WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 (BUS) – The United States is so close to expanding COVID-19 vaccines to millions of other children as a panel of government advisers on Tuesday endorsed child-sized doses of Pfizer shots for children ages 5 to 11. , AP reports.
An FDA advisory panel voted unanimously, with one abstention, that the vaccine’s benefits in preventing COVID-19 in that age group outweigh any potential risks — including heart-related side effects that were very rare in teens and young adults despite of their presence. Use a much higher dose dose.
While children are at lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than older adults, many panelists ultimately decided it was important to give parents the option to protect their young children – especially those who are at risk of getting sick or who live in places where other precautions exist. Like masks. Schools, they are not used.
The virus “is not going away. We have to find a way to live with it and I think vaccines give us a way to do that,” said Janet Lee, an advisor to the US Food and Drug Administration from the University of Arkansas.
The FDA is not bound by the committee’s recommendation and is expected to make its own decision within days.
If the Food and Drug Administration allows child-sized doses, there’s still one more step: Next week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have to decide whether to recommend doses and which children should get them.
Full-strength shots from Pfizer and partner BioNTech are already recommended for everyone age 12 or older, but pediatricians and many parents are clamoring for protection for younger children. The highly contagious delta variant has caused an alarming rise in child infections — and families are frustrated with school quarantines and forced to say no to sleepovers and other childhood rituals to keep the virus at bay.
While the proportion of COVID-19 is lower among people ages 5 to 11, they still face serious illness — including more than 8,300 hospitalizations, about a third of whom require intensive care, and nearly 100 death.
A study of primary school students found Pfizer injections to be about 91% effective in preventing symptomatic infection – although youngsters received a third of the dose given to adolescents and adults.
The Pfizer study followed 2,268 children ages 5 to 11 who got two injections three weeks apart from either the placebo dose or the children’s dose. The vaccinated children developed levels of anti-virus antibodies just as strong as the teens and young adults who got the full-strength shots.
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