imago
Corona vaccinations are starting in the USA for children aged between five and eleven: After the health authority CDC had issued a vaccination recommendation for this age group with the vaccine from Biontech/Pfizer on Tuesday evening (local time), the first younger children were vaccinated that same evening. President Joe Biden spoke of a “turning point” in the fight against the pandemic.
Emergency approval granted!
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had granted the vaccine emergency approval for this age group late last week. The government then already began shipping out more doses of the vaccine across the country. With the CDC vaccine recommendation, children as young as five years old can now receive their shot, with the full-scale vaccination campaign set to begin next week, according to government sources.
For many parents, the vaccination recommendation means “the end of months of worrying about their children,” Biden explained. At the same time, he said, the vaccination reduces the spread of coronavirus through children in other age groups. “This is an important step in our fight to win against the virus.”
At Hartford Hospital in the state of Connecticut, the first Corona vaccine shots were administered to under-twelve-year-olds as early as Tuesday evening. “I could cry,” mother Liz Cronin told the AFP news agency. “We’ve all been waiting so long for our kids to finally get some sense of normalcy back.”
Doesn’t “really hurt”
Six-year-old Kareem Omar reported after his vaccination that it “didn’t really hurt” and expressed patriotism, saying, “Do this for the good of America. Because this helps America and the world, and so life is better for everyone on earth,” he proclaimed, addressing his peers.
The US government had already ordered another 50 million vaccine doses for children from Biontech and Pfizer. So far, only a handful of countries, including China, Chile, Cuba and the United Arab Emirates, are administering Corona vaccines to younger children.
Since the pandemic began, a total of 1.9 million Corona infections have been recorded in children between the ages of five and 11 in the United States, and more than 8300 children in that age group have been hospitalized for covid 19 disease. According to the report, there were more than one hundred deaths. There were also more than 2300 cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a rare but very serious corona after-effect.
Health officials should continue to watch for possible serious side effects of the vaccine, such as heart muscle inflammation, in children. Clinical trials have been too small to reliably describe these risks. However, such side effects are believed to be extremely rare. The coronavirus itself probably causes significantly more heart muscle inflammation, depending on the rate of transmission.
The Biontech/Pfizer vaccine already has emergency approval in the US for children and adolescents aged 12 and over, and full approval for people aged 16 and over. The companies have also applied for approval of their vaccine in the EU for five- to 11-year-olds. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) could decide on this by Christmas.
The Biontech vaccine is administered to five to eleven year olds in two vaccinations of ten micrograms each, which is a third of the usual dose for adults. Pfizer says the vaccine’s protection against Covid 19 disease in this age group is 90.7 per cent.