My guess is that they hope to prove that the vaccine is relatively safe for children; therefore, all children should be vaccinated -- against this virus that poses little if any threat to them.

We're heading down a very slippery slope here I'm afraid.

But think of the money!

Variants

There appears to be 3 main variants - UK, SA, and Brazil. (Is it racist to call these variants by their country origins?) There are some remarkable coincidences connecting the three.

1. All three broke out in the countries where the AstraZeneca trials were conducted. The trials began in late June. The variants were first detected from July in Brazil, September in the UK, and October in SA.

2. Despite the random nature of mutations, we've "started to see some striking evolution of SARS-CoV-2 with a repeated evolutionary pattern in the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern emerging from the UK, South Africa and Brazil" (Trevor Bedford, geneticist).
Brazilian researchers also reported "The recent emergence of variants (in UK, SA, Brazil) with multiple shared mutations potentially associated with an increase in transmissibility or propensity for re-infection of individuals."

In other words, these three variants on three different continents have undergone mutations in the spike protein in very similar ways.

This makes me wonder:

Is that in response to the same immune pressure?

Will the net result of the immune pressure applied by vaccines be to produce new variants that are impervious to those vaccines?

Where would that leave us?