Why Is It Taking So Long to Get Vaccines for Kids?
Original article from The Atlantic , 2021
A few things still need to happen before the shots can be authorized for Americans younger than 12.
The timing of the latest COVID-19 surge isn’t great for children. Millions have already started the school year, the rest will do so in the coming weeks, and COVID-19 vaccines aren’t yet available for the 50 million Americans who haven’t reached their 12th birthday.
Vaccine availability will not bring this pediatric outbreak to a halt. But it will help curb the spread of the virus for everyone, and give many families a better sense of how to plan for the future. To that end, as we hurtle toward the fall, parents, teachers, and pediatricians are eager to know when, exactly, the youngest Americans will have a shot at getting a shot. Even though the timeline is still uncertain, the government and vaccine makers have offered hints to help us understand how the process might unfold.
Vaccines for young kids are most likely to be authorized via the same emergency-use mechanism that allowed adults to get their shots starting last December. The process is a bit of a push-and-pull between vaccine makers and the government. The companies have to recruit participants, perform clinical trials, collect data, and submit that information to the government, and the FDA has to tell the companies what sorts of data it’s looking for, how much, and over what timeline. Once the FDA grants an emergency-use authorization, the CDC has to weigh in, offering recommendations to the nation’s doctors and public-health bodies about when and how the shots should be used. (The latter step took only one day after the FDA authorized each of the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines for adults.)