Travelers who provide proof that they are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus before boarding a flight will be able to fly to the United States.
The F.D.A. is preparing to address other big questions in the coming weeks, including vaccines for children under 12. The Biden Administration plans to lift restrictions on vaccinated international travelers in November. Pfizer says its vaccine is safe and highly effective in 5- to 11-year-olds. Pfizer says its vaccine is safe for children 5 to 11. Will parents buy in? The Biden administration will lift restrictions on fully vaccinated international travelers in November. The U.S. travel industry welcomes the Biden administration’s changes to travel rules. New York City will increase testing at schools and relax quarantine rules. N.Y.C.’s tourism industry, hit hard by the pandemic, sees a reason for hope with changes to travel rules. India plans to resume vaccine exports starting next month. The F.D.A. is likely to make its long-awaited decision on boosters this week. The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine has been shown to be safe and highly effective in young children ages 5 to 11, the companies announced early on Monday. The news should help ease months of anxiety among parents and teachers about when children, and their close contacts, might be shielded from the coronavirus. The need is urgent: Children now account for more than one in five new cases, and the highly contagious Delta variant has sent more children into hospitals and intensive care units in the past few weeks than at any other time in the pandemic. Pfizer and BioNTech plan to apply to the Food and Drug Administration by the end of the month for authorization to use the vaccine for ages 5 to 11. If the regulatory review goes as smoothly as it did for older children and adults, millions of elementary school students could be inoculated before Halloween. Trial results for children younger than 5 are not expected until the fourth quarter of this year at the earliest, according to Dr. Bill Gruber, a senior vice president at Pfizer and a pediatrician. Pfizer and BioNTech announced the results in a statement that did not include detailed data from the trial. The findings have not yet been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But the new results dovetail with those seen in older children and in adults, experts said. “There’s going to be a huge number of parents who are going to heave a big sigh of relief when they hear this,” said Dr. Kristin Oliver, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “We’ve been waiting for these kids to be protected.” Children have a much lower risk of Covid-19 than adults, even when exposed to the Delta variant. Still, some small number of those infected develop a life-threatening condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C. Others may have lingering symptoms for months. Nearly 30,000 children were hospitalized for Covid in August; the least vaccinated states reported the highest rates. At Seattle Children’s hospital, about half of the children who are admitted for Covid are older than 12, according to Dr. Danielle Zerr, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the hospital. “I’ve been dismayed at the fact that the sickest children in our hospital with acute Covid-19 or MIS-C are children who could have been vaccinated,” Dr. Zerr said. — Apoorva Mandavilli With Pfizer-BioNTech’s announcement on Monday that its Covid-19 vaccine had been shown to be safe and effective in low doses in children ages 5 to 11, a major question looms: How many parents will have it given to their children? If authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, the vaccine could be a game changer for millions of American families with young children and could help bolster the country’s response as the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads. There are about 28 million children ages 5 to 11 in the United States, far more than the 17 million adolescents ages 12 to 15 who became eligible when the Pfizer vaccine rolled out to that age group in May. But it remains to be seen how widely the vaccine will be accepted for the younger group. Uptake among older children has lagged, and polling indicates reservations among a significant chunk of parents. Lorena Tule-Romain was up early Monday morning, getting ready to ferry her 7-year-old son to school in Dallas, when she turned on the television and heard the news. “I was like, ‘oh my gosh, this is exciting,’” said Ms. Tule-Romain,32, who felt an initial surge of hopefulness and relief. She has spent months living in limbo, declining birthday party invitations, holding off registering her son for orchestra in school and even canceling a recent trip to see her son’s grandparents in Atlanta. A vaccine for her son, she said, could change all of that. Ms. Tule-Romain will be among those eagerly waiting to learn whether federal officials authorize the vaccine for the younger age group, a step that is expected to come first on an emergency-use basis, perhaps as soon as Halloween. However the F.D.A. rules, Michelle Goebel,36, of Carlsbad, Calif., said she is nowhere near ready to vaccinate her children, who are 8,6 and 3, against Covid-19. Though Ms. Goebel said she had been vaccinated herself, she expressed worry about the risks for her children, in part because of the relatively small size of trials in children and the lack of long-term safety data so far. She said the potential risk from a new vaccine seemed to her to outweigh the benefit, because young children have been far less likely to become seriously sick from the virus than adults. “We absolutely are not ready,” she said. Only about 40 percent of children ages 12 to 15 have been fully vaccinated so far, compared with 66 percent of adults 18 and over, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polling indicates that parental openness to the vaccine for their children decreases with the child’s age. About 20 percent of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they definitely did not plan to get their child vaccinated, according to polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation published last month. The “definitely not” group grew to about 25 percent in parents of children ages 5 to 11, and 30 percent among parents of children under 5. René LaBerge,53, of Katy, Texas, greeted the Pfizer news with cautious optimism. “I’m hopeful,” said Ms. LaBerge, who plans to vaccinate her 11-year-old son when he becomes eligible. “But I’m not impatient. I want them to do the work.” She said she had heard about some rare, but serious, side effects in children, and she was eager for federal officials to thoroughly review the data before she makes her decision. “I don’t want my son to take something that is unsafe,” she said, but she added, “I believe Covid is dangerous. There aren’t any good easy answers here.” Among the side effects scientists have been studying is myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. In rare cases, the vaccine has led to myocarditis in young people. But a large Israeli study, based on electronic health records of two million people aged 16 and older, also found that Covid is far more likely to cause these heart problems. The Pfizer trial results were greeted enthusiastically by many school administrators and teachers’ organizations, but are unlikely to lead to immediate policy changes. “This is one huge step toward beating Covid and returning to normalcy. I don’t think it changes the conversation around vaccine requirements for kids,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national union. Ms. Weingarten predicted that there would not be widespread student vaccine mandates until the 2022-2023 school year. She noted that parents and educators were still awaiting full F.D.A. approval of vaccines for children aged 12 to 15, and that mandates for adults did not come until months after the shots first became available. A significant barrier to child vaccination, she said, were widespread conspiracy theories about the shots impacting fertility. “When people have these conversations prematurely about requirements, it adds to the distrust,” she said. Only a single large school district — Los Angeles Unified — has mandated vaccination for those students already eligible for a shot, those 12 and older. On Monday, the district said it was not ready to respond to news about the Pfizer trial results for children under 12. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said Monday that the promising results from Pfizer did not change his conviction that student vaccine mandates are the wrong approach. Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago said last month that student mandates would be “premature.” Historically, it is states, not individual school systems, that determine which vaccines are necessary for school attendance. All 50 states currently mandate vaccination against diseases such as polio, measles and chickenpox. Given the entrenched politicization of the coronavirus vaccine — with Republican parents much less likely to support vaccination — and the existence of widespread misinformation about the shots, many school leaders are hesitant to step out in front of the issue, and are likely to await guidance from their states on how to handle student vaccination. No state has mandated that children or adolescents be vaccinated against the coronavirus, and five states are currently banning such mandates, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education. — Sarah Mervosh and Dana Goldstein The Biden administration will lift travel restrictions starting in November on foreigners who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, reopening the country to thousands of people, including those who have been separated from family in the United States during the pandemic. The foreign travelers will need to show proof of vaccination before boarding and a negative test for the coronavirus within three days before coming to the United States, Jeff Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator, said Monday. “International travel is critical to connecting families and friends, to fueling small and large businesses, to promoting the open exchange ideas and culture,” Mr. Zients said. “That’s why, with science and public health as our guide, we have developed a new international air travel system that both enhances the safety of Americans here at home and enhances the safety of international air travel.” The administration has restricted travel for foreigners looking to fly to the United States from a group of European countries, Iran and China for more than a year. Unvaccinated Americans overseas aiming to travel home will have to clear stricter testing requirements. They will need to test negative for the coronavirus one day before traveling to the United States and show proof that they have bought a test to take after arriving in the United States, Mr. Zients said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also soon issue an order directing airlines to collect phone numbers and email addresses of travelers for a new contact-tracing system. Authorities will then follow up with the travelers after arrival to ask whether they are experiencing symptoms of the virus. The changes announced on Monday only apply to air travel and do not affect restrictions along the land border, Mr. Zients said. The Trump administration began implementing the travel bans against foreign travelers in January 2020 in the hopes of preventing the spread of disease. The effort was largely unsuccessful. The prior administration’s mangled announcements over the restrictions also led to exoduses of American citizens, with packed, chaotic airports that had porous screenings. Mr. Biden has kept the restrictions against potential travelers from the European Union, Britain, India and others, despite pleas from business leaders in need of profits from tourism, immigrant workers who traveled overseas to renew work visas to work in the United States only to be left stranded and citizens left separated from their romantic partners abroad. The White House maintained the restrictions were necessary, particularly after the spread of the contagious Delta variant this summer fueled a rise of coronavirus cases and undermined the central theme of Mr. Biden’s presidency — vaccinating Americans and getting the pandemic under control. Mr. Zients cited the pace of vaccinations administered globally as a reason for the administration’s pivot. The decision also comes on the eve of a visit by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was expected to press Mr. Biden to lift the ban. British officials had hoped the president would announce a relaxation of restrictions when he came to Cornwall, England, in June for the Group of 7 summit meeting and were disappointed when he did not. Their frustration has only deepened since then. The easing of the travel restrictions also comes as the administration has sought to reduce tensions with another ally in France after the United States kept Paris in the dark as they secretly negotiated an agreement with Australia to build nuclear submarines.
