Cadell Walker hurried to get her 9-year-old daughter Solome vaccinated against COVID-19-not only to protect her, but to help stop the spread of the coronavirus and produce more dangerous variants.

“Loving your neighbor is something we truly believe in. We want to be good community members and hope to establish this idea for our daughter,” said the 40-year-old Louisville mother, who recently brought Solome to A local middle school filmed her. “The only way to truly defeat COVID is to let us all work together for the greater good.”

The scientists agree. Every infection—whether in adults in Yemen or children in Kentucky—provides another opportunity for the virus to mutate. Protecting large new populations anywhere in the world limits these opportunities.

This effort has been enhanced, and 28 million American children between the ages of 5 and 11 are now eligible to receive a child dose of Pfizer’s BioNTech vaccine.Move to other places, such as Austria’s recent decision to require all adults to be vaccinated, and even The U.S. authorizes all adults to inject booster shots On Friday, help is provided by further reducing the chance of new infections.

CDC finally approves COVID-19 injections for children aged 5 to 11 years

Vaccinating children also means reducing silent transmission, because most people have no or mild symptoms when they contract the virus. Scientists say that when the virus spreads invisible, it will increase unabated. As more and more people are infected with it, the chances of new variants will increase.

David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likened infection to “our lottery for the virus.” Grand prize? A more dangerous variant than the infectious delta currently spreading.

He said: “The fewer people who are infected, the fewer lottery tickets we get, and we will all get better at generating variants,” he added, adding that variants are more likely to appear in people with weakened immune systems. Systems that carry viruses for a long time.

Researchers disagree on the impact of children on the pandemic. Early research shows that they do not contribute much to the spread of the virus. But some experts say that this year children played an important role in spreading infectious variants such as alpha and delta.

According to estimates by the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Center, vaccinating children may have a real impact on the future. The center is composed of universities and medical research organizations and integrates models of how the pandemic may develop. The center’s latest estimates show that from November this year to March 12, 2022, if no new mutations appear, vaccinating children between 5 and 11 years of age will avoid approximately 430,000 COVID cases in the overall U.S. population. Katriona Shea, the co-leader of the project at Penn State University, said that if an infectious variant that is 50% higher than delta in the late fall, 860,000 cases will be avoided, “this is a huge impact.”

As the number of child deaths increased, the virus surge broke hospital records

Delta still dominates, accounting for more than 99% of the coronavirus specimens analyzed in the United States. Scientists are not sure why. Dr. Stuart Campbellley, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, said it may be more infectious in nature, or it may at least partially escape the protection people get from vaccines or protection from previous infections.

“It may be a combination of these things,” he said. “But there is also very good evidence that delta is more suitable, which means it can grow to higher levels faster than the other variants studied. Therefore, when people are infected with delta, they will spread more quickly.”

Lei said that delta is a “big family” of viruses, and the world is swimming like a “delta soup” now.

“We have many delta lineages circulating in many places, but there is no clear winner,” Lei said, adding that it is difficult to know from genetic characteristics which may have advantages or which non-delta variants may replace delta.

“I often say it’s like seeing a car parked on the side of the road with racing paint and racing stripes on it, with an airfoil and a big engine behind it,” Lei said. “You know it looks like a real contender, but you don’t know if it will win until you see it appear with other cars on the track.”

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Another big unknown: Even if American children join the ranks of vaccinations, dangerous mutations may still appear in most of the world’s unvaccinated areas and enter the United States.

Louisville’s mother Walker said that she and her husband were helpless against distant threats, but could register their daughter for vaccinations on the Jefferson County Public Schools website on a recent weekend. Solome was adopted from Ethiopia. After being exposed to tuberculosis in his infancy, it is easy to get pneumonia due to respiratory diseases.

She said she wanted to protect the safety of other children because “it is not good to be sick.”

When a nurse leaned forward to vaccinate Solome, Walker held her daughter’s hand and praised her for choosing a post-jab sticker that suits her for a brave child who was just to curb the pandemic Did my part.

“Wonder Woman,” Walker said. “perfect.”