(AGENPARL) – NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT (USA) mer 22 giugno 2022

[Originally published: June 17, 2022. Updated: June 19, 2022]

After multiple delays, very young children are finally eligible for COVID-19 vaccination. In mid-June, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 6 months to 5 years, as well as to Moderna’s vaccine for kids ages 6 months to 6 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) soon after recommended the vaccines, which should become available early next week.

While some parents have been counting down the days and are eager to vaccinate their kids, others are hesitant and have lingering questions: Are the vaccines safe? How effective are they, especially against Omicron? Should a child who recently had COVID-19 get vaccinated?

Vaccination uptake in young children has not been high to date. Nationally only about 29% of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. This compares to a vaccination rate of 60% among kids ages 12 to 17. There are roughly 18 million children under the age of 5 in the United States. 

Leslie Sude, MD, a Yale Medicine pediatrician, says opening vaccination to this younger group is yet another way to manage the pandemic to make everyone safer. 

“While a significant proportion of the population was not eligible for vaccination, there was still the opportunity for widespread circulation of COVID among children, who could then keep transmitting it to older people,” she says. “And as long as the virus spreads from person to person, the virus can keep changing and evolving into new variants.” 

To answer parents’ questions about vaccinating young children, we talked with Dr. Sude and Thomas Murray, MD, PhD, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist.  

Fonte/Source: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccines-kids-under-5