With Tuesday’s highly-anticipated, unanimous vote from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and quick nod from Director Rochelle Walensky, kids ages 5 through 11 can now get a low-dose COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech.
On Wednesday, Walensky told NPR’s Morning Edition that the evidence from trials in that age group was clear: “Overwhelmingly, the evidence demonstrated that the benefits of this vaccine certainly outweigh the risks of the disease itself.”
“What I really want to say is that we have taken the time to do this right,” she told NPR’s Steve Inskeep.
Their conversation is below, edited for length. (You can also listen to it here.)
On whether the benefits of the COVID vaccine for children under 12 outweigh the risks:
“Children under 12 have done well compared to our elderly population. That is true. But what we have seen and what the evidence we reviewed yesterday demonstrated is that this is not a benign disease in our young children. And in fact … we’ve lost children to this disease. Children ending up in the hospital, in the ICU, long COVID, more so than many other vaccine-preventable diseases for which we vaccinate our children. … So overwhelmingly, the evidence demonstrated that the benefits of this vaccine certainly outweigh the risks of the disease itself.”
On whether there have been any cases of serious side effects during the trials:
“There was not a single case of a severe side effect from this vaccine.”
On the potential risks for myocarditis, a rare side effect of the mRNA vaccine:
“That was absolutely something that we were looking at and looking for. It is one of the reasons that the dose of this vaccine for our younger children is a lower dose. It’s the standard Pfizer vaccine, but the doses are lower for our young children. And again, not a single case of myocarditis in the trials.”
On when and where children 5-11 will be able to get the vaccine:
“So the pediatric vaccines have begun distributing. We began distributing just after the advisory, the authorization from the FDA on Friday. We are scaling up to full capacity. It’s available in some places, but we’ll be at full capacity next week with more than 20,000 sites across this country. … We’re distributing the vaccine to pediatricians’ offices. It’ll be in pharmacies. It’ll be [at] the federally qualified health centers. And that’s where people are getting their children vaccinated.”
On a when a vaccine for children under 5 might be available:
“We are working hard now to make sure that we can bring vaccines to those younger children … and we’re anticipating seeing trial data early in 2022.”
On her expectations for the upcoming winter month:
“I’m really encouraged that cases are now about 50, 60 percent of what they were in our peak of our delta surge. But as you know, we are at 70,000-75,000 cases per day. Still, we’re still at about 1,000 deaths a day and that’s too high. So we are really asking people to do the hard work of getting themselves vaccinated, getting their children vaccinated and continuing to practice those prevention strategies that we know work. The masking, the distancing, the hand-washing, we know those strategies work as we head into these winter months.”
