Trials ongoing for children’s vaccine
Over the weekend, Ohio began allowing anyone over the age of 16 register to get a COVID-19 vaccination and starting today, they can begin to receive the vaccine.
In the state, 3.245 million people have started or completed the vaccine, or 27.76% of the population.
In Auglaize County, 10,709 people have started or completed the vaccine, or 23.46% of the population.
The age group with the highest number of people who have begun the vaccination process are those between 65 and 69, with the 50-59 age group right there with 1,658.
With shots getting in people’s arms, it poses the question of when are vaccines going to be available to those under the age of 16?
Dr. Gary Grosel, chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare of Ohio, said pharmaceutical companies have begun conduction trials.
He said Pfizer recently completed enrollment for a trial of around 2,200 kids between the ages of 12 and 15; Moderna has a similar trail with 3,000 and roughly the same age as the Pfizer one.
Worldwide, Grosel said AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford put together a trial of 300 school-aged children in the United Kingdom, with ages ranging from 6 to 17 years old.
“Mostly in the U.S., it’s been 12 to 15 that’s being trialled,” said Grosel.
Sinovac, a Chinese pharmaceutical company, has completed trials with 3 to 17 year olds, said Grosel, with those results showing the vaccine is safe in children as young as 3.
“Something that’s important, even though we know kids don’t really get as sick as adults, it’s still kind of crucial to protect them because although there’s only been 250 out of 500,000 deaths that have been children, it’s still higher than the flu,” said Grosel. “It still is a concern and obviously with kids, every death is one too many. Not only that, but the one other main reason is they still can spread the disease. In order to drive down the rates completely, we are going to have to — for the entire population — vaccinate children in order to do this.”
Because children have had the lowest infection rate, with 13% of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S. attributed to children, the main focus of these trials and studies is to measure what kind of effect it has on their immune systems.
“The whole thing is these neutralizing antibodies that are made from the vaccines. What they want to do is compare teenagers and adults. It could be less than what an adult immune system would do, but if it’s like 50 times less, that’s a problem,” said Grosel. “If it’s just a little less, it’s going to do what we want it to do. They’re just doing the incremental age drops to be on the safe side.”
Grosel said the no. 1 thing to
sider in all of this is the safety of it.
“They just want to make sure — even in the trials — they’ll stop them if there’s a few issues going on,” he said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases, recently told Congress that he
expected high school students would likely begin getting vaccinated in the fall and that elementary students may not be eligible until early 2022.
While vaccine distribution started slow for the state, Grosel now believes that Ohio is right around the middle of the pack in rate of distribution and getting better.
One of Grosel’s fears initially was the variants
of the coronavirus but he says with the increase in vaccinations, he feels good about where the state and the country is headed.
“I’m hoping we’re not going to hit a plateau and then go up with these variants; the other scary part is we don’t know yet,” he said. “My only fear is the variants start coming on stronger, but I think right now we are looking really good.”