Two Year Olds Soon Eligible For COVID Vaccine | BabyGaga
Two-year-olds could potentially be eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine soon. This is because Pfizer has announced that it will request an emergency use authorization for ages two to 11 years of age once , during the fourth quarter of this year.
On Tuesday, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla, D.V.M., Ph.D., announced the plan to request an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to allow children ages two to 11 to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, this September, according to .
Currently, those who are six months to 11 years of age are still completing the trial process.
The first results of the trials will be released in September in two separate cohorts. Those groups include two to five years old and also five to 11 years old, according to the .
The results of those in the six months of age to two years old cohort will be available sometime in the fourth quarter, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics' publication, .
This news comes as Pfizer and the company's partner, BioNTech are waiting for the FDA to authorize EUA for children ages 12 to 15 years old. According to the , that after trials have shown the vaccine to have a 100 percent efficacy rate in that age group.
While and young children have fared much better during the pandemic than adults have, according to the , as of the end of April, more than 3.78 million children have contracted COVID-19. 303 children have also died from the virus. And until recently, children were seeing a surge in COVID cases as a result of variants at a higher rate than adults were.
It is with this information that Pfizer is hoping that their vaccines are approved to help protect the youngest members of society stay safe while moving towards herd immunity.
The process of approving the EUA for the younger age groups is different than that for adults or even older children though.
When the vaccines were approved for use in older children by the FDA, there was no need for the Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to convene to determine whether the approval should be given or not, according to CNN. This was because if everything in the trial looked similar to that of what looked like, there was no need to discuss the vaccination safety for that group.
With the younger age group being a whole different animal, it is likely that the Advisory Committee will be reviewing the clinical data from the trial and will then make recommendations regarding the use of the vaccine on babies and young children. And the hope is that should these younger age groups fare as well as the older ones did that the EUA will be approved and vaccines can roll out to the population-at-large in a very short time following the approval.
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