The Food and Drug Administration cleared the first coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in children as young as 12 on Monday, expanding access to the Pfizer-BioNTech shot to adolescents ahead of the next school year and marking another milestone in the nation’s battle with the virus.
The decision that the two-shot regimen is safe and effective for younger adolescents had been highly anticipated by many parents and pediatricians, particularly with the growing gap between what vaccinated and unvaccinated people may do safely. Evidence suggests that schools can function at low risk with prevention measures, such as masks and social distancing. But vaccines are poised to increase confidence in resuming in-person activities and are regarded as pivotal to returning to normalcy.
FDA officials said the Pfizer authorization for 12- to 15-year-olds was a straightforward decision because the data showed that the vaccine was safe and that the response to the vaccine was even better than among the 18- to 25-year-olds who got the shots.
Children rarely suffer serious bouts of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. But there is no way to predict the few who will become dangerously sick or develop a rare, dangerous inflammatory syndrome. Out of more than 581,000 covid-19 deaths in the United States, about 300 have been people under 18 — a tiny fraction of the total. But that exceeds the number of children who die in a bad flu season.
Children appear to be less efficient at spreading the virus, although their role in transmission is still not fully understood — another reason for pediatric vaccinations.
Clinicians also worry that with a new virus with many unknowns, the possibility exists for long-term impacts of infection, even from the mild or asymptomatic courses of illness common among children.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, already authorized for adolescents 16 and older, was the first to be tested in younger adolescents. The FDA’s decision will provide a potential path for other vaccine-makers to follow, most of which have launched or plan to initiate trials of their vaccines in teenagers and younger children.
The agency based its authorization on a trial of nearly 2,300 adolescents between 12 and 15 years old, half of whom received the same two-shot regimen shown effective and safe in adults. Researchers took blood samples and measured antibody levels triggered by the shots and found stronger immune responses in the teens than those found in young adults. There were 16 cases of covid-19 in the trial, all of them among adolescents who received a placebo, suggesting the regimen offered similar protection to younger recipients as it does to adults.
But many other physicians take comfort knowing that 250 million shots of messenger RNA vaccine have been given in the United States alone. Serious side effects, such as a risk of anaphylaxis, are extremely rare. Because the trial in teens was an “immune bridging” trial designed to test whether the vaccine triggered immune responses similar to those in adults, researchers did not need to recruit tens of thousands of people to see if those who received a vaccine were protected against illness. The immune bridging technique is commonly used to expand access to vaccines that have been proved effective and safe to adolescents or other populations.
Audrey Baker, 15, and Sam Baker, 12, rolled up their sleeves for shots in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Audrey said she had no hesitation about signing up, and misses little things about how life used to be — eating out in restaurants and seeing family.
“I just trusted the science,” Audrey said. “I knew it was tested in adults. I was really just joining, hoping that maybe I could get vaccinated and help out science.”
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/05/10/coronavirus-vaccine-for-kids/