“Many parents, caregivers and clinicians have been waiting for a vaccine for younger children and this action will help protect those down to 6 months of age,” FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf said in a statement. “As we have seen with older age groups, we expect that the vaccines for younger children will provide protection from the most severe outcomes of COVID-19, such as hospitalization and death.”
The vaccines for young children arrive at a critical moment in the nation’s quest to vanquish the virus, with vaccination levels overall flagging even as covid-19 hospitalizations reach their highest average level in more than three months. And they come a few months before the fall, which, along with the winter, could feature another deadly surge of covid cases.
Many parents with babies and young children see the shots as critical to resuming their pre-pandemic lives, without frequent disruptions to day-care schedules or family celebrations. Some parents said they intend to get their children vaccinated as soon as possible.
Their first opportunity, if all goes as expected, will be early next week, following what are expected to be favorable recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday.
“This is a very important moment,” said Sallie Permar, an expert in pediatric vaccines at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “Children and their parents have been waiting since the pandemic began to have a tool to prevent disease.”
Yet indications are that initial uptake of the vaccines will be low. In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, only 18 percent said they plan to get their children vaccinated right away, while 27 percent said they will “definitely not” get their child vaccinated.
It’s not unusual for parents to be hesitant when childhood vaccinations first roll out, as was the case with the polio and pneumococcal vaccines, experts said. But it means pediatricians and family doctors, whom polls show parents trust the most, will have to work diligently in coming months to assuage parental anxieties about having their child vaccinated.
“There’s a lot of information and trust building that needs to happen,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s going to take time to reach other parents, and they’re going to need to really develop confidence in the vaccine and hear it from their most trusted local health-care providers. … Hopefully, with time, people will have increasing confidence that it’s both effective and safe.”
Other experts advise setting realistic expectations about what the shots can do against a pathogen that can evolve quickly. Neither vaccine was tested against the fast-spreading omicron subvariants, called BA.4 and BA.5, that are circulating and have an exceptional ability to evade immune protections.
Vaccines tested against earlier lineages of the coronavirus “won’t hold up that well in protecting against infection by the new subvariants,” said Peter Hotez, a molecular virologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “But they will still be…
Read More: FDA authorizes coronavirus vaccine for young kids with shots likely next week
