A Vaccine For Children Is Not Likely To Be Approved Until The End Of Year

Parents and caregivers may have to wait until the end of 2021 before a COVID-19 vaccine is approved for young children ages 5 to 11. The news comes from Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

Collins said both Pfizer and Moderna are still collecting trial data, trying to understand — among other things — whether young children should receive a smaller vaccine dose than what has already been approved for adults.

Pfizer could submit its data to the Food and Drug Administration for review by the end of September, Collins said. But he added, “I’ve got to be honest, I don’t see the approval for kids — 5 to 11 — coming much before the end of 2021.”

Collins’ remarks come one day after the FDA granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 and older. The vaccine remains available for kids between the ages of 12 and 15 through the current emergency use authorization.

“If you want to avoid having that outbreak that’s going to send all the kids home again, you should be doing everything to avoid that. And that means wearing masks,” Collins told NPR. “And by the way, if somebody tries to tell you we don’t really have scientific evidence to say that masks reduce infection in schools, that’s just not true. There are dozens of publications, both from the U.S. and other countries, to show that’s the case.

Excerpted from “A Vaccine For Children Is Not Likely To Be Approved Until The End Of Year” on NPR. Read the full article online.

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Source: NPR | A Vaccine For Children Is Not Likely To Be Approved Until The End Of Year, https://www.npr.org/sections/back-to-school-live-updates/2021/08/24/1030611406/a-vaccine-for-young-children-is-not-likely-until-the-end-of-year-nih-director-sa |© 2021 npr

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