The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Biontech’s corona vaccine emergency approval for children between the ages of five and eleven on Friday.
Washington DC – With the release of the corona vaccine from Biontech / Pfizer, which was granted by emergency approval on Friday (October 29th, 2021), children aged five to eleven in the USA will soon be able to be vaccinated. The vaccine of the Mainz vaccine developer Biontech and the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer meet the “high standards” of the US drug authority, said FDA director Janet Woodcook. The advisory vaccination committee of the FDA had already recommended emergency approval for the Biontech / Pfizer vaccine for this age group on Tuesday (October 26th, 2021).
The drug authority said, among other things, that the vaccine against the coronavirus is also effective and safe for children under the age of twelve. “As a mother and doctor”, she knows that many in the USA – parents, children, but also school and kindergarten employees – have been waiting for approval, explained FDA executive Woodcock. “Vaccinating younger children against Covid-19 will bring us closer to a return to a certain normalcy.”
US FDA grants emergency approval for corona vaccine from Biontech / Pfizer
So that children from five years of age can be vaccinated in the USA, the approval of the health authority CDC, which will re-examine the approval in the coming week, is still missing. With the final approval, enough vaccine will be available for the 28 million or so children of that age in the United States. The US government under President Joe Biden has announced that it will start vaccinations immediately after the release and has ordered another 50 million doses for children from the manufacturer.
Compared to adults, five to eleven year olds receive a third of the dose, namely only ten instead of 30 micrograms of the RNA vaccine. According to studies by Pfizer, the protection against illness with the coronavirus through vaccination in five to eleven year olds is already 90.7 percent. Biontech and Pfizer have also applied for emergency approval