What You Need To Know About The Coronavirus Vaccine For Kids Ages 5 To 11

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed off on the coronavirus vaccine for children 5 to 11 years old on Nov. 2. About 28 million additional children are now eligible for the two-shot regimen, issued three weeks apart.

“Sharing this life-saving vaccine with our children is a huge step forward and provides us all with more confidence and optimism about the future,” Lee Savio Beers, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement Nov. 2.

Beers said children have suffered during the pandemic, including “disruptions to their education, harms to their mental and emotional health, and greatly diminished access to critical medical services.”

“The vaccine will make it safe for children to visit friends and family members, celebrate holiday gatherings, and to resume the normal childhood activities that they’ve missed during the pandemic,” she said in an earlier statement.

Children are contracting covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. And whether it makes children ill themselves or they spread infection to other people in the community, vaccines can help stave off deadly mutations and prevent serious illness, experts said.

“The most important thing about vaccination is that we want to prevent serious illness and death in children, decrease infections and prevent further variants,” said Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician and an AAP spokesperson.

Shu said parents and guardians should speak with their children’s pediatricians with any questions or concerns about the vaccine. We have also tried to answer some common questions here and will be updating as more information becomes available.

Q: Is the vaccine available for children ages 5 to 11?

A: Yes. Coronavirus vaccines were available immediately after the recommendation from the CDC in early November.By the first week of December, 17 percent of 5-to-11-year-olds had received at least one dose and 5 percent were fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

Q: Is it the same vaccine given to children 12 and older?

A: No. Children ages 5 to 11 will get one-third the dose given to adolescents, teenagers and adults. Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said in a statement that the lower dosage was selected for use in the clinical trial “based on safety, tolerability and immunogenicity data.” Younger children will still receive two doses, 21 days apart – the same regimen as for older children and adults.

Children should receive the vaccine specified for their age on the day that they get the shot – for example, an 11-year-old should receive the vaccine for younger children, even if the child will soon turn 12 or is big for his or her age, according to a presentation to the CDC’s advisers on Nov. 2. Unlike some other medications, dosage is not based on size or weight.

Q: How will parents know where to find the shots?

A: Check with your child’s pediatrician, state and local health departments, clinics, pharmacies and on vaccines.gov.

Q: Can a 5-11-year-old child get the vaccine at the same time as other shots?

A: Yes. Coronavirus vaccines may be given without regard to the timing of other vaccines, including on the same day. If more than one vaccine is given on a single visit, the shots should be given at different injection sites.

Q: Is there time to get younger children fully vaccinated before Christmas and New Year’s Eve?

A: No, there is not enough time to start the two-dose vaccine series and be considered fully vaccinated by Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

Still, health experts stressed that what’s crucial is getting vaccinated as soon as possible, noting that partial vaccination offers some protection.

“One dose is better than no dose,” said Chulie Ulloa, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of California at Irvine.

“I anticipate children, even after one dose, will have a pretty strong protection, but you will need that second dose to get you closer to 100 percent,” she said. “Also taking into consideration different individuals, children who are immunocompromised or who have underlying conditions that may reduce their response to the first dose – in general, starting the series sooner rather than later is best, especially going into the holiday season.”

Q: Should younger children even be vaccinated against covid-19?

A: Some parents have questioned whether younger children need the vaccine, particularly given that children tend to – but not always – have less severe illness than adults.

About 1.9 million U.S. children between ages 5 and 11 have been infected with covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. More than 8,300 have been hospitalized – many requiring intensive care – and 146 have died, according to federal health officials.

“So this is a disease of children,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Nearly 6.9 million children in the United States have tested positive for the coronavirus, resulting in more than 20,000 hospitalizations and more than 600 deaths, according to the most recent data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Nearly 6,000 children have suffered a rare but serious condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), which is associated with covid-19 and can cause inflammation of the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, eyes and other organs, the CDC said. The median age of patients who have developed the condition is 9, and half of them were between the ages of 5 and 13, according to the data.

Those numbers are lower than the more than 48 million total cases and over 780,000 deaths across the United States, but health experts have said the virus is hurting children, even young ones.

Offit said, in particular, the highly contagious delta variant “has reached down to the other age groups.”

“They’re a vulnerable population because they’re not vaccinated – the less than 11-year-olds are not vaccinated,” he said.

In the clinical trial, the vaccine was shown to be safe and more than 90 percent effective for children ages 5 to 11 during a time when the delta variant was the dominant strain, according to the vaccine manufacturer.

A slide shown at the CDC advisory committee meeting showed that the estimated benefits of vaccination for children ages 5 to 11 include the prevention of more than 57,000 covid-19 cases and 191 hospitalizations among females in that age group, and of nearly 57,000 cases and 226 hospitalizations among males.

“If you can tell me that over the next couple of months, the incidence of this virus will dramatically decline, then great,” Offit said. “But you’re heading into the winter months with a virus that is, at its heart a winter virus, and you’re going to have children getting together all in one place, most of whom are unvaccinated. That’s not a good recipe. So were I the parent of a 5- or 6-year-old child, I would vaccinate them in a second.”

Q: Should I be concerned about myocarditis?

A; There have been very rare instances of heart muscle inflammation in vaccinated adolescents and young adults. Both the FDA and CDC advisory panels said the benefits of the shot outweighed the risks of the rare heart conditions, with both groups voting unanimously to back the vaccine for children ages 5-11.

Myocarditis cases that followed the vaccine have generally been mild and resolved quickly, officials have said. The CDC has not found any deaths caused by vaccine-related myocarditis.

And the coronavirus itself is more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccine, especially in children who develop a condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, because of the infection.

As of Nov. 24, more than 1,900 reports of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) or pericarditis (inflammation of the outer lining of the heart) were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) among people 30 and younger in the United States who received a coronavirus vaccination. At least 234 million Americans have received at least one vaccine dose, including about 61 percent of people ages 12 to 17 and 68 percent of people 18 to 24, according to the CDC.

The CDC and FDA have confirmed more than 1,000 reports, most of which occurred in adolescent boys and young men after receiving one of the mRNA vaccines. Because of this, the FDA added a warning about potential risks to the Pfizer and Moderna fact sheets and requested larger clinical trials for children ages 5 to 11 to determine whether they might be at an increased risk.

Myocarditis, which can have many causes, is generally not as common among 5-to-11-year-olds as it is among adolescents and young men, however. Pfizer’s clinical trial among children of that age group recorded no cases but researchers caution that it was too small to forecast the risk for younger children. In five out of six modeling scenarios put together by the FDA, the benefits of the shots outweigh the risks due to myocarditis for children ages 5 to 11.

U.S. medical investigators are assessing what the relationship to the shots might be, the CDC said. Symptoms include chest pain, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. But most people with the condition experienced a full recovery, according to the data.

(c) 2021, The Washington Post · Lindsey Bever, Lateshia Beachum, Lena H. Sun ·

{Matzav.com}

5 COMMENTS

  1. Any parent bringing or allowing their child to get the death wax should be arrested and their children removed.

  2. Giving shots to kids is child sacrifice to the golden calf. Healthy children are at no risk whatsoever nor are they super spreaders. This omicron is another Fauci wolf cry. Children will only be harmed by what’s in the shots causing blood clotting/ myorcardidis, strokes , infertility and the ultimate goal of the evil globalists (bill Gates and his cronies including Fauci) to drastically reduce global population by year 2030. Any parent that takes their child down that route us a potential murderer.

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