US authorizes Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for children ages 5 to 11

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized this Friday (29) the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against coronavirus for emergency use in children aged 5 to 11 years. The move was awaited by millions of families seeking to protect some of the only Americans left out of the vaccination campaign.

About 28 million children in this age group may receive a third of the adult dose, in two injections three weeks apart. If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) approves, as is expected, they will be able to start receiving vaccines next Wednesday (3).

The Biden government has promised that childhood vaccines will be readily available in pediatric offices, community health centers, children’s hospitals and pharmacies, with 15 million doses ready for immediate shipment.

States began asking for doses last week, under a formula based on how many children they have in that age group. With the school year already underway, the pediatric dose arrives in time for the end-of-the-year holidays, giving more peace of mind to families who want to bring together the oldest and the youngest for the first time since the first months of 2020.

“It’s an extremely important tool for returning to normalcy,” said Dr. Larry Corey, a virus specialist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and leader of the Covid-19 Prevention Network. “Knowing that your child is protected and that they won’t get seriously ill from going to school is an incredible psychological relief.”

In a clinical trial, the vaccine has been shown to provide significant protection in children against the virus. But it is not clear whether this will substantially help to contain the pandemic. This week, 8,300 children ages 5 to 11 were hospitalized with Covid-19 in the US, and at least 94 died, from more than 3.2 million hospitalizations and 740,000 deaths in total, according to the CDC.

The biggest determinant of how many more cases of the disease and deaths there will still be is whether the 60+ million teens and adults who should have already been vaccinated will get vaccinated, said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, public health researcher at the Resource Center for Coronavirus from Johns Hopkins University.

Some vaccine experts warn that the same inequalities that hampered adult immunization earlier this year could hurt children’s.

“We cannot repeat what happened in the early stages of adult vaccination, where well-off and wealthy people found a way to be first in line,” said Dr. James EK Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution. .

Black and Hispanic children are less likely to be tested for the virus, but are more likely to become infected, hospitalized and die from Covid-19 than white children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Hospitalization rates in the 5- to 11-year-old age group are three times higher for black, Hispanic, and Native American children than for white children, according to the CDC.

Between the ages of 5 and 11, more than half are non-white children and nearly 4 in 10 come from families with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, according to Kaiser.

At Washington’s National Children’s Hospital, authorities have developed a plan to ensure that most-at-risk families and children have immediate access to injections, said Dr. Lee Ann Savio Beers, the hospital’s medical director for community health and advocacy and president of the hospital. American Academy of Pediatrics.

The hospital plans to alert its most-at-risk patients to vaccines based on their medical diagnosis and neighborhood, by contacting parents directly, she said.

A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation released on Thursday (28) revealed that 27% of parents of children aged 5 to 11 years are eager to vaccinate them immediately, while a third said they would wait to see how the vaccination goes.

Application among teenagers has been slower than public health experts had expected: Pfizer’s vaccine was made available to children aged 12 to 15 in May, but less than half of that age group is fully vaccinated, compared with 69% of adults.

State and local health officials are bracing themselves not only for further hesitation over vaccines, but also for possible disputes over the order of vaccinations in schools.

“I think the controversy we’ve seen over the mask issue tends to fade from what we’re going to see about the idea of ​​mandatory vaccination” of schoolchildren, said Dr. Jessica Snowden, head of the division of infectious diseases at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. .

At a meeting this week of the FDA’s Vaccine Expert Advisory Panel, several members spoke out vehemently against the school vaccination order.

A CDC study suggests that 42 percent of children ages 5 to 11 have antibodies to the coronavirus from a previous infection, prompting some FDA advisers to ask whether one dose would be enough for children. The use of this study has been questioned by some scientists.

FDA panel members also questioned whether only children with high-risk medical conditions, such as obesity, should receive the vaccine, as they are more vulnerable to having severe cases of Covid-19.

CDC officials said, however, it would be difficult to restrict eligibility, and the FDA advisory panel endorsed the pediatric dose offer for the entire age group by a 17-0 vote, with one abstention.

Snowden said the delta variant eliminated any idea that children would be immune to the virus. At the height of the most recent peak, she said, Arkansas Children’s Hospital was treating up to 30 children a day for Covid, including some with fully vaccinated parents. Although that number has decreased, “it hasn’t returned to what it was before the delta,” she said.

It is expected that much of the burden of vaccination in children will fall on pediatricians and family doctors. Many of them are overwhelmed by the understaffed and pent-up demand for care at this point in the pandemic, but they have deep relationships with parents and children.

Dr. Sterling Ransone, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians and a physician in rural Deltaville, Virginia, said he will keep his office open late on weekdays and Saturdays to meet demand for pediatric vaccines.

“We know who to prioritize — asthmatics, people with heart disease, people who are obese,” he said.

Dr. Victor Peralta, a pediatrician in the Jackson Heights neighborhood, a racially diverse Queens (New York), said vaccination may be a little slower at first among his patients — most of them have Medicaid coverage. to low-income families).

But he predicted that the pediatric dose will be accepted and will ultimately help delay transmission of the virus. “I have no doubt that this will make a difference, not just for those who are already concerned,” he said.

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}