Info Magzine: When can children get it? Is it safe? What we know

Millions of adults get vaccinated towards COVID-19 within the USA every day, however trials are nonetheless underway to find out the security and effectiveness of the vaccines in children.

Moderna introduced Tuesday it has given the primary doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to children below 12 years previous. The firm launched a trial in 12- to 17-year-olds in December 2020.

“This pediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our COVID-19 vaccine candidate in this important younger age population,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel stated. Immunogenicity is the power to set off a physique’s immune response.

A Pfizer spokesperson stated the corporate completed enrolling members for its trial with youngsters ages 12 to fifteen.

As states are pressured to ship children again to high school, mother and father surprise when their children will be capable of get a COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s when consultants anticipate that may occur:

When can children get COVID-19 vaccine?

The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are cleared for individuals 18 and older, and the Pfizer vaccine is permitted for ages 16 and up.

Moderna and Pfizer have accomplished enrollment for research of children ages 12 and older and anticipate to launch the information over the summer time. If regulators clear the outcomes, youthful teenagers might begin getting vaccinated as soon as there’s sufficient provide.

“For kids 12 and above, I think we’ll have a vaccine licensed before the 2021-2022 school year,” stated Dr. Robert Frenck, director of the Gamble Vaccine Research Center and principal investigator for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

There is rising proof that teenagers usually tend to transmit COVID-19. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered about twice the incidence of COVID-19 amongst teenagers 12 to 17 years previous than in children ages 5 to 11 from March to September 2020.

Vaccines are typically examined in adults, then teenagers, earlier than being tried in youthful children and infants, who may have decrease doses or have totally different reactions.

Moderna has begun vaccinating youthful children in its trials. A spokesperson for Pfizer stated the corporate hopes to have knowledge from 12- to 15-year-olds within the first half of this yr and, based mostly on these findings, might begin a trial in youthful children.

Neither firm confirmed a timeline, however Frenck guessed a vaccine for youthful children could also be out there in spring 2022, or “maybe a bit sooner.”

J&J stated the corporate is in “discussions with regulators and partners regarding the inclusion of pediatric populations,” in keeping with an announcement despatched to USA TODAY on Tuesday.

Dr G. Paul Evans, CEO of Velocity Clinical Research, which is working trials in children ages 6 to 11 for lots of the corporations, stated in an electronic mail that it could also be trickier to recruit youthful children than teenagers, “because of the hesitation that parents naturally have, when considering allowing their children to take part.”

But, he added, that folks are desperate to get their children vaccinated. “Parents don’t want to keep home-schooling children and want their kids to socialize again,” he stated.

Are COVID-19 vaccines secure for teenagers?

Health consultants stated the vaccines are prone to be as secure for teenagers as they’ve proved to be for adults.

“That’s going to be a fact,” Frenck said.

More than 109 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the USA, the CDC reported. During this time, the agency received 1,913 reports of death among people who received the vaccine but found no evidence that vaccination contributed.

The vaccines are undoubtedly safe among adults, said Dr. Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital, but he’d like to see robust trials that prove safety and efficacy among adolescents and children before making a similar claim.

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“Some degree of hesitancy for vaccinating children is proper,” he said. “We need vaccines for children because we want to generate herd immunity, there’s no question. But we need to do that safely.”

Frenck said trial participants are mostly healthy without underlying medical conditions, but he hopes to expand trials to children who may have compromised immune systems by the summer.

Are there any differences between the vaccines given to kids versus adults?

Though the composition of the vaccines may not change, the dosage might, experts said.

Teens are likely to get the same dose as adults, but children under the age of 12 may be given a lower dose.

In younger kids, researchers may start with a quarter of the regular dose, Frenck said. If things look OK, they may decide to increase the dose in that same age group or move down to the next age group.

Younger kids may end up with a lower dose because their immune response works well against COVID-19. This isn’t the case with all vaccines.

“If you look at the flu vaccine, we use the same dose of flu vaccine in a 6-month-old as we do in a 64-year-old,” Frenck stated.

He emphasized COVID-19 in children is worse than the flu.

Though COVID-19 is mostly delicate in children, in uncommon instances, it can trigger severe illness and even demise. More than 260 children have died from the coronavirus in contrast with 188 children from the flu in the course of the 2019-2020 season, according to data from the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“If you compare (260) to 500,000 deaths, it’s a very small number,” Frenck said. “But these are kids that were perfectly healthy until they got COVID.”

Babies under six months are not included in the vaccine trials, because they are generally presumed to have some antibodies from their mother, which will provide protection but could also interact with a vaccine, potentially causing problems, said Dr. Sallie Permar, chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital.

“It can be fascinating to see if there’s any trace of that” kind of issue with COVID-19 vaccines, she said. On the flip side, infants might end up needing a booster shot, if their mothers’ antibody protection doesn’t last long enough.

She said she also think young children should be given a lower dose of the vaccine than older children or adults. In her own research with HIV, Permar said she found that “children can reply effectively to low-doses of protein-based vaccines.”

Why couldn’t adult and pediatric trials happen at the same time?

Researchers needed data from the adult trials to understand a degree of safety and effectiveness before moving forward with adolescents and younger children, health experts said.

“You need to have more of a justification as to why you are testing vaccines in kids,” Frenck said.

Experts said the adolescent and pediatric trials won’t take nearly as long as the adult trials because they don’t require as many participants as the Phase 3 trials in adults.

Moderna and Pfizer took months to recruit 55,000 adult volunteers for Phase 3 trials. For adolescent trials, the companies will need about 3,000 and 2,600, respectively.

Researchers don’t want to wait for trial participants to come in contact with someone infected with COVID-19 to determine the vaccine’s efficacy, unlike the adult trials. Instead, they’ll measure children’s immune response and compare it with the adults’.

“If you get the identical immune response, then the extrapolation is that you’ve the identical safety,” Frenck said.

Contributing: Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY

Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.

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