Elsa Estrada, 6, smiles at her mom earlier than receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday at a pediatric vaccine clinic for kids ages 5 to 11 arrange at Willard Intermediate College in Santa Ana, Calif.
Jae C. Hong/AP
conceal caption
toggle caption
Jae C. Hong/AP
Elsa Estrada, 6, smiles at her mom earlier than receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday at a pediatric vaccine clinic for kids ages 5 to 11 arrange at Willard Intermediate College in Santa Ana, Calif.
Jae C. Hong/AP
Beloved stuffed animals in hand, they lined up at colleges, pop-up clinics and youngsters’s hospitals to do one thing that little children usually hate to do: get photographs. COVID vaccinations for 5-11 12 months olds began in earnest late last week, ramping up over the weekend and early this week.
By the tip of the day on Wednesday, roughly 900,000 elementary-aged kids may have gotten their first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, a White Home official shared with NPR upfront of an announcement anticipated later within the day.
That represents about 3% of kids aged 5 to 11. 700,000 extra have appointments scheduled within the days forward at pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.
“This doesn’t embody appointments being made, for instance, at locations like pediatricians places of work, kids hospitals and different websites,” the official mentioned.
For the White Home, that is an early and inspiring signal within the effort to vaccinate 5 to 11 12 months olds, although it’s unimaginable to inform from these preliminary numbers whether or not vaccinations will proceed apace or hit a plateau of hesitancy as they’ve with different age teams. In contrast to earlier expansions of vaccine availability, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for these youthful kids is available in a smaller dose with completely different packaging and smaller needles.
Vaccines for this age group could not be packaged and shipped till the FDA gave emergency use authorization on Oct. 29, and it’s been a dash ever since.
To quickly attain this new inhabitants, the official says Minnesota has arrange 1,100 vaccination websites together with one on the Mall of America that may vaccinate 1,500 kids a day. Youngsters’s hospitals have arrange household pleasant occasions with pets, stuffed animals and adults in costume. New York Metropolis has greater than 1,000 clinics deliberate in colleges, with versatile hours.
As a result of it’s a new program, comparisons are imperfect. Every week after authorization of vaccines for 12-15 12 months olds, a bigger share of the eligible inhabitants had gotten their first dose than 5-11 12 months olds to this point. However adolescents had been getting the identical vaccine doses already extensively out there to adults in pharmacies and physician’s places of work everywhere in the nation, so there was no ramp-up time wanted.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll discovered solely 27% of fogeys deliberate to hurry proper out and get their 5-11 12 months olds vaccinated for COVID-19. A full 30% mentioned they positively wouldn’t get their kids vaccinated. Surgeon Normal Vivek Murthy has raised alarms about misinformation, pleading with mother and father to do their analysis utilizing dependable sources and to speak to their kids’s pediatricians if they’ve questions.
Some mother and father have complained about having hassle discovering appointments. Nonetheless, over the weekend social media flooded with photos of masked kids sporting brightly coloured band-aids.
“And it will give thousands and thousands of American mother and father peace of thoughts,” President Biden mentioned at a digital political fundraiser Tuesday night time, touting the newly out there vaccines for kids.
First Woman Jill Biden is anticipated to journey across the nation within the coming weeks, visiting colleges and making direct appeals to folks to guard their kids by vaccination.
The secretaries of training and well being and human companies earlier this week despatched letters to high school leaders, encouraging them to arrange vaccine clinics on campuses, to distribute top quality details about the vaccines to college students’ households and to carry Q-and-A periods for fogeys with native pediatricians. The letter additionally flagged that there’s cash within the American Rescue Plan handed by Congress earlier this 12 months to assist fund these efforts.
If sufficient mother and father vaccinate their kids, it might go an extended solution to restoring normalcy for elementary colleges. Many have needed to put college students on “pause” after shut contact with an contaminated classmate, disrupting in-person studying. Some college districts have even needed to shut down totally for every week or extra to attempt to break the chain of an infection.
