Corona vaccinations for under-twelve-year-olds are getting closer in the USA! Several vaccines are awaiting approval in the near future!
Corona vaccinations for children five years and older are getting closer in the US. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccination committee recommended Tuesday that Biontech/Pfizer’s vaccine be granted emergency approval for children ages five to 11. FDA experts consider the benefits of vaccination in this age group to significantly outweigh any potential risks. Biontech/Pfizer have also applied in the EU for approval of their vaccine for five to eleven year olds.
The FDA’s vaccine committee stressed that the coronavirus is also dangerous to younger children. They would be “anything but spared from Covid-19,” said FDA scientist Peter Marks. In this age group, he said, 1.9 million corona infections, more than 8300 hospitalizations – with treatment in intensive care in a third of cases – and about a hundred deaths had been recorded in the US.
“It’s pretty clear to me that the benefits outweigh the risk when I hear about kids who have to go to the ICU, who have long-term effects after Covid, and who die,” said Amanda Cohn of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She and 16 other members of the expert panel voted for emergency approval of the vaccine for five- to 11-year-olds. There was one abstention.
The FDA must now decide on official approval. The drug authority usually follows the recommendations of the expert panel. The CDC then has to issue a corresponding vaccination recommendation. A panel of experts there will consider the issue on November 2 and 3.
The U.S. government hopes to begin a large-scale vaccination campaign soon thereafter for the country’s approximately 28 million five- to 11-year-olds. Children in this age group are to receive two vaccine doses of ten micrograms each. The usual dosage is 30 micrograms each. According to Pfizer, the protection against Covid 19 disease from the vaccination is 90.7 percent in five to eleven year olds.
The vaccine has so far had emergency approval in the US from age 12 and full approval from age 16. In the EU, the vaccine produced by the Mainz-based company Biontech and its US partner Pfizer has so far been conditionally approved for children and adolescents from the age of twelve.
In Germany, the chairman of the Standing Commission on Vaccination (Stiko), Thomas Mertens, expressed reservations about Corona vaccinations for children as young as five. The Covid-19 disease burden in children is “apparently higher in the USA than in Germany”, he told the Düsseldorf-based “Rheinische Post”.
The data from the vaccine approval study for five- to 11-year-olds, which was submitted to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), has also been available to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the Stiko since Tuesday – “and must be evaluated, said the Stiko head.
The president of the German Child Protection Association, Heinz Hilgers, said, “I would very much welcome a safe vaccine for children.” But this would have to be evaluated by technical experts such as the Stiko scientists – and independently, Hilgers stressed in the papers of the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND). “No pressure should be exerted from the side of politics.”
The Pharmacists Association North Rhine expects, however, that the Stiko will recommend a Corona vaccination only for pre-diseased children under twelve years. “I do not assume a general vaccination recommendation of the Stiko and also not the policy,” said association head Thomas Preis to the “Rheinische Post”. Against measles, mumps and rubella every child is vaccinated for good reason. However, coronavirus infections in young children “do not cause such serious complications as we know from the typical childhood diseases”.
