SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B3
health officials to affirm that my judgment is
correct.
It’s the known and unknown risks of long
covid that worry me more and that exacerbate
my frustration at the lack of public health
guidance. One concern, for instance, is multi-
system inflammatory syndrome in children, a
rare condition that has been linked to covid.
Granted, some of the data on long covid in
children is ambiguous: One study, from Brit-
ain, suggested that tens of thousands of chil-
dren there (11 to 17) could be suffering from
long-term symptoms. Another large study,
examining children in Denmark (17 and un-
der), found only a very small difference in the
prevalence of long-covid symptoms experi-
enced by those diagnosed with covid-19 and
those who had never been infected. But it
shouldn’t be up to parents to reconcile con-
flicting medical studies; that’s the job of public
health officials.
As research accumulates on the long-term
impact of covid on adults, we parents are
wondering whether the dangers for children
are similar. Do children also suffer an in-
creased risk of stroke, heart failure and other
cardiovascular problems? What should weand ventilation is poor, making sure everyone
is masked. But the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention has relaxed its public masking
guidance, leading cities and counties to aban-
don mandates, making it nearly impossible for
parents to act on that advice.
I’m a bioethicist who, stuck in parental
limbo, has become a fervent amateur epidemi-
ology researcher, devouring information to
decipher the risks to our youngest child. But
like other parents, I’m exhausted from the
effort and confused by the data, and I believe
that public health agencies, not me, should be
doing the work of summarizing the most
salient findings and explaining how to act on
them.
I’ve been comforted that the short-term
odds of death and other severe outcomes for
the youngest have remained quite low, relative
to older populations, even though their hospi-
talization and death rates rose during the
omicron variant wave. If the risk of taking my
child out in public was limited to a short bout
with the disease, I would not be overly con-
cerned; at the youngest ages, comparisons
with the flu are not unfounded. (The flu, after
all, can be deadly, too.) But I would like federalW
e parents of young children who can’t
be vaccinated feel abandoned at this
late stage of the pandemic. Federal
officials, it seems, have decided to leave it up to
us to figure out how to navigate coronavirus
risks for our children. This lack of information
has bred distrust in parents while putting
public health agencies in an unenviable Catch-
22 as they prepare to — finally, hopefully —
vaccinate children under 5.
Either the risks to this age group are mini-
mal, which potentially weakens the imminent
message to vaccinate children younger than 5
years old, or they are more substantial, and
public officials have failed to adequately ad-
vise parents about how to protect children in
the absence of a vaccine. It’s not too late for
public health agencies to correct course and
issue guidance for what we should be doing
(and not doing) to protect our young unvacci-
nated children from covid’s short-term and
long-term harms.
Moderna recently requested emergency-
use authorization of its coronavirus vaccine
for babies and the youngest children, but the
Food and Drug Administration has delayed a
decision until June, apparently to review it
alongside a candidate vaccine from Pfizer-Bio -
NTech.
This follows an earlier about-face on autho-
rization of the Pfizer vaccine for children
under 5. (The FDA planned to evaluate a
two-dose regimen in February, then, after
disappointing data, pushed off the review to
see how three shots fared.) Meanwhile, par-
ents have received maddeningly little infor-
mation about the reasons for the delay and
about what they should do in the interim.
The mixed messaging is frustrating. Public
health agencies emphasize the importance of
vaccinating older children and adults who
interact with unvaccinated children — like my
2-year-old daughter. And they stress keeping
these children distanced from others in public
indoor spaces; or, when that is not possible,
We parents of
unvaccinated children
need more guidance
As mask
mandates and
other covid
protections fall
away, we’re
wondering
what we should
be doing to
protect our
children, writes
bioethicist
Nita FarahanyJAE C. HONG/ASSOCIATED PRESSWhile children
older than 5 can be
vaccinated against
the coronavirus,
federal officials
have not yet
authorized the
shots for younger
kids, leaving many
parents struggling
with how to
evaluate covid
risks.make of the data that says even mild cases in
older adults increase brain matter loss? (Evi-
dence of cognitive decline in that study was
slight.) Given that children’s brains are devel-
oping rapidly, should we be taking even great-
er precautions to make sure our youngest
aren’t infected — or are there reasons not to
worry? Either way, parents want to know.
What is my family doing, day to day? We lost
a child to an infection with respiratory syncy-
tial virus (RSV), so we are more conservative
than many, but I don’t think we are being
unreasonably cautious. We balance maintain-
ing the mental health and well-being of our
7-year-old — who needs to interact with other
children and teachers, we’ve decided — with
the risk to our 2-year old, and we reevaluate
frequently.
