When can children get it? Is it safe? What we know

Millions of adults are vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States every day, but trials are still ongoing to determine the safety and efficacy of vaccines in children, as Modern announced on Tuesday that it had given the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to children under the age of 12. The company launched a trial. On people aged 12 to 17 in December 2020. “This pediatric study will help us assess the safety and potential immunity of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate in this younger age group,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said. Immunity is the ability to stimulate the body’s immune response, and a spokesperson for Pfizer said the company has ended enrollment of participants in its experience with teens ages 12 to 15, as states are pressured to return children to school, and parents wonder when their children will be able to do so. . Get the COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s when experts expect it to happen: When can children get the COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are canceled for people 18 years of age or older, and Pfizer vaccine is approved for ages 16 and over. For studies of children aged 12 years and over, we expect to publish data over the summer. If the organizers scan the results, younger teens can start receiving the vaccination as soon as adequate supplies are available. There is growing evidence that teens are more likely to transmit COVID-19, said Dr. Robert Frink, director of the Gamble Center for Vaccine Research and lead investigator of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found nearly twice the incidence of COVID-19 among teens ages 12 to 17 compared to children ages 5 to 11 from March to September 2020. Vaccines tend to be tested in adults. And then teenagers, before it is tried in young children and infants, who may need lower doses or have different reactions. Moderna began vaccinating young children in her experiments. A Pfizer spokesperson said the company hopes to have data from 12 to 15 years in the first part of this year, and based on these results, it could start an experiment on younger children. I guessed that a vaccine for younger children might be available in the spring of 2022, or “maybe soon”. J&J said the company is in “discussions with regulators and partners regarding the inclusion of children’s groups”, according to a statement sent to USA TODAY on Tuesday. Dr. J. Paul Evans, CEO of Velocity Clinical Research, which is experimenting with children 6-11 years old for several companies, in an email that it may be more difficult to recruit younger children than teens “due to the reluctance of parents naturally. The case, when thinking about letting their children participate. ” But he added that parents are keen to vaccinate their children. “Parents don’t want to keep their children at home and they want their children to mix again,” he said. Are COVID-19 Vaccines Safe for Babies? Health experts have said that vaccines are as likely to be safe for children as they have been shown to be for adults. “That would be a fact,” Frenk said. More than 109 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been given in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During this time, the agency received a 1913 report of deaths among people who received the vaccine Dr. Cody Messner, head of the Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital, said he found no evidence that the vaccination had contributed. Before making a similar claim. Moderna, Pfizer, or J&J: What If You Have Your Choice of COVID-19 Vaccine? The differences are small, but they do exist. “There is a degree of reluctance to vaccinate appropriate children,” he said. “We need vaccines for children because we want to produce herd immunity, so there is no doubt. But we need to do it safely.” Frink said the trial participants are often healthy without underlying medical conditions, but he hopes to expand the trials to include children who may have a device. My immunity is weak by summer. Are there any differences between the vaccines given to children versus Although the composition of the vaccines may not change, the dose may change, experts say, it is more likely that teenagers will receive the same dose as adults, but children under the age of 12 years They may be given a lower dose. You start with a quarter of your regular dose, Frenk said. If things look okay, they may decide to increase the dose in the same age group or move on to the next age group. Younger children may end up taking a lower dose due to their immunity. The response is working well against COVID-19. This is not the case with all vaccines. “If you look at the flu vaccine, we are using the same flu vaccine dose for a 6-month-old child as we at 64 years old,” Frink said. He stressed that COVID-19 in children is worse than influenza. Although COVID-19 is generally mild In children, however, in rare cases it can cause serious illness and even death.More than 260 children died from the Coronavirus compared to 188 children from influenza during the 2019-2020 season, according to data from the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics. : “If you compare 260 deaths to 500,000 deaths, that’s a very small number.” “But these are children who were healthy until they contracted the COVID virus.” Babies younger than six months of age were not included in vaccine trials, because it is generally assumed that They have some antibodies from their mother, which will provide protection but could also interact with the vaccine, which is likely to cause problems, said Dr. Sally Birmar, chief pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Comansky Children’s Hospital. On the other hand, the Order infants need a booster dose if their mother’s antibody protection does not last long enough. She also believes that young children should be given a lower dose of the vaccine compared to older children or adults. In her research with HIV, Pirmar said she found that “children can respond well to low-dose protein-based vaccines.” Why can’t adult and child trials be conducted at the same time? Researchers need data from adult experiences in order to understand safety and efficacy, health experts said, before moving forward with teens and younger children. “You should have more justification for why vaccines are tested on children,” Frink said. Experts said that teen and child experiences will not take nearly as long as adult experiences because they do not require as many participants as Phase 3 trials in adults. Modern and Pfizer took months to recruit 55,000 adult volunteers for the Phase 3 trials. For teen trials, the companies would need about 3,000 and 2,600, respectively, and researchers are not willing to wait for trial participants to come into contact with someone infected with COVID-19 to determine the effectiveness of the vaccine, unlike trials Adults. Instead, they will measure the children’s immune response and compare it with that of adults. “If you get the same immune response, the induction is you have the same protection,” said Frink. Contribution: Karen Weintraub, USA Today, follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT. Health coverage and patient safety at USA TODAY made possible in part through a grant from the Massimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.