Children under age 5, the last remaining age group still ineligible for Covid vaccines in the U.S., could finally become vaccine-eligible soon — and some parents have questions about it.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory committee is set to meet>The risks of Covid for small children
The push to get young kids vaccinated follows a rise in child hospitalizations last month, as Covid's omicron variant continues to sweep across the country.
During the first full week of January, the CDC charted 15.5 Covid-associated hospitalizations per 100,000 children under the age of 4. That's a nearly seven-fold increase over the first full week of December, which saw>What experts say about young kids and vaccine safety
Dr. Matthew Harris is the medical director for Northwell Health's vaccine program, and a pediatric emergency doctor at Cohen Children's Medical Center in Queens, New York. He's also the father of two 7-year-old twins and a 4-month old.
As such, he says, the most common question he gets is: Are you going to give this vaccine to your kids?
"And I can very clearly say to them, yes," Harris says. "My school-aged kids are already fully vaccinated, and my infant who will [hopefully] be eligible in about a month and a half will certainly be vaccinated."
Harris doesn't blame parents for asking the question, saying "it's appropriate to have a healthy sense of skepticism" when making decisions for your children. For him, the data from the tens of millions of doses already handed out to older children and young adolescents show the vaccines' robust safety profiles, and a proven amount of protection against Covid.
Some parents are concerned about potential long-term vaccine side effects popping up years, or even decades, later. But Dr. Mark Sawyer, an infectious disease specialist at Rady Children's Hospital who served>Why the small kid-sized dosage is encouraging
For anyone ages 12 and older, Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine has a dosage of 30 micrograms per shot. Kids aged 5 to 11 get 10 micrograms per shot.
For the new group of small children, the drugmakers have proposed just 3 micrograms per shot.
Dr. Sonja Rasmussen, a pediatrics and epidemiology professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine and College of Public Health, says that while she's waiting to see the newest data before recommending the vaccine to young kids, she's encouraged by the effort to select an appropriately low dosage for the age group.
"The company has worked really hard to get the lowest dose that gives an immune response, but keeps the side effects very low," she says.
If the data shows that the doses are safe and effective, Rasmussen says, their benefits outweigh the potential risks.
It remains to be seen whether parents will be eager to embrace the shots, once approved. Only three in ten parents of children under age 5 say they'll get their children vaccinated right away, according to a poll published last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy and research nonprofit.
