December 22, 2021
A COVID-19 vaccine for young children is “unlikely” to be available before mid or even late 2022, an expert said.
Pfizer and BioNTech announced last week that they were evaluating the addition of a third 3 µg dose of their vaccine for children aged 6 months to 5 years after the two-dose series failed to produce the expected level of protection in study participants aged 2 to 5 years, although protection in participants aged 6 to 24 months matched that seen in adolescents and young adults.
If the three-dose series is successful, the companies said they would submit data to the FDA for an emergency use authorization “in the first half of 2022.”
“Hopefully, that’ll make up for the fact that it didn’t get an adequate response with two doses for that older group within that population,” Paul A. Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Healio.
Read more at Healio.