The White House said on Wednesday that when the COVID-19 vaccine is authorized, it would most likely be three doses for children under the age of four and that millions of Pfizer antiviral tablets will be made accessible in the following months.
At a news briefing, White House top medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said two clinical studies of the Pfizer vaccine are beginning on children ages 6 months to 2 years old, and ages 2 to 4, although the older group hasn't yet satisfied guidelines.
Children to get 3 doses of COVID-19 vaccine
Until then, despite allegations that the drug has been difficult to locate in recent weeks, White House officials agreed to issue millions more Pfizer antiviral tablets by June. The vow to enhance pill availability and to continue developing vaccinations for the young age range come amid a seven-day daily average of 692,400 COVID-19 cases and roughly 2,200 fatalities each day in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A potentially more infectious new Omicron sub-variant has been discovered in at least 40 nations, including roughly 100 cases in the United States, according to health experts throughout the world, according to the New York Post.
Vaccinating young children against COVID-19 will take time, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday.
Even while the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) head said he expected children under the age of five to receive three doses of immunizations, he couldn't give a date for when the federal government would authorize the use of those vaccines in an emergency.
The FDA is being "scrupulous" in making sure "that when these vaccinations become accessible for children at those ages that we can be convinced that they will be safe and efficacious," according to Fauci, indicating that the system is working.
For months, Pfizer and BioNTech have been studying a vaccine that protects young children, but Fauci said Wednesday that the original results from trial participants aged 2 to 4 didn't meet experts' expectations although doses for children aged 6 months to 2 "worked effectively."
In October, the FDA issued an emergency use permission for COVID-19 vaccinations for children aged 5 to 11, but parents of children younger than that have been held in limbo ever since. Fauci said on Wednesday that he wasn't aware of the FDA's continuing approval procedure or that he wasn't privy to the data, according to Virginia Mercury.
Fauci hits back to his critics
Meanwhile, Fauci retaliated against "purely political" assaults on himself and his colleagues in the field of public health for their attempts to keep COVID-19 under control. In an interview that aired on Wednesday, the nation's top infectious disease doctor spoke with Dr. Marc Siegel, the host of SiriusXM radio's Doctor Radio Reports, saying that critics are using the pandemic and people's dissatisfaction with preventative measures to make political points, even if it costs lives. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican, has frequently stated that Fauci is lying about the epidemic and that he sought to "knock down" certain experts who disagreed with him during a Senate hearing on January 11.
Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health's infectious disease program who also serves as President Joe Biden's main medical adviser, has been the target of criticism from Paul and other conservatives for how the epidemic is being handled, New York Daily News via MSN reported.
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