CDC adviser says children could get vaccinated in second half of 2021

Children and young adolescents could receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the second half of next year, an adviser from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

Dr Jose Romero, chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, said he hoped to see trials testing Covid-19 vaccines in young children from the second quarter of 2021. If the vaccines do, proven to be safe and effective, children under the age of 18 could be vaccinated in the second half of next year, he said.

“I don’t think we’re going to see it in the first half of the year to come,” he said in an interview on MSNBC, adding that the children could still get the vaccine before the semester of autumn. “We have to see how the studies progress. We have to see this data in order to make sure that it is safe and effective in children.”

A vaccine cannot be distributed to children until it has been thoroughly tested in children in clinical trials.

Pfizer, which on Nov. 20 submitted an emergency use request to the Food and Drug Administration for its coronavirus vaccine, is already testing children 12 and older.

Moderna, who submitted an emergency use request for her vaccine earlier this week, is preparing to test at least 3,000 children as young as 12, according to a post on Clinicaltrials.gov. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel told CNBC on Monday that the company plans to test its vaccine on children aged 11 to 17 later this year. But he added that testing on children under 11 would not begin until next year.

“For younger children you have to get down in age very slowly and you have to start at a lower dose to be sure it’s safe,” he said in an interview on “Squawk Box”.

Romero’s comments came three days after his committee voted 13-1 to prioritize the first doses of vaccine for healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities.

Since the start of the pandemic, scientists and infectious disease experts have debated who gets vaccinated first and how the first limited doses of vaccine will be distributed in the United States. On November 16, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told CNBC that about 40 million doses of the vaccine would be available by the end of this year, enough to inoculate about 20 million people, because Moderna and Pfizer vaccines require two injections.

Medical experts have previously advocated for healthcare workers to get the vaccine first, followed by vulnerable Americans, including the elderly, people with pre-existing illnesses and essential workers. Children and young adults, considered to be at lower risk of developing serious illness, should receive the vaccine last.

During the meeting, CDC officials also said that there is currently no data on how pregnant women will respond to vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, both of which use messenger RNA technology, or mRNA. About 75% of health workers are women, according to a briefing at the meeting, and 330,000 of them are pregnant.

Officials said they plan to provide additional guidance on pregnant women once data from the phase three trial has been fully reviewed.