Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor Expects Vaccinations for Kids by Summer

Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor Expects Vaccinations for Kids by Summer.

SPEAKING over the weekend, Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to US President Joe Biden, said that he hopes to see some kids starting to get vaccinated for COVID-19 in the next few months.

Vaccines are not yet approved for children, but testing is already underway for those as young as 12 and if they are successful, he said they would be followed by another round of testing down to those 9 years old.

“Hopefully by the time we get to the late spring and early summer we will have children being able to be vaccinated,” Fauci said at a White House coronavirus briefing.

Rather than doing trials involving tens of thousands of people, like the Pfizer and Moderna adult trials, clinical trials involving children will be done in smaller groups.

“What you can do is in a much smaller trial measured in hundreds to a couple of thousands to do what we call ‘safety in a Phase 2a for immunogenicity,” Fauci said.

Immunogenicity refers to the ability of a substance to induce a cellular and humoral immune response.

“What you can do is then bridge that [the smaller trials] to the efficacy data that you got from the 30,000 trial of Moderna and the 44,000 trial that we did with Pfizer,” Fauci explained.

A supporter of Fauci’s goal is Dr Leana Wen, a public health expert and emergency room physician, who said: “Children tend to not become as severely ill as adults but they can still become ill and some have tragically died.

“Children can also be vectors of transmission, and getting children vaccinated is important as we strive for herd immunity,” she concluded.

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