The COVID-19 vaccine can be implanted in children as early as spring, said Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday.
The country’s leading infectious disease expert said testing will begin in the coming months to test the effectiveness of vaccines among the country’s youngest population.
“Hopefully, when we reach the end of spring, early summer, we will have children capable of being vaccinated according to FDA guidelines,” said Fauci (detail) during a COVID-19 meeting at the White House.
Fauci described the upcoming tests as “age reduction tests” that will allow researchers to analyze the vaccine’s effectiveness among a smaller batch of children – “hundreds to a few thousand,” he said.
These results are then compared to the largest tests of tens of thousands of people conducted by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech.
“If you can show that it is safe and that it actually induces the type of response that reflects protection – especially the correlate of immunity – what you can do is link that to the effectiveness data you got from the 30,000[-person] trial with Moderna and the 44,000[-person] test we did with Pfizer, ”explained Fauci.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pointed to recent school data to reiterate that children have lowered COVID-19 transmissibility rates.
Currently, the Pfizer vaccine is authorized for people over 16, while Moderna is approved for adults over 18. Both vaccines – the only vaccines approved for use in the United States so far – require two doses weeks apart.
Fauci said earlier that it could take “months” before children start to protect themselves from the deadly insect.
He noted that “the reason is traditionally when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to be sure, because both children and pregnant women are vulnerable, so, before you put it in children, you will want to make sure that you have a degree of effectiveness and safety that is established in an adult population, particularly a normal adult population, ”Fauci told NBC anchor Chuck Todd in“ Meet the Press ”.
In December, Moderna said it would begin testing its vaccine on 3,000 children aged 12 to 17.