Dr. Anthony Fauci recently revealed when children can likely get the COVID-19 vaccine.
What’s going on?
Fauci said at a White House coronavirus briefing Friday that children will likely get the COVID-19 vaccine before the summer is through, according to The Associated Press.
- “Hopefully by the time we get to the late spring and early summer we will have children being able to be vaccinated,” Fauci said.
Dr. Leana Wen, a public health expert and emergency room physician, said she supported Fauci’s goal for when children can be vaccinated — even if children have, in large part, avoided severe illness to COVID-19, according to The Associated Press.
- “Children tend to not become as severely ill as adults but they can still become ill and some have tragically died,” Wen said, according to the Associated Press. “Children can also be vectors of transmission, and getting children vaccinated is important as we strive for herd immunity.”
Do children need the vaccine?
Dr. Cody Meissner of Tufts Children’s Hospital recently told NPR that children often catch COVID-19 from adults. So if adults become immunized, children might be safe to return to the normal way of life.
- “You know, this is primarily a disease that children catch from adults,” he told NPR. “And so once we generate sufficient so-called herd immunity so that enough adults have developed immunity from their vaccine or from an actual infection — and we think that something around 15- to 25% of the country right now is seropositive, meaning they have some degree of immunity - then maybe that will reduce the risk for children. But I think once the adults are immunized, I don’t think children are going to play a big role in transmission to people who aren’t.”
What about MIS-C?
One major concern with children has been that COVID-19 has led to rare cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C.
- Per ABC News: “MIS-C is a condition where different body parts like the heart, lungs, brain, skin, eyes and kidneys can become inflamed. The condition occurs in children who have been infected with COVID-19.”
The CDC said last week that it remains unsure if the new COVID-19 variants are creating more cases of MIS-C. But it’s something to be mindful of as the variants continue to pop up across the country.