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Why a Covid-19 vaccine isn’t
available for kids yet |
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A year
and a half into the pandemic, parents might wonder why isn't there
a vaccine for younger children yet. After all, some young kids are
just as big as older children for whom the vaccine is authorized. "Boy,
have I had this discussion with several parents," said Dr. William
Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt
University and a longtime vaccine adviser to the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. "It doesn't have anything to do with size. It
has everything to do with maturity of the immune system, and that doesn't
correlate one-to-one with the size of the child." Young
children might need different doses. They might need a different number of
doses. They might not need as many doses. "What
you may see in a child that's 6 months of age may differ from what you see in
a child that's 3 years of age versus a child who's 8 years of age, or versus
an adolescent who's 13 or 14. So, you really kind of need to take each age
separately and evaluate the vaccines," said Dr. Chip Walter, a
pediatrician at Duke University and an investigator for the Pfizer Covid-19
trials. Dr.
Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt
University and one of the lead investigators for Moderna’s pediatric Covid-19
vaccine, said finding the "Goldilocks dose" for young children
takes time. Give too little and the child may not make enough of an immune response
to the coronavirus. Then they're getting a vaccine with the potential for
side effects with little or no benefit. ➕ From my colleague Holly Yan: Why these
parents volunteered their young children for Covid-19 vaccine trials |
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