Roll up your sleeves: the children’s turn is coming for the COVID-19 snapshots

In a Decatur, Ga. Pediatrician’s office on Wednesday, Mackenzie Olson, 10, took off his black leather jacket and rolled up his sleeve as his mother watched.

“I see my friends but not the way I want them to. I want to hug them, play games with them that we don’t normally go to normally, ”and have a pillow fight with her best friend, Mackenzie said after getting the shot on the Children’s Medical Group website.

With the federal government promising enough vaccines to protect the nation’s 28 million children in this age group, pediatrician offices and hospitals have started vaccinating children, schools, pharmacies and other places planning to do the same in the days to come.

Brian Giglio, 40, of Alexandria, Va., Took his 8-year-old son, Carter, to be vaccinated at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, where children with underlying conditions were vaccinated for the first time. Carter has type 1 diabetes which puts him at risk for complications if he were infected.

“Carter was the last one in our house to get the vaccine and he was always the one that worried us the most,” Giglio said. “And so today is like a pass for us to start living again and we could not be more grateful to everyone who has been involved in this process for helping us to feel this freedom that we feel today. ‘hui. “

Carter said he can’t wait to leave the masks behind once he’s fully vaccinated, so he can smell the things he could smell without them.

“I’m ready to throw it away,” he said, although the CDC still recommends masks in schools and indoor public spaces where viral activity is high, even for fully vaccinated people.

Cate Zeigler-Amon, 10, was on the front line Wednesday for a drive-thru vaccination at Viral Solutions in Atlanta. The girl bounced around the car excitedly before the shot, which she streamed live to her computer during the morning announcements at her elementary school.

Afterwards, Cate said she was “very, very, very excited and very happy”, looking forward to hugging her friends and celebrating her birthday indoors next month “instead of having a frosty birthday party outside “.

Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital vaccinated seven young people on Tuesday night, minutes after the CDC director agreed, and three more early Wednesday. For most of the kids on staff, the kids were waiting for the CDC’s announcement, said Eric Arlia, senior pharmacy director for Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut.

A girl closed her eyes and a boy barely flinched when they were beaten and other waiting children clapped, a video from local media showed.

“This appears to be another important step on the way to being able to vaccinate as many people as possible and end the pandemic,” Arlia said.

The vaccine – one-third the dose given to older children and adults and given with child-sized needles – requires two doses three weeks apart, plus an additional two weeks for full protection. This means that children who get vaccinated before Thanksgiving will be covered before Christmas.

“The time before winter break is very happy,” said Dr Jennifer Shu, whose Children’s Medical Group office in Decatur, Ga., Began immunizing early Wednesday. “This age group will be able to vacation with friends and family more safely than they have been able to since the start of the pandemic.”

Sarah Kerr’s children, aged 6 and 7, are Shu’s patients and she hopes to get them vaccinated by the end of the week. Her kindergarten son has a chromosomal disorder, receives a special education and is at risk of serious illness if infected, Kerr said.

“My son, who cannot wear a mask and has been completely dependent on those around him to protect him, this will give him a line of defense,” Kerr said. “My daughter had to sit on some social stuff because we had to be very careful for her sake. She was so understanding, but it was hard on her.

Thousands of pediatricians have pre-ordered doses, and Pfizer began shipments shortly after the Food and Drug Administration’s decision on Friday to allow emergency use. Pfizer said it plans to make 19,000 shipments totaling about 11 million doses ahead, and millions more will be available to order each week.

Authorities said they expected a smooth deployment, unlike the chaos that plagued nationwide for adults nearly a year ago.

Asked about parents’ difficulties finding vaccine appointments, White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said the vaccins.gov The website will be updated by Friday so parents can search for locations near them. He said the children’s immunization campaign will go full steam ahead next week as Pfizer continues to ship millions of additional doses to locations across the country.

And he said more than 6,000 vaccination clinics are planned in schools across the country before the winter break.

Walgreens planned to start children’s immunizations on Saturday and said parents can register online or by calling 1-800-Walgreens. CVS also accepted appointments online and by phone at certain pharmacies from Sunday.

Many places have planned mass vaccination events in the coming days. And while many pediatrician offices expected high demand at least initially, nearly two-thirds of parents recently surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they would wait or not seek vaccines for their children.

Hannah Hause, Colorado, mother of four, ages 2, 5, 7 and 8, is one of them. She is vaccinated but wants to see how childhood vaccines play out and are studied in the larger child population.

“It is not studied for the long term. It just makes me nervous, ”she said. “As long as I can wait, I will wait.”

During a White House briefing on Wednesday, Walensky’s authorities thoroughly examined all available data on the safety, efficacy and immune response of the vaccine it generates before recommending injections for children.

“The safety of our children is of the utmost importance to me,” she said.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said he plans to have his 5-year-old son vaccinated. “Ultimately, we want every child in our country to be safe from COVID and get back the life they loved,” Murthy said.

Government officials have said pediatricians and family doctors, on whom parents depend to administer routine immunizations to children, could help build confidence.

Dr Ada Stewart, a black family doctor in Columbia, South Carolina, who works at a clinic for underserved patients, said she was ready to start immunizing young children. She has seen the toll the virus has taken on them – not just in family illnesses and deaths, but in school disruptions, declining grades and mental strain.

School closures throughout the pandemic have taken a disproportionate burden on children of color, widening educational gaps and worsening mental health, according to data presented to CDC advisers on Tuesday. It showed more than 2,000 school closures linked to COVID in the first two months of the current school year.

But Stewart believes demand for children’s pictures will be mixed.

“Because many of my patients are black, native and colored, I have seen the full spectrum” from parents keen to have their children vaccinated to those who are more hesitant “due to a history of mistrust of the community medical, ” said Stewart, former president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

His message to both is the same: “Vaccines work, they are safe, they are effective and they save lives.

A Pfizer study of 2,268 children found the vaccine to be nearly 91% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infections. The FDA examined 3,100 vaccinated children and concluded that the injections were safe.

Some skeptics have questioned the need for children to be vaccinated because they are less likely than adults to develop severe COVID-19. But with the delta variant, they get infected and transmit “just as easily as adults,” Dr Anthony Fauci said in a recent White House briefing.

Infected children have also contributed to the American toll – nearly 46 million infections and more than 740,000 deaths.

Since the start of the pandemic, at least 94 children aged 5 to 11 have died from COVID-19, more than 8,300 have been hospitalized and more than 5,000 have developed severe inflammatory disease linked to the coronavirus. Black and Latino youth and those with chronic illnesses are among the hardest hit.

But while some health officials say minorities should be over-represented in COVID-19 vaccine studies because they are disproportionately affected by the virus, nearly 80% of the children in Pfizer’s study were white. Black youth totaled 6%, Latinos 21%, Asians 6%, and less than 1% were Native Americans or natives of Alaska or Hawaii.

Kye’vontay Jordan, 7, who is black, has diabetes and his injection at Children’s National in Washington, DC, reassured his father.

“Now I can sleep without worrying about him going to school,” Brian Jordan said. “Being exposed to the coronavirus could really affect it and ruin it. “

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Patty Nieberg in Denver; Angie Wang in Washington, DC; Lauran Neergaard in Alexandria, Virginia, and Kate Brumback and Ron Harris in Atlanta contributed.