As parents forbid shots, defiant teens seek ways to get them

COVID shots for children are crucial to achieving broad immunity and returning to normal school and work routines. But although the vaccines have been authorized for children as young as 12, many parents, worried about side effects and frightened by the newness of the shots, have held off on permitting their children to get them.

A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 3 in 10 parents of children ages 12-17 intended to allow them to be vaccinated immediately. Many say they will wait for long-term safety data or the prod of a school mandate. But with many teenagers eager to get shots they see as unlocking freedoms denied during the pandemic, tensions are crackling in homes in which parents are holding to a hard no.

Forty states require parental consent for vaccination of minors under 18, and Nebraska sets the age at 19. Now, because of the COVID crisis, some states and cities are seeking to relax medical consent rules, emulating statutes that permit minors to obtain the HPV vaccine, which prevents some cancers caused by a sexually transmitted virus.

Last fall, the District of Columbia City Council voted to allow children as young as 11 to get recommended vaccines without parental consent. New Jersey and New York legislatures have bills pending to allow children as young as 14 to consent to vaccines. Minnesota has one that would permit some children as young as 12 to consent to COVID shots.

But other states are marching in the opposite direction. Although South Carolina teenagers can consent at 16, a bill in the Legislature would explicitly bar providers from giving the COVID shot without parental consent to minors. In Oregon, where the age of medical consent is 15, Linn County ordered county-run clinics to obtain parental consent for the COVID shot for anyone under 18. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, some states are working on legislation to prevent public schools from requiring COVID shots.

The issue of who can consent to COVID shots is providing fresh context for decades-old legal, ethical and medical questions. When parents disagree, who is the arbiter? At what age are children capable of making their own health decisions and how should that be determined?

Frustrated teenagers are searching for ways to be vaccinated without their parents' consent. Some have turned to VaxTeen.org, a vaccine information site run by Kelly Danielpour, 18.

The site offers guides to state consent laws, links to clinics, resources on information about COVID-19 and advice for how teenagers can engage parents.

"Someone will ask me, 'I need to be able to consent at a vaccine clinic that is open on weekends and that is on my bus route. Can you help?' " said Danielpour, who begins her freshman year at Stanford this fall.

She started the site two years ago, well before COVID. The daughter of a pediatric neurosurgeon and an intellectual property lawyer, she realized that most adolescents know neither the recommended vaccine schedule nor their rights.

"We automatically talk about parents but not about teens as having opinions on this issue," she said. "I decided I needed to help." Danielpour wrangled experts to help her understand vaccination and consent laws, and she recruited teenagers to be "VaxTeen ambassadors."

"I want teenagers to be able to say to pediatricians, 'Hey, I have this right,' " said Danielpour, who gives talks at conferences to physicians and health department officials.

Although doctors have been trying to instill vaccine confidence in parents as well as patients, there's not much they can do when parents object. Recently, Dr. Mobeen Rathore, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida medical college in Jacksonville, told a patient whose mother refused consent that she couldn't get the COVID vaccine until she turned 18, three weeks hence.

"She got vaccinated on her birthday," Rathore said. "She sent me a message saying that was her birthday gift to herself."