American coronavirus: FDA could authorize Covid-19 vaccines for young children in a few weeks, expert says

Currently, the youngest Americans eligible for vaccination are 12 years old, and the adolescent vaccination rate is still approaching half, according to a CNN analysis of CDC data.

Trials are currently underway for young children, and Pfizer / BioNTech announced in a press release Monday that a Phase 2 of 3 trial has shown their two-dose vaccine to be safe and generated a “robust antibody response. »In children 5 to 11 years old.

Expanding access to vaccines would be important both to protect children and to end the virus’s grip on the United States for everyone, said the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine of the United States. Baylor College of Medicine, said Dr Peter Hotez.

“At the end of the day, if we are serious about stopping this epidemic in the United States, we need 85 to 90% of the American population to be vaccinated,” Hotez said. “It means all adults, all adolescents and a large number of young children.”

But there’s still a big challenge ahead: getting the doses into the hands of children, said CNN medical analyst Dr. Johnathan Reiner.

While some parents are eager to get their children vaccinated, others are more hesitant.

“While this seems like a guarantee that parents would give this vaccine to their children, we’re going to have to do a much better job of educating a very diverse group of Americans that this vaccine is safe and effective,” he said. .

But as medical professionals discuss the decision with families, CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said she believes it is normal that some parents are not ready.

“I understand some of them maybe don’t want to go first,” Wen said. “There is another segment of parents who are really impatient, who would do anything to get their children immunized. Let them go first.”

School policy changes

As the vaccination process unfolds, schools are learning how to manage student safety on campus.

New quarantine protocols for students and teachers at Miami-Dade County public schools took effect Monday, reducing the length of quarantine for staff and high school students if exposed to Covid-19 by 10 days to 5 days, as long as they test negative and show no symptoms.

Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said masks were still required for all teachers and students, but said it was something they would continue to review throughout the year.

“These are measures that we are submitting to our working group … to be seen as the guardians of a further relaxation of the protocols,” he said.

New York City authorities also reduced the quarantine time for exposed students, allowing unvaccinated masked students in a classroom to forgo quarantine if there was an exposure in the classroom. and that they were three feet apart.

Starting next week, however, schools will increase student testing to once a week, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

Boosters Could Spread To More Populations, Says Fauci

Booster vaccine doses have been another consideration to bolster protection against the virus and although the population being studied for clearance to obtain them is limited, Dr.Anthony Fauci, director of the National Allergy Institute and infectious diseases, said the group could expand.

FDA vaccine advisers voted on Friday to recommend authorization for emergency use of a booster dose of Pfizer’s vaccine for people 65 years of age and older and those at high risk of severe Covid-19. The FDA has yet to act on this recommendation.

But Fauci told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the FDA will track incoming data from the United States and Israel in real time and adjust all permissions accordingly.

“The decline in protection, especially against serious illness in younger groups, would prompt the FDA to look into this and see if it wants to extend the recommendation to much under 65,” Fauci said.

If that data comes in, “then I think it’s likely, over the coming weeks, that we will increasingly see an extension of the recommendation for boosters for these people,” Fauci said.

Those who received the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine for their initial vaccine “have not been forgotten,” Fauci noted.

“The data associated with the boosters in these people will arrive at the FDA, I imagine in a few to three weeks,” he said. “They will look at it the same way they did before and hopefully get a recommendation that would ensure fairness between people who have had different products in their vaccination schedule.”