More than 600,000 kids received a COVID-19 vaccine dose in the first week they became available for 12- to 15-year-olds, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a White House press briefing.
“In less than one week, we have vaccinated more than 600,000 12- to 15-year-olds,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky, M.D., MPH, said in the briefing. In total, more than 3.5 million adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 have been vaccinated so far, she continued. “My own son was one of them.”
At this point, 60% of people over age 18 in the U.S. have gotten at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and about 48% are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. Those numbers include a huge amount of adults in the country. But in order to really significantly contain the pandemic and, maybe, reach our threshold for herd immunity, kids and adolescents will need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus as well.
That’s why it was such a huge moment when, last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave emergency authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to be used in kids ages 12 to 15. The two-dose mRNA vaccine was already authorized for people ages 16 and up, while the other two vaccines available in the U.S., including another mRNA vaccine from Moderna and an adenovirus-based vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, can be given only to people 18 and older.
Clinical trial results suggest that the vaccine is highly effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infections. Among 978 adolescent participants who received a placebo, there were 16 cases of COVID-19. But in a group of 1,005 participants who got the vaccine, there were no cases of COVID-19, the FDA states.
The side effects of the Pfizer vaccine in 12- to 15-year-olds are similar to those observed in adults, the FDA says. Kids who get a COVID-19 vaccine may experience pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, fever, chills, and joint pain, according to a clinical trial involving 1,131 participants who received the vaccine. Those side effects were temporary, though, and typically lasted between one and three days. And, as with adults, participants reported experiencing more side effects after the second dose of the vaccine than the first.
“We have truly made tremendous strides across the country to ensure people have access to vaccines. And there is still a lot of work for us to do ahead,” Dr. Walensky said in the press briefing. “We are more than 274 million doses administered. If you haven’t yet been vaccinated, perhaps you will consider being our reason to celebrate one more.”