The Centers for Disease Control is set to meet Wednesday, where officials will decide whether the CDC will formally recommend Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine for children ages 12-15. This comes after Pfizer on Monday was granted emergency use authorization from the FDA to begin administration on that age group.
So how will the vaccine for children compare and contrast with adult vaccine administration?
Dr. Norman Baylor, former director of FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, said it is completely normal for children to have the same amount of vaccine doses as an adult would receive.
“The dose is determined by clinical trials, so they actually do dose ranging studies to select the most effective and the safest dose,” Dr. Baylor said. “And those studies indicated that the adult dose was the same.”
But Dr. Baylor said that where we might see a more significant difference in dosage is for very young children like toddlers, but that still has yet to be clarified.
When it came to reactions in adolescents, Dr. Baylor said the clinical trials showed no serious illness caused by the vaccine, which is a good sign. But he said things can always change, depending on certain circumstances.
“As these variants are developing and arising, we may need some type of booster dose -- all of us -- to address those variants,” he said.
Dr. Baylor noted that, while the current vaccines seem to be at least somewhat effective against particular variants like the UK variant, the vaccines may need to be tweaked in the future to align with new data on those variants.
