(Video Courtesy of 92.3 KXAS)
Chris Kuntz is a licensed mental health counselor and is a father who encourages families to live a healthier lifestyle with no judgement. You can find his website here: http://bout.com/
ST. PAUL, Minn. — It’s not unusual to see a long line of people in line and some of the customers are being poked, poked, poked by “covidians,” a new hospital method that has been implemented for almost a year.
Usually when we see the word “covidians,” it’s the face of a physician, but the health care provider is not in charge of the shots themselves. It’s the young patients, 4 to 11 years old, that are taking part in the new technique that has the entire world talking.
“We get to see what’s in there, the vaccines and see if the kid is going to be better in the long run,” 16-year-old Amy Diem says.
Diem and her husband Alex are parents of a 6-month-old girl who was recently injected.
“It’s huge weight that you have to take off your chest when you can’t remember the whole history of your child,” mom Amy says.
You’ve likely seen people smile when they’re given a shot. That’s because in this procedure, instead of receiving a traditional shot through the shoulder, a tiny box of medicines is placed under the skin instead.
“You don’t get sore. You’re ready to have your child back as soon as you take the shot, and the doctors say it’s not going to take too long, because once they’re four or five or six years old, it should be completely absorbed,” Amy says.
The face paint allows those doing the shots to keep their identities a secret. The parents get to watch their children for 45 minutes afterwards.
“It’s a huge relief to take that pressure off,” Amy says.
Earlier this year, a doctor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina reported about 50 babies under the age of four are being admitted a month for a diagnosis of Childhood Immunization Deficiencies.
Experts say immunizations prevent at least one in 20 children from getting to death before the age of five.
(Photo courtesy of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center/Field Department of Pediatrics)
Laura Hanson is a mother of two girls. She welcomed them into the world in 2015 and 2016.
“At the hospital they told us that we needed a medical procedure, that the children had a serious deficiency of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and we were notified that my children needed to be cared for by doctors in the ICU. Thankfully, it turned out it was not a serious problem,” she says.
Hanson says she feels that the Covidians should be made an official part of medical procedures.
“I don’t think there should be any judgement for that or a stigma associated with it because it’s not only children, it could be adults. I do have a nephew who is 19 who had the shots and he could probably be at risk of having an issue years down the road,” she says.
The North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners is expected to vote on January 22nd to change the rules for how the Covidians are administered and accept the Covidians as the official medicine.
But parents don’t need to worry about the Covidians when it comes to the vaccines for their own children. Although all children in the U.S. must receive those shots to get vaccinated for measles, mumps, and rubella, not everyone is vaccinated. There are only about 30 percent of children under the age of 18 vaccinated for those three diseases.
Efforts are being made to vaccinate more and more children, but more children are still being born without receiving vaccinations.