An advisory committee voted unanimously to recommend authorizing the Moderna and Pfizer shots for the youngest children
Kids under five years old have just become the last age group made eligible for a COVID vaccine in the U.S.
“As pediatricians, being able to offer this lifesaving innovation to our patients has been top of mind,” says Sallie Permar, chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and pediatrician-in-chief at New York–Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. “Not only are you protecting against the rare chance that your child would have severe disease, you’re also helping them achieve the normality in life that we’ve all been seeking—to keep all your current activities ongoing without interruptions.
Testing a new vaccine in children is always challenging: the requisite safety threshold is higher in a population of individuals who are still developing and are generally healthy. Additionally, older adults face the greatest risk of severe disease and death from COVID. So when the vaccines were developed, it made sense to start testing them in the latter age group first.
In a preliminary analysis among children under age five, three doses of the Pfizer vaccine had an apparent efficacy of 80.4 percent at preventing confirmed COVID . Moderna’s two-dose vaccine had an apparent efficacy of 50.6 percent in children aged six through 23 months and 36.8 percent among those aged two through five years.
The vaccines continue to provide good protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death in adults, and they are expected to provide similar protection in children.