I’d like to begin this post with a disclaimer. I understand that the US is at a very different place in their COVID management than the rest of the world. When I write, it’s generally from a US perspective. We appreciate our commenters from other countries and their contributions.
Last week, we discussed that schools throughout the US were opening back up for in person classrooms in the fall. Many schools would only have in person classes, eliminating virtual learning. Part of that discussion was that kids 12 and up could be vaccinated. But that left parents of kids under 12 wondering how they were supposed to feel. There is some good news on the horizon, Pfizer and Moderna are both in clinical vaccine trials for children aged six months to 12 years.
A COVID-19 vaccine could soon be available for children as young as 6 months old.
Pfizer and Moderna have both begun vaccine trials on the youngest age group yet, with parental consent. Dr. Steve Plimpton, the principal investigator for Moderna’s trial in children, told ABC News that their main concern is that kids can unknowingly infect others.
“We’re also going to be protecting those around those children, the teachers, the parents at home, the grandparents,” Dr. Plimpton said. “So that’s the unspoken benefit of this study.”
In the phase one trial for Pfizer, kids will receive their second dose 21 days after their first. For Moderna, it will be 28 days later. This is referred to as a “dosing” trial, allowing researchers to determine how much vaccine children can tolerate and how to protect them.
The second phase will involve splitting subjects into a placebo and a treatment group. “We’ll follow these children out for a year to determine how they’ve done with it,” Dr. Plimpton added of the Moderna trial.
As for Pfizer, their study involves 5,000 children nationwide, and they expect to have results by the winter. “Together with our partner BioNTech, we have dosed the first healthy children in a global Phase study to further evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2) in preventing COVID-19 in healthy children 6 months to 11 years old,” a spokesperson for Pfizer tells PEOPLE in a statement.
If the trials go as planned, full Food and Drug Administration approval is expected by the winter. However, Pfizer and Moderna will apply for emergency use authorizations this fall, like Pfizer did for 12–17 year-olds, so students can be vaccinated for school. This will likely create some debate for parents who are already hesitant to (or outright against) vaccinating their children and school boards requiring it.
A big issue is that so far, the idea has been that COVID is not an issue for younger kids. That even if they get it, they’ll be fine. Medical professionals are emphasizing that is not the case. According to Dr. Yvonne Maldonado at Stanford University School of Medicine, at least four million children have been infected with COVID and between 300-600 have died. A small number of children who contracted the virus developed a multi-system inflammatory system that affected their organs. The long-term effects are still being worked out. A vaccine would help prevent these long-term events even if the child ends up contracting the virus. And its biggest benefit is it would definitely limit the spread of the virus among children.
In other vaccine news, Moderna has completed vaccine trials on 12–17 year-olds and is applying for FDA approval. So we should have even more options available soon.
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