Israeli teens set for Pfizer shots after FDA approval

Israel may begin vaccinating teenagers by the end of the month, a Health Ministry official told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday hours after the US Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization to administer the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to children ages 12 to 15.

The ministry said that its director-general, Chezy Levy, has been holding consultations with relevant professionals including the Vaccination Committee, representatives of the Israel Pediatric Society and representatives of the four health funds, the organizations which are conducting the vaccination campaign.

Israel is home to some 630,000 children ages 12-15.

So far, the country has vaccinated around 5.42 million people with at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine out of an eligible population of about 6.3 million. In the past few weeks, however, the campaign has dramatically slowed down, showing that the operation is hitting the wall of vaccine hesitancy. While in January more than 200,000 people were inoculated every day, in the past 10 days the number of shots has not reached 10,000, with no more than 3,500 first doses administered.

Ahead of the FDA’s authorization, Tomer Lotan, executive director of the National Coronavirus Task Force, told the Post the panel is expecting difficulties in persuading many parents to vaccinate their children.

“We think it is going to be challenging to convince parents as long as the level of disease here is so low,” he said. “The rate we reached with adults is higher than what many professionals expected.”

In the past week, Israel has registered fewer than 75 new cases per day, and only 912 active cases remain in the country. At the peak of the pandemic in January, these figures amounted to thousands and tens of thousands, respectively.

If infected, children tend to develop only asymptomatic or very mild cases.

Lotan said that they found fake news particularly worrisome. Earlier in the campaign, the ministry set up a “war room” to fight against fake news about vaccination circulating on social media.

“In the past few weeks, the volume of fake news has decreased compared to what we saw in February, but we know that this is going to be an issue again when the time will come to vaccinate children,” Lotan said. “This is a challenge we are preparing ourselves to face and we know it is going to be much more difficult than with adults.”

The topic of whether children should be vaccinated after a fast approval process has been an issue of contention. Last month, two groups of Israeli physicians signed two opposite letters, one supporting the vaccination and one opposing it.

Some 2,260 children of the relevant age have participated in the Pfizer- BioNTech clinical trial.

According to the data provided by the company, the vaccine proved 100% effective, without any major side effect. Adverse reactions on participants ages 12-15 included pain at the injection site (90.5%), fatigue (77.5%), headache (75.5%), chills (49.2%), muscle pain (42.2%), fever (24.3%), joint pain (20.2%), injection site swelling (9.2%), injection site redness (8.6%), lymphadenopathy (0.8%) and nausea (0.4%).

The participants will be monitored for the next two years to collect further data.

“Our work is not yet complete, as we continue our research into the use of our vaccine in pediatric populations,” Dr. Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech, said in a press release. “Our goal is to submit data for pre-school and schoolage children in September.”

The study on children aged six months to 11 years is ongoing.