Good news for kids hoping for jabs in arms (which used to sound like an oxymoron before this spring): Moderna has announced promising results for its trial in adolescent-aged children. In around 4,000 adolescents, the vaccine proved to be 94.1% effective in preventing disease. No cases in the vaccinated group were found two weeks after the second shot, while 4 cases were found in the unvaccinated control group.
On Tuesday, May 25, Moderna showed in a clinical trial that its mRNA vaccine is safe and effective in people ages 12 to 17. The company will apply for FDA emergency use authorization in June. This follows the semi-recent authorization of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine for the same age group, which happened at the end of March.
While children tend to have less severe complications from COVID-19 on the whole, serious illness is still quite possible. And even though rates across the country are falling due to more widespread vaccination, it’s still important that kids get vaccinated as herd immunity is not quite in our grasp yet.
The availability of another vaccine may help more people in this age group get protected; however, the rest of the world has nowhere near the access to vaccines that U.S. citizens over age 12 do right now. In April, health policy experts estimated that the United States might have an excess of up to 300,000 extra vaccines.
That being said, adolescents should still get vaccinated if it is available to them. This problem isn’t the fault of citizens wanting to get protection; it’s about the failures of governments and systems to provide vaccine equity.
More vaccine reporting
- Sources and updates, February 26Sources and updates for the week of February 26 include deaths in U.S. prisons, the future of COVID-19 vaccines, airplane wastewater testing, and more.
- Sources and updates, February 12Sources and updates for the week of February 12 include routine vaccinations for kids, variant analysis in China, ME/CFS research, and more.
- Sources and updates, February 5Sources and updates for the week of February 5 include modeling persistent COVID-19 risk, global vaccination coverage, COVID-related lawsuits, and more.
- The future of COVID-19 vaccines needs more dataOn Thursday, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (or VRBPAC) met to discuss the future of COVID-19 vaccines. While the committee readily agreed that our current, Omicron-specific shots are working well and should be used more broadly, it had a hard time answering other questions about future vaccine regimens—largely due to a lack of good data.
- Sources and updates, December 18Sources and updates for the week of December 18 include at-home test orders, lives saved by vaccines, state-level wastewater surveillance, and more.