The past few weeks have been full of encouraging news about the COVID vaccine. President Joe Biden said last week that the country is “on track” to have enough vaccines “for every adult in America by the end of May.” After a rocky initial rollout, the country is currently vaccinating more than 2 million people a day. And the CDC released guidelines suggesting that grandparents who have been fully vaccinated can safely hug their grandchildren again.
But one big question that remains is when kids will be able to receive the vaccine. Currently, none of the vaccines available in the U.S. have been approved for use in children under 16.
Here’s what we know about when kids will be able to get vaccinated.
Vaccine trials for older children are happening now.The reason that the vaccines haven’t yet been approved for children is that they haven’t yet been thoroughly studied in children. According to the New York Times, kids of different ages can have different responses to vaccines, and it’s standard practice to test older children first to evaluate their response and potentially modify the dosage.
Those studies are beginning to happen now: Both Pfizer and Moderna are currently conducting clinical trials to assess the efficacy and safety of their vaccines in children 12 and older, and hope to have results by the summer, or possibly sooner. Depending on the results of those trials, they will then test progressively younger groups of children. Last month, Johnson & Johnson announced plans to test its vaccine in children 12 and older, immediately followed by studies with younger children, including infants and newborns.
Teenagers will likely be able to get vaccinated this fall.Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious-disease specialist, recently said that teens can expect to receive vaccines later this year. “We project that high school students will very likely be able to be vaccinated by the fall term, maybe not the very first day, but certainly in the early part of the fall,” he said.
Younger kids probably won’t get a vaccine until 2022.Fauci said this week that elementary-school students probably won’t start getting vaccinated until the beginning of 2022, once the clinical trials have been completed. It’s not yet clear when the youngest children, including infants, will be vaccinated, but, if all goes well, presumably after that.
We need kids to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity.In general, kids are a low-risk group for COVID, and therefore also a lower priority to get the vaccine than adults. But it’s still important that they get vaccinated as soon as possible. Though most kids do not get very sick from COVID, some do, and they also can spread the virus.
And experts say that if we hope to reach herd immunity — the point at which enough of the population is inoculated against COVID to stop its spread — we’ll need children, who make up a quarter of the U.S. population, to be vaccinated, too.
“It’s unlikely we could get community protection without immunizing children,” Drexel University pediatrics professor Dr. Sarah Long told the AP. “This is the lynchpin to getting everything back to some kind of normalcy.”
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