Vaccination is the only solution to safeguard yourself, your family, and your friends from COVID-19. Children of all ages can be affected by COVID-19, so the FDA is likely to approve Pfizer for children under five years of age next month, said White House medical advisor Dr. Fauci.
Fauci said that younger children need three vaccine doses since two shorts didn’t provide enough response during the clinical trials. In mid-December, Fizer announced that it plans to submit data during the first half of 2022 if the three-dose vaccine was successful. Pfizer said that no safety concerns were identified, and the 3mg dose provided a favorable safety profile in six months to four years old children.
Recently, Omicron cases appear to peak among children. Many children from age zero to four are hospitalized with a highly contagious Omicron variant, says Rochelle Walensky, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Nearly 8 out of 100,000 children ages 4 and under admitted to hospitals were infected with COVID-19, which is double the time from early December.
Fauci and CDC said the Omicron variant is more contagious, but it doesn’t appear to cause high risk than the previous variants. The increased hospitalization rate is because the variant is spreading and infecting faster than the other variants.
However, WHO said that healthy children don’t need COVID-19 boosters. "The aim is to protect the most vulnerable, to protect those at highest risk of severe disease and dying, those are our elderly population, immunocompromised with underlying conditions and also health care workers,” said Sowmya Swaminathan, WHO chief scientist.
