Children 2-4 years old will require three shots of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday after a previous trial failed to establish the shots’ efficacy in young people.
“It turned out that the other dose, namely the other group, from 24 months to four years did not yet reach the level of non-inferiority, so the studies are continued,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. “It looks like it will be a three-dose regimen. I don’t think we can predict when we will see an [emergency use authorization] with that because the company is still putting the data before the FDA.”
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var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_43232467", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"946487"} }); ","_id":"0000017e-984c-d5a4-a37f-fb4e40a40000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedSCIENTISTS IDENTIFY FACTORS LINKED TO LITTLE-UNDERSTOOD ‘LONG COVID’
Clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine in children under five are underway. One trial is testing the efficacy and safety of the shots in children between the ages of 6 months and 2 years, as well as a study in children 2 to 4 years old. Pfizer announced last month that children between the ages of 2 and 5 did not mount an adequate immune response after receiving two full doses of the vaccine and that it would begin testing a third low dose for children under 5 to be taken two months after the second dose.
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“I wouldn’t want to anticipate what the FDA would do. I think we just need to be patient and know one thing for sure that that’s why the system works because the FDA is very scrupulous in their ability” to investigate drugs and vaccines in clinical trials for people of all ages, Fauci said.
Children under 5 are the only cohort of the population that is not eligible for a vaccine.
To date, over 80% of U.S. residents over the age of 5 have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, while nearly 68% are fully vaccinated.
