Covid vaccine for kids under 16 yrs by end of summer: Fauci

By Nikhila Natarajan New York, Feb 17 : “End of summer, beginning of Fall” is the earliest that US kids under the age of 16 years could get Covid-19 vaccine shots, US President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci told IANS.
Fauci was responding to a question on the state of play of age de-escalation trials during a press availability.
“By the time we get to the end of the summer, the beginning of the Fall, we would hope that we would have at least one of the candidates available for children…By the time we get to the end of the summer, unless we get into some issue with safety and immunogenicity. We don’t anticipate that that will be the case,” Fauci said.
Pfizer and Moderna, the two companies whose vaccines have emergency use authorisation in the US, are approved for use in the over 16 and over 18 age groups, respectively.
“We’ve already started what’s called age de-escalation studies. You do a Phase 1 or Phase 2 A trial, going from 16 to 12, 12 to nine, nine to six, and you show that a vaccine is safe in those individuals and B, you induce an immune response that’s comparable to the level of the immune response that you showed was effective in a normal adult population,” Fauci explained.
Fauci’s comments on vaccines for kids come at a time when Americans are not only getting a strong dose of sunny news, but also a lot of alternative scenarios on school reopenings.