PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — COVID-19 vaccination is now available to children ages five and up, but none of that would be possible without the people who participated in the clinical trials.
One area mom talked to KYW Newsradio about why her family chose to include their daughter in a vaccine study.
Paige Wolf lives in Haddon Township, New Jersey. Being immunocompromised, she was extremely worried about her children picking up COVID-19 at school. After Wolf, her husband and their 12-year-old son got vaccinated, her attention and concern turned to her 8-year-old daughter. While she wasn't yet eligible to get vaccinated, the child was a perfect candidate for a local vaccine study.
"I had a friend who had signed up her kids for a trial with [Children's Hospital of Philadelphia] and she shared the information with me, so we applied and we were accepted into the trial," Wolf said.
The trial, she learned, was a blind control study, "so we were not told if she was given the placebo or the actual vaccine."
While she was happy her daughter could potentially have access to the vaccine as early as possible, Wolf had some questions.
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"The questions that I asked were, I wanted to make sure that the dose that she was going to be getting would be the approved dose so that we weren't in the first phase of the trial so that we wouldn't have to do anything differently once the vaccine was approved," she said.
Wolf also wanted to know when her daughter would be unblinded in the study. "Because certainly," she said, "when a safe and effective vaccine was approved, I would want to make sure that if she had gotten the placebo, she could go out and get the real thing."
However, Wolf said they were confident that she received the actual vaccine. "She did develop a sore arm after the first dose. It was mildly sore. She was able to go about her day without any issues," she reported.
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When the Pfizer vaccine received emergency use approval for children ages 5-11, Wolf's family was informed that their daughter had in fact received the Moderna vaccine. Once unblinded in the study, she was given a vaccine card.
"It's not the official one [printed by the federal government] because Moderna still doesn't technically have the EUA approval," she said, "but she has a special card that says that she was given the Moderna vaccine."
And a happy side effect of being involved in the trial, Wolf said, is knowing that her daughter contributed to the advancement of science.
"It's been a wonderful experience for our family and we were really proud and pleased to be a part of it."