An advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted unanimously Saturday to propose covid vaccines for children under 5, in one of the last regulatory steps before the blows pass into hands.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, is expected to give final approval for the vaccines soon.
The clinical advisory panel supported a two-dose edition of Moderna’s vaccine for children 6 months to 5 years and a three-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine regimen for children 6 months to 4 years.
Once Walensky gives his approval, he will begin a large-scale implementation of vaccines, paving the way for the first vaccines of young people until next week.
Young people make up the last significant segment of the U. S. population. The U. S. government is not yet eligible for a covid vaccine, but the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been spared several key regulatory hurdles in recent days. A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted unanimously Wednesday to submit the injections, which won full FDA approval on Friday. Moderna’s vaccine for children is a quarter of the dose of an adult vaccine, while Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have only one-tenth the dose.
Forty-nine states are expected to get injections immediately to distribute through state systems after requesting the injections from the federal government. Florida is the only state that missed the pre-order deadline for snapshots.
A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released last month suggests that many parents are reluctant to vaccinate their young children. Only 18% of respondents said they plan to vaccinate their children right away.
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