The White House is preparing to roll out COVID-19 vaccines to children ages 5 to 11 despite the shots not being approved for the demographic.
Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s top pandemic adviser, defended the decision to announce the White House’s plan before Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for children is authorized by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after the political problems it encountered when it prematurely promoted its booster shot framework.
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“Best practice here is to plan ahead so that we can hit the ground running,” he told reporters Wednesday.
The White House will work with state and local governments, having procured enough vaccine doses for the country’s 28 million children ages 5-11, with 15 million shots ready to distribute in the first week, according to Zients. That includes smaller needles for children.
The White House is also preparing to offer “vaccinations in settings that parents and kids are familiar with,” Zients said. More than 25,000 pediatric and primary care provider sites nationwide will administer vaccines, as will tens of thousands of pharmacies, children’s hospitals, and community health centers.
“Hospitals will partner with local community and faith-based organizations to host vaccination events, including in the evenings and on weekends,” Zients added, with schools being tapped to help, too.
The logistical plan will be supplemented by a multilingual public education campaign “that will meet parents where they are with information about the vaccine,” according to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, another member of Biden’s COVID-19 task force. That includes through the so-called COVID-19 Community Corps and social media, as well as tailored opportunities for parents to ask doctors and public health experts questions about the shots.
“One of the barriers and challenges we will face to getting vaccines to children is this similar barrier we faced with adults, which is that there’s a profound amount of misinformation that is circulating about vaccines, and that’s why we’re making sure that it’s trusted messengers with scientific credibility who go out there and talk about these vaccines,” Murthy said.
The task force’s announcement anticipates meetings of the FDA’s independent advisory committee and the CDC’s counterpart on Oct. 26 and Nov. 2-3, respectively.
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Biden and the task force touted their booster shot plan in August with the intention of it being implemented from Sept. 20. The announcement created concerns the White House was pressuring federal agencies to make decisions based on politics rather than science. The FDA and CDC eventually approved booster jabs for select recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech adult vaccine on Sept. 22.
