The COVID-19 vaccine could be rolled out to children as early as the spring, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday.
The country’s top infectious disease expert said trials will begin in the coming months to test the efficacy of the vaccines in the country’s youngest population.
“Hopefully, by the time we get in late spring, early summer, we will have children who can be vaccinated according to FDA guidelines,” Fauci said at a White House COVID-19 briefing.
Fauci described the upcoming studies as “age de-escalation tests” that allow researchers to analyze the efficacy of vaccines in a smaller group of children – “hundreds to several thousand,” he said.
Those results are then compared to the larger studies of tens of thousands of people conducted by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech.
“If you can show that it is safe and that it actually induces the kind of response that reflects the protection – mainly the correlate of immunity – then you can bridge that into the efficacy data you get from the 30,000[-person] trial with Moderna and the 44,000[-person] trial we did with Pfizer, ”explained Fauci.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pointed to recent school data to reiterate that children have less COVID-19 transmittability.
Currently, Pfizer’s vaccine is approved for people 16 and older, while Moderna’s is approved for adults 18 and older. Both vaccines – the only ones approved for use in the US so far – require two weeks apart.
Fauci previously said it could take ‘months’ for children to be protected from the deadly bug.
He noted that “the reason traditionally is that when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to make sure, because both children and pregnant women are vulnerable, so before you put it in the kids, you want to make sure. that you have a level of efficacy and safety that has been established in an adult population, especially an adult normal population, ”Fauci told NBC anchor Chuck Todd on“ Meet the Press ”.
In December, Moderna said it would start testing its vaccine on 3,000 children ages 12 to 17.