COVID vaccines are coming for children – after studies are finished
More than almost anything, Katelyn Evans yearns to be in a play again – onstage, in front of an audience. When the coronavirus pandemic put the world on pause a year ago, she was a high school sophomore three weeks out from opening night of the musical comedy “Once Upon a Mattress.” The show never went on.
Evans, now 17, feels lucky overall. No friends or relatives have become seriously ill, and she’s attending school in person in Cincinnati. But she’s keeping a mental tally of the performances that could have been.
“Most people my age are aware we’re not the No. 1 priority for getting the vaccine . . . . There are people in higher-risk groups than teenagers,” Evans said. Still, she said, “it is a tough age for this to happen. These are once-in-a-lifetime things.”
To help speed the journey back to live theater performances, Evans rolled up her sleeve in October and became one of the youngest volunteers, at that point, in a trial to test an experimental coronavirus vaccine in teens. On Wednesday, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German biotech partner BioNTech announced that their vaccine was safe and effective in adolescents as young as 12 – the same vaccine Evans received. Vaccinations could begin before the next school year for younger teens, pending regulatory approval, Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said.
The key to ending the pandemic looms tantalizingly close in the United States – for adults. President Joe Biden vowed that there would be enough vaccine doses for every American adult by the end of May and predicted that, by July 4, enough people will have received shots to make small gatherings safe.
But the security and relief that come with vaccination remain months away for most children and teens. With normalcy in sight after a long year, many families have become focused on the gap in vaccine availability, an immunity purgatory where only some family members will be vaccinated. The delay will ripple beyond individual families because the threshold for herd immunity almost certainly will not be reached without providing vaccines to many of the about 73 million people under age 18 in the United States.
Vaccines are on their way to children, but it will take time.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says older teens such as Evans will be the first to be offered vaccines, probably by the fall. Elementary-school-age children probably will have to wait until early 2022.
“Vaccinating the children, particularly in the context of the teachers and the parents feeling more confident as we get both high-schoolers and elementary kids back to school, that’s an important goal,” Fauci said. But he cautioned not to get too fixated on a particular fraction of the population being vaccinated for things to improve, because the world will get safer as more people are protected.
“Even if we don’t reach whatever this number of herd immunity is, the more people you get vaccinated, the less virus you have in the community,” Fauci said.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is authorized for people age 16 and older. Evans recently got a real vaccine because she received a placebo in the study. Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement Wednesday that data showing that their vaccine was 100% effective in preventing symptomatic illness in 12- to 15-yearolds will be submitted to regulators in coming weeks. A similar trial from Moderna is expected to report results by summer.
Moderna this month launched a trial that will gradually decrease in age of participants, from 11-year-olds down to babies. Pfizer and BioNTech recently began testing their vaccine in a similar trial, working first to establish a safe dose, then to test it in children ages 5 to 11, then 2 to 5, and, finally, ages 6 months to 2 years.
AstraZeneca and Oxford University launched a trial in February in children as young as 6 years old. In briefing documents submitted to the Food and Drug Administration, Johnson & Johnson outlined two planned studies in children, one for 12- to 18-year-olds and another that would include children as young as infants.
The euphoria from effective vaccines late last year has been tempered by the realization that more than a fifth of the U.S. population faces a wait. The gap has become a reminder that even after the scientific success achieved with coronavirus vaccines, the pandemic will not have a tidy, universal end. Children are at low risk for serious illness, but their lives have been upended by the pandemic.
“As a pediatrician, for sure you hear all the time how this has affected people in many ways, even if it’s not the disease itself,” said Flor Muñoz, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine. “There’s no question that children have a lot of consequences from the pandemic, and a vaccine provides hope as much as possible about going back to a near-normal life.”
In the early days of the pandemic, experts debated why so few children were becoming infected and why those who did so often had few or no symptoms. They rarely suffered serious illness.