authorities), and I said, ‘OK, when I come in today, I’m going to ask his doctor if he can have it.’ So I asked her, and she said, ‘Oh, you are lucky! Let me get an appointment for you today.’
She welcomed the news because her son Bryan goes to daycare when she goes to work as a certified nursing assistant. Whenever Bryan is exposed to a child who has COVID-19, she said, she cannot go into work until her family can show a series of negative tests.
Infectious disease experts and pediatricians are urging parents to begin immunizing their kindergartners, preschoolers and infants over 6 months of age against COVID-19, a wily respiratory disease that already has killed more than 400 U.S. children age 5 and under.
“Nearly 2.5 million very young children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic resulting in thousands of hospitalizations, hundreds of deaths, and potential exposure to the unknown effects of long COVID,” said Daniel P. McQuillen, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “Vaccinations for the youngest people in the country will provide critical protection against serious disease, hospitalization and death, and improve overall immunity to the virus in the community.“
Dr. Nicole Makram, a Kaiser pediatrician, said that she’s relieved to finally be able to refer her young patients for COVID-19 vaccinations. Children are more likely than adults to initially show no symptoms or very mild symptoms from COVID-19, she said but that doesn’t mean they are in the clear.
“There are many ... people who had mild disease,” Makram said, “and they do also go on to have long COVID. You could have a child who’d had relatively minor symptoms, maybe sore throat and some headache, and then go on to have fatigue for months and months. That can just be profoundly affecting for their families. You expect your kids to be playing and having a wonderful time and they cannot do their normal activities.”
Not enough is known yet about how COVID-19 to allow doctors to determine which children or adults will experience the long-term effects from an infection, a condition now often called long COVID, long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID or chronic COVID.
In addition to fatigue, those afflicted with it also may report additional symptoms such as fever, a lingering cough, chest pains, heart palpitations, headache, depression, sleep problems, diarrhea and muscle or joint aches.
What the vaccine really does well is preventing serious disease and death, Makram said, but they no longer prevent any disease. The goal of herd immunity has slipped through the world’s fingers, she said.
“We had this fantastic vaccine that was over 90% effective, but we have a virus that has fooled us and tricked us. It’s mutated faster than we ever thought a coronavirus would,” she said. “We will be able to moderate severe disease and death, which is really the most important thing. But this is gonna end up being a little bit more like the flu, where we have to learn how to live with it.”
Researchers have now found the new coronavirus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, in more than 20 different species of animals, Makram said, so it will be mutating and changing within those animals, just as it does in the human population. New variations of the disease will pass back to humans, she said, so its crucial to keep younger generations vaccinated so they have a leg up in a fight against a new variant.
Sacramento residents Brent Chock and his wife, Kimberly Truong, are both pharmacists. brought their preschool twins Colton and Brie to get the COVID-19 vaccinations at the Kaiser clinic. Their eldest, 7-year-old Connor, already had gotten the vaccine when it was his turn.
“We wanted to make sure that our kids are protected, and we got (Connor) vaccinated when it was possible,” Chock said, “so when we heard they opened up for our younger kids, we wanted to make sure they were protected as well.”
Chock said that one of his family’s unvaccinated relatives has been hospitalized with COVID-19 for six months, and while it looks as though he will survive, the severity of the case really confirmed for him and his wife that vaccinations are crucial.
This story was originally published June 23, 2022 at 3:48 PM with the headline "Kids under 5 can now get COVID-19 vaccines. Here’s where in Sacramento."
