The COVID-19 vaccine can be given to children starting in the spring, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday.
The country’s top infectious disease expert said trials will begin in the next two months to test the effectiveness of vaccines among the country’s youngest population.
“Hopefully, when we get to late spring, early summer, we will have children able to get vaccinated according to FDA guidelines,” Fauci (insertion) said during a House COVID-19 briefing White.
Fauci described the upcoming trials as “age escalation tests” that will allow researchers to analyze the vaccine’s effectiveness among a smaller batch of children, “from hundreds to a couple thousand,” he said.
These results are compared to the largest trials of tens of thousands of people conducted by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech.
“If you can prove that it’s safe and in fact induces the type of response that reflects protection, primarily the immunity correlate, what you can do is link it to the efficacy data you got from the 30,000[-person] test with Moderna and the 44,000[-person] test we did with Pfizer, “Fauci explained.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted recent data from the school to reiterate that children have decreased COVID-19 transmissibility rates.
Currently, the Pfizer vaccine is licensed for ages 16 and up, while Moderna is approved for adults over 18. Both vaccines, the only ones approved for use in the United States so far, require two doses of weekly difference.
Fauci has said earlier that it could be “months” before children are protected from the deadly bug.
He noted that “the reason is that traditionally, when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to insure, because children and pregnant women are vulnerable, so before you put them on children, you want to insure “You have an established degree of effectiveness and safety in an adult population, particularly in a normal adult population,” Fauci told NBC anchor Chuck Todd on Meet the Press.
In December, Moderna said it would begin testing its vaccine on 3,000 children ages 12-17.