Buffalo, NY (WBEN) - On Friday, U.S. regulators approved a new COVID-19 vaccine for infants and toddlers between the ages of 6 months to 5 years. Vaccinations could start as early as this week.
The Food and Drug Administration greenlighted the Moderna and Pfizer kid shots on Friday and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended them Saturday. In the U.S., COVID-19 vaccines were first tested and given in late 2020 to health care workers and older adults. Teens and school-age kids were added last year.
"I think this is exciting. This has been long-awaited and finally children from six months to five years old are now hopefully eligible for vaccination," said Chief of Infectious Disease at Jacob's School of Medicine, Dr. Thomas Russo.
"I think there's multiple reasons why children should get vaccinated. First, and most importantly, although children have fared very well in this pandemic, in terms of having less severe disease than adults, there's been over 400 children that have died from COVID. Pediatric deaths are tragic and many more children who had been hospitalized and suffered severe consequences," said Dr. Russo.
"Perhaps even more importantly than consequences acute infection, children similar to adults can get long COVID. The frequency is smaller and there's uncertain consequences of long-term consequences of infection from COVID as well. That may not manifest for years, or even decades. So the best strategy for the personal health of our children is to go ahead and get them vaccinated which will minimize the likelihood of these consequences," Dr. Russo added.
According to the World Health Organization, 12 countries are already administering COVID vaccines to children under 5. Why has the U.S. been behind in the effort?
"I think that it was critical that we felt this vaccine was safe for our children. For some young adults from 16 to 24, there was a slight increase signal. In terms of myocarditis. We have not seen as much of this with younger children, but we wanted to make sure and therefore, the trials were carefully assessed for safety signals and potential adverse reactions. The data that's been presented so far, really looks quite strong. There's no major safety signals of concern. There are no cases of myocarditis in these trials, which is quite encouraging, likely due to the lower dose. However, this is something that we need to follow as more children getting vaccinated, but I think that there's very little question that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh any potential yet to be realized adverse reactions," said Dr. Russo.
The Pfizer vaccine for young children is 10 percent of the full dose and is given in three shots and the Moderna vaccine is two shots, each shot is a quarter of the adult dose.
Dr. Russo recommends the shot even if your child already had COVID.
"Immunity acquired from prior infection is quite variable and is not as protective against severe disease as vaccination induced immunity. In fact, if your child has been infected already and had COVID, if that is packaged together or combined with vaccination, that develops what we call hybrid immunity and a large body of data shows that hybrid immunity is the absolute best and highest degree of protection from COVID infection. I would strongly encourage parents, even if their children had been previously infected, to go ahead and get vaccinated and that will optimize or maximize protection going forward, particularly for variants that may arise where we really want the highest degree of protection."
