Pfizer and BioNTech announced this week that they will soon seek approval from global regulators to use their coronavirus vaccine in children as young as 5 years old.
Vaccine makers said in an interview published Friday that they sought to produce smaller doses of the vaccine for younger children.
“We will present the results of our study on children aged five to eleven to authorities around the world in the coming weeks,” Ozlem Tureci, co-founder of BioNTech and its chief medical officer, told the German journal Der Spiegel.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in adolescents 12 to 15 years of age in May and granted full approval of the vaccine to older recipients. 16 years old last month.
According to the New York Times, vaccines for children 12 years of age and younger have not yet been approved by the FDA.
Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and board member of Pfizer, said in August that the vaccine maker “could be in a position” to file an application for vaccine approval in children as early as October.
“This fall, Pfizer will be in a position to file data with the FDA sometime in September and then potentially file the application in October, so it will put us in a period of time when the vaccine could be available in sometime in late fall, probably early winter, depending on how long it takes the FDA to review the application, ”Gottlieb told CBS’s“ Face the Nation ”at the time.
Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech, on Friday asked people who are currently eligible to get the vaccine to do so ahead of the expected wave of COVID-19 infections this fall.
“We still have about 60 days left as a society to avoid a harsh winter,” he said, according to the Times.