Soon the youngest can be vaccinated in the USA …
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Pfizer / Biontech’s vaccine for use in children aged six to ten years. The vaccine would be the first in the United States to allow small children to be vaccinated.
It is hoped that as many parents as possible will have their children vaccinated so that they are protected, said FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock at a press conference on Friday.
The approval is based on a study by Pfizer and Biontech that showed vaccination protection of 90.7 percent against the Delta variant in children aged five to eleven. “As children between the ages of five and eleven get used to the new school year in and outside of the classroom, our goal is to help them be safe and secure and to find their way back to normal,” said Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of Biontech. in a statement.
The FDA approved a 10-microgram dose of the vaccine for young children, which is lower than the 30-microgram dose of the original vaccine for children twelve years and older. As the company Pfizer announced, the children’s vaccination doses are to be sent to pharmacies and pediatricians in the USA from Saturday.
The FDA advisory panel had already voted overwhelmingly in favor of approval earlier this week. Final clearance is expected next Tuesday, when the American Disease Control Authority, CDC, has another consultation on how the vaccine should be administered. According to this, the vaccine would be available to 28 million younger children in the USA, after children and adolescents from the age of twelve can already be vaccinated with the vaccine.