When can children get the COVID vaccine?

The past few weeks have been full of encouraging news regarding the COVID vaccine. President Joe Biden said last week the country was “on track” to have enough vaccines “for every adult in America by the end of May.” After a difficult initial deployment, the country is currently vaccinating more than 2 million people per day. And the CDC has released guidelines suggesting that grandparents who have been fully immunized can safely hug their grandchildren again.

But a big question that remains is when children can get the vaccine. Currently, none of the vaccines available in the United States have been approved for use in children under the age of 16.

Here’s what we know about when children can get vaccinated.

The reason the vaccines have not yet been approved for children is that they have not yet been thoroughly studied in children. According to the New York Times, children of different ages may have different responses to vaccines, and it is common to test older children first to assess their response and possibly adjust the dosage.

These studies are starting to happen now: Pfizer and Moderna are currently conducting clinical trials to assess the efficacy and safety of their vaccines in children 12 years of age and older, and hope to see results by the summer, or maybe earlier. Depending on the results of these tests, they will then test groups of increasingly younger children. Last month, Johnson & Johnson announced plans to test its vaccine in children 12 and older, immediately followed by studies with young children, including infants and newborns.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease specialist, recently said teens can expect to receive vaccines later this year. “We anticipate that high school students will most likely be able to be vaccinated by the fall term, maybe not on the very first day, but definitely in early fall,” he said.

Fauci said this week that elementary school students are unlikely to start getting vaccinated until early 2022, once clinical trials are completed. It is not yet clear when younger children, including infants, will be vaccinated, but, if all goes well, possibly after that.

In general, children are a low risk group for COVID and, therefore, a lower priority for vaccination than adults. But it is still important that they are vaccinated as soon as possible. While most children don’t get very sick from COVID, some do and can spread the virus as well.

And experts say that if we hope to achieve collective immunity – the point at which a sufficient population is vaccinated against COVID to stop its spread – we will need children, who make up a quarter of America’s population, to be vaccinated as well. .

“We are unlikely to be able to achieve community protection without immunizing children,” Drexel University professor of pediatrics Dr. Sarah Long told the AP. “It’s the keystone to bring everything back to a kind of normalcy.”