Everyone else in our household is vaccinat-
ed, and we are spending time indoors only
with vaccinated friends and family. We also
ask everyone to take a rapid antigen test before
spending time unmasked with us. We do let
our 7-year-old have indoor playdates with
other vaccinated children, although we en-
courage them to play outdoors whenever pos-
sible. She also attends school in person (where
the indoor masking requirement was recently
lifted).
When the case counts came crashing down,
we took our children out to breakfast a couple
of times inside a restaurant with widely spaced
tables, but as cases climbed, we went back to
avoiding indoor dining with strangers. We
postponed a plane trip to visit in-laws when
the mask mandate was dropped. I have de-
layed weaning my 2-year-old to give her anti-
bodies to SARS-CoV-2 through breast milk,
one of the only ways I can actively protect her.
Everyone has their own risk calculus, but we
shouldn’t be forced to wing it like this. My
family’s approach seems reasonable, but
there’s just no way to know for sure. All of us
need timely information to make choices to
best protect our children, and parents of
young children especially need this informa-
tion, given that we continue to wait for vac-
cines. Unfortunately, federal health officials
are letting us down — still.
Twitter: @NitaFarahanyNita Farahany, a bioethicist, is the Robinson O.
Everett professor of law and philosophy and the
founding director of the Initiative for Science &
Society at Duke University.was born in Canada but is also a U.S. citizen.
Like many people who live near the border, she
often travels back and forth between the
countries to shop and stay at her second home
near Montreal. In December 2009, she was
heading home with her toddler son and 6-
year-old daughter when U.S. border officers at
Overton Corners, N.Y., handcuffed her and
separated her, at least briefly, from her chil-
dren. “They were still in their car seats. I was
hyperventilating, as you can well imagine,”
she said. Border officers, she recalled in a
phone interview, told her, “You need to calm
down.” Subsequently, Nelson, who was then
head of her local chamber of commerce, was
detained several more times and once held in a
cell. She generally received polite enough
treatment, but she recounted that an officer
once told her husband, “That should teach you
for going shopping across the border.”
She learned during at least five detainments
that she had been mistaken for someone who
looked very different from her: “It was an
African American man. I’m Caucasian and a
woman. Two hundred and fifty pounds, and
I’m not 250 pounds. Tattoos. I’m not tattooed.”
Nelson said border officers recommended
that she change her name or call ahead before
traveling so they could conduct a “primary
lookout override,” which according to a CBP
report assists “travelers who are erroneously
designated for secondary inspections because
they possess a characteristic similar to a
person of interest,” something of a manual
purge of the incorrect information. But Nelson
refused. “It’s their problem,” she said. “It’s
their antiquated system.”
Only after she went to the press and con-
tacted her representative in Congress, New
York Democrat Bill Owens, who has sincechampion Rich Franklin was handcuffed,
marched through Los Angeles International
Airport and held in a cell following a trip to
Singapore because he had the same or similar
name as an escaped or wanted felon.
Stephen Coulthart, an associate professor
at the University at Albany’s College of Emer-
gency Preparedness, Homeland Security and
Cybersecurity, estimates that a few hundred
separate databases collect information on
travelers. “The overall architecture is extreme-
ly complex,” said Coulthart, co-author of a
2021 policy paper, “Improving Big Data Inte-
gration and Building a Data Culture for U.S.
Border Security,” published by the Harvard
Kennedy School. And he worries that “all these
different databases, they don’t speak well to
each other. Because these different databases
were set up in some cases with different
protocols, maybe programming languages.”
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the
American Civil Liberties Union, fretted during
a phone interview that since 9/11 federal
government watch lists have become “big,
bloated and over-inclusive.” According to the
ACLU, the federal watch list now includes
about 1.6 million names. “There’s every incen-
tive to throw people on the list and little
reason to throw them off,” Stanley said. “Every
person on Earth is a potential terrorist, ac-
cording to our national security agencies.”
“The fact that passports are such strong
identification means that [CBP’s] back-end
system must be all the more problematic,”
continued Stanley, which “guarantees that
innocent people will be treated as dangerous
fugitives, and reflects a typical failure to
balance bureaucratic security goals against
the impact on innocent people.”
Sylvie Nelson, 56, can empathize. NelsonW
hen I tell strangers my name, people
routinely respond, “Like the boss
from ‘The Office,’ right?”
No, I explain, he’s W-A-L-L-A-C-E. I’m W-A-
L-L-I-S. In the 1990s, after the celebrated novel
“Infinite Jest” came out, I bet that my tenuous
connection to author David Foster Wallace
secured me some prized Manhattan restau-
rant reservations.
