Moderna will test its vaccine against COVID-19 in children under 12 years of age

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Modern American pharmaceutical company began a study of its COVID-19 vaccine in children under 12, which will include babies up to 6 months old.

Tuesday’s announcement comes exactly one year after the first adult received a test dose of the injection created at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Injection is now used in Puerto Rico, the United States, and many other countries.

Moderna has also tested the vaccine in young people aged 12 to 17, but has not yet published the findings. The study in younger children will be more complex, because researchers need to determine whether lower doses are used than in adults and adolescents.

The study aims to test the drug in about 6,750 children in the United States and Canada in two phases: one to determine the best dose and the last in which the serum will be administered in two doses in a random sample, while another part will receive a placebo.

“This pediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our VOCID-19 vaccine candidate in this very important population,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.

Due to the speed with which vaccines have been developed as the disease most severely affects older people, the United States does not have any vaccines authorized to be administered to children under 18 (Moderna and Johnson & Johnson) or under 16 (Pfizer / BioNTech).

Pfizer and Moderna have been conducting clinical trials of the vaccine among people over the age of 12 since the end of last year, with a sufficient level of volunteers and waiting to present results to the Federal Food and Drug Agency (FDA).

Steps taken to ensure the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine in children are essential both to reduce the chances of serious cases of the new coronavirus among children and to improve the immunity of the general population by denying virus transmission capacity.

U.S. authorities have suggested that if the results of vaccine trials in minors are positive, high school students could begin to be inoculated this fall, while those in lower grades could be vaccinated early next year. .

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