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The past few weeks have been filled with encouraging news about the COVID vaccine. President Joe Biden said last week that the country is “on the right track” to have enough vaccines “for every adult in America by the end of May”. After a difficult initial implementation, the country is currently vaccinating more than 2 million people a day. And the CDC has released guidelines suggesting that grandparents who have been fully vaccinated can safely hug their grandchildren again.
But a big question that remains is when children will be able to 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 be vaccinated.
The reason that vaccines have not yet been approved for children is that they have not yet been extensively studied in children. According to New York Times, children of different ages may have different responses to vaccines, and it is standard practice to test older children first to assess their response and potentially modify the dosage.
These studies are starting to happen now: both Pfizer and Moderna are currently conducting clinical trials to assess the effectiveness and safety of their vaccines in children 12 years and older and hope to have results in the summer, or possibly earlier. Depending on the results of these tests, they will test groups of progressively younger children. Last month, Johnson & Johnson announced plans to test its vaccine on children as young as 12, immediately followed by studies with younger children, including babies and newborns.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, said recently that teenagers can expect to receive vaccines later this year. “We project that high school students will most likely be able to be vaccinated by the fall, perhaps not on the first day, but certainly in the early fall,” he said.
Fauci said this week that elementary school students are unlikely to start vaccinating until early 2022, when clinical trials are completed. It is not yet clear when the youngest children, including babies, will be vaccinated, but if all goes well, probably after that.
In general, children are a low-risk group for COVID and therefore also have a lower priority for receiving the vaccine than adults. But it is still important that they be vaccinated as soon as possible. Although most children are not very ill with COVID, some do, and they can also spread the virus.
And experts say that if we hope to achieve collective immunity – the point at which enough population is inoculated against COVID to prevent its spread – we will need children, who make up a quarter of the population in the United States, to be vaccinated as well.
“It is unlikely that we will be able to obtain protection from the community without immunizing children,” Dr. Drexel University professor of pediatrics, Dr. Sarah Long, told the AP. “This is the axis to get everything back to some kind of normality.”