The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday legalized a third injection of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for children aged five to 11 at least five months after its number one two-dose series.
Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA department responsible for vaccines, said the information increasingly shows that the coverage provided through two injections decreases over time. The FDA has decided that a third vaccine can help cover for children in this age organization. and that the benefits outweigh the risks, Marks said.
The FDA authorized a third injection after analyzing data from an ongoing Pfizer trial, in which a subset of 67 children this age had higher antibody levels a month after receiving a booster dose. The drug regulator did not identify any new protective considerations and found that the children experienced the same mild side effects as others after receiving a recall. These side effects come with swelling at the injection site, fatigue, headache, muscle or joint pain, chills, and fever.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s committee of independent vaccine experts has a meeting scheduled for Thursday, at which they are expected to have advice for or against recalls. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has the final say on whether physical care providers deserve to start administering the injections. Walensky generally supports the committee’s advice.
The FDA did not convene its committee to discuss the knowledge before authorizing the booster dose. Some committee members were frustrated that the drug regulator made decisions about booster doses without speaking openly to the public.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 28 percent of children ages five to 11 had won their first set of two doses in April. FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf on Tuesday encouraged parents to vaccinate their children to protect them from the virus. Califf said that while covid tends to be less severe in young people, more young people have become ill and hospitalized with the virus since the omicron variant became dominant in the U. S. USA during the winter.
Covid infections are reappearing in the United States as more transmissible subvariants of omicron spread across the country. The U. S. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 90,000 new infections consistent with one day on average sunday, 30 percent of which piled up as of last week, according to CDC data. New hospital admissions of other people with covid also increased 8% over the past week, according to the CDC.
In the United States, almost all age teams can now get at least 3 doses of the vaccine, with the exception of children under the age of five, who are not yet eligible for the number one vaccine. The FDA’s advisory committee is scheduled to meet next month to review applications from Moderna and Pfizer for the drug regulator to authorize their vaccines for children under five.
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