Kids May Get COVID-19 Vaccines By November.
Children in the United States may start to get vaccines from November following the request from Pfizer/BioNTech for authorisation from the Food and Drug Administration for a vaccine for kids from 5- to 11-years-old.
This is said to be giving hope to medical experts who are worried about the alarming rate of cases among children.
Reuters’ sources said that the authorization might be granted near the end of October.
The timeline is based on the expectation that Pfizer will have enough data from clinical trials to request FDA emergency use authorization for the age group near the end of September.
Health experts in the United States are worried about the increasing cases of Covid among children that is caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant, relaxed restrictions, and ineligibility for children under 12 to get vaccines.
“The number of new child COVID cases remains exceptionally high,” said the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Over 148,000 cases were added the past week, with over 750,000 child cases added over the past 4 weeks.”
The AAP said that since the start of the pandemic, children represent 16.3 per cent of total cumulated cases. But for the week ending Oct. 7, children were 24.8 per cent of reported weekly cases.
“Definitely over the last eight weeks we’ve seen dramatic increases in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in kids,” said Donna Tyungu, MD, a pediatric infectious disease physician at OU Health in Oklahoma City, according to USA Today. “It started right when we started school.”
USA Today said that COVID hospitalizations of children hit a peak of three per 100,000 the week of Sept. 5 but have declined since then across the nation. However, numbers have not gone down in more than a dozen states, including Michigan, Oklahoma, Utah, Delaware, and Vermont.