But any benefits of my common-ish name
vanished on a recent Sunday afternoon when I
was returning home to New York following a
four-day road trip to Montreal with my wife
and 12-year-old son. After we handed our
passports to an agent at the Champlain, N.Y.,
port of entry, an alarm blared and the officer in
the booth ordered, “Put your hands where I
can see them.” In a flash, at least four U.S.
Customs and Border Protection officers,
hands on holsters, surrounded my Subaru. A
blond-haired agent half my age who reminded
me of a cross between Rutger Hauer and Opie
from “The Andy Griffith Show” shouted for me
to keep my hands up and get out of the car.
That’s impossible if you need to open a car
door, which I tried to explain.
Gingerly exiting my car, I walked backward
and then put my hands behind my back,
following commands. The officer cuffed me as
I looked at my shocked wife and little boy,
wondering if I would see them again. The clink
of the locking cuffs was an unforgettable
sound. I scanned my memory for every possi-
ble misdeed. Was I bringing back too much
Quebec ice cider? Were the Montreal bagels in
the back seat banned agricultural products?
“Why am I being arrested?” I asked. The
officer told me that I was not being arrested. It
certainly felt like being arrested, as I was led
into a holding room. A mustached officer told
me that my name was the same as or similar to
that of a wanted criminal. Some minutes later,
I heard someone shout, “Okay, he’s good,” and
off came the cuffs. I received not an apology for
the false arrest but a pamphlet titled “Securing
America’s Borders: The CBP Screening Proc-
ess” that includes this questionable claim: “We
pledge to cordially greet and welcome you to
the United States.”
We tend to forget that we live in a surveil-
lance state, just not a particularly sophisticat-
ed or efficient one. I covered the aftermath of
9/11 up close, so I understand that the U.S.
government must protect us from terrorists
and criminals. I also get that borders are busy.
CBP notes in its fact sheet that on a typical day
it processes 491,688 passengers and pedestri-
ans. But how is it possible that the U.S.
government, which can track a terrorist half-
way around the world and deliver a Hellfire
missile into his speeding car, lacks the technol-
ogy to differentiate between a law-abiding U.S.
citizen holding a valid passport and a wanted
criminal?
I’m not sure why I was flagged or which
watch list includes my apparently dangerous
namesake or near-namesake, because neither
CBP’s director of media, Lawrence “Rusty”
Payne, nor the agency answered questions
about my detainment. I know, though, that
federal agencies that manage immigration
and our borders are far from bulletproof. A
2020 Cato Institute study concluded that
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is
“regularly issuing immigration detainers for
U.S. citizens.” The study examined a sample of
155 erroneous detentions and found that
15 percent were the result of mistaken identity.
In 2004, federal air security officials repeat-
edly questioned Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Ken-
nedy because he was apparently on the no-fly
list. A George W. Bush administration source
told The Washington Post at the time that “the
name ‘T. Kennedy’ has been used as an alias by
someone on the list of terrorist suspects.”
In 2015, mixed martial arts middleweight
I was wrongly detained at the border. It’s part of a larger pattern.
It shouldn’t be
so hard to
differentiate
between
l aw-abiding
U.S. citizens
and wanted
criminals,
says journalist
David WallisDON EMMERT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESretired, did her border woes stop. In 2010,
Owens received a letter from CBP officials that
the agency had taken “positive steps” to re-
solve Nelson’s quasi-arrests.
Chris Bronk, an associate professor at the
University of Houston who has studied pass-
port technology, called for CBP to increase the
use of biometrics such as fingerprints to
screen travelers. But Bronk, who served as a
State Department official at the U.S.-Mexico
border in the early 2000s, also warned that
even such systems have their limitations:
Longtime farm laborers might have worn
down their fingerprints, for example — and
hardened criminals could burn theirs off.
To lessen the chances of nabbing an inno-
cent traveler, Coulthart urges CBP to provide
front-line employees with more training in
information technology. “CBP is struggling to
develop a data culture,” said Coulthart, who
believes that the agency should establish an IT
boot camp for recruits. He thinks officers
would benefit from a better understanding of
the data that they are using: “Just having some
basic understanding of those systems is neces-
sary for having some understanding of what
they can and can’t do.”
During his State of the Union address in
March, President Biden said that “If we are to
advance liberty and justice, we need to secure
the border and fix the immigration system.”
He added, “We can do both,” pointing to “new
technology like cutting-edge scanners.”
For the time being, when it comes to border
technology, cutting edge we’re not.
Twitter: @DavidRwallisDavid Wallis is the managing director of the
Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism
nonprofit organization.A bilingual stop
sign at the U.S.-
Canada border in
East Hereford,
Quebec. Experts
estimate that the
United States has a
few hundred
different databases
that collect
information on
travelers.