An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday voted to recommend Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for children 5 …
An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday voted to recommend Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for children 5 to 11, and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has signed off on the committee’s recommendations. Now vaccines will be available to eligible children across the country as soon as Wednesday. The CDC announced the news in a Tuesday night release, saying the recommendation includes about 28 million children and that health care providers can start vaccinating the age group « as soon as possible. » Although younger children are now able to get vaccinated, many parents still have questions. Here’s everything health experts want them to know about the vaccine. The American Academy of Pediatrics on Tuesday issued a release supporting the CDC advisory committee’s decision. « The AAP urges families to check with their pediatrician and community health care providers about how to get their eligible children vaccinated, pending a final recommendation from the CDC, » the release says. Many health experts are going on the record recommending children ages 5 to 11 get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as soon as it becomes available. “As pediatricians, our sole purpose is to take care of children and protect them,” said Dr. Stan Spinner, vice president and chief medical officer at Texas Children’s Pediatrics and Texas Children’s Urgent Care. “We feel very comfortable (with this vaccine). If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be recommending it.” Hundreds of children ages 5 to 11 have been hospitalized with COVID-19, and 94 have died this year, the FDA has reported. It was the eighth-leading cause of death in the age group over the past year, after accidents, cancer, malformations, murder, heart disease, chronic lower respiratory disease, and flu or pneumonia. Children appear to be just as likely as adolescents and adults to catch COVID-19 and pass it on, health experts say. Though they seem to be less likely to become seriously ill, health experts urge parents not to take that chance. “A third of our pediatric patients admitted to the hospital ended up in the ICU with COVID,” Spinner said. “So it’s not a benign disease for anybody…. Kids need the vaccine.” Even with a mild infection, children are still at risk for developing a dangerous immune overreaction called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. COVID-19 has led to more than 5,000 cases of the condition; the average age is 9. Children are less likely to have long-term symptoms of COVID-19 than adults, experts say, but they still can suffer from so-called long-haul COVID. Recent data shows children are as likely to get infected by the delta coronavirus variant as adults, and about 50% of infections in children are asymptomatic, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser and the nation’s top infectious disease expert. Fauci told reporters that vaccinating millions of children ages 5 to 11 will also stifle community transmission and nudge the country closer to herd immunity. “If we can get the overwhelming majority of those 28 million children vaccinated, that would play a major role in diminishing the spread of infection in the community,” Fauci said. If the pandemic is contained, health experts say, children will have more freedom to enjoy a sense of pre-pandemic normalcy, like going back to school with minimal restrictions and safely attending family events. “The last point for why to vaccinate children now is to really allow kids the freedom to be kids,” said Dr. Emmanuel Walter Jr., professor of pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine and chief medical officer of the Duke Human Institute. Pediatricians and primary care doctors, children’s hospitals, pharmacies and clinics at schools are among the places where kids can get the vaccine. Those locations include more than 25,000 pediatricians’ offices and primary care sites, more than 100 children’s hospitals and health systems, tens of thousands of pharmacies, and hundreds of schools and community-based clinics. Administration officials say they are working with states and localities to enroll more sites. CVS and Walgreens, the two largest chains in the country, said Wednesday morning that they are now accepting appointments for COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 5 through 11.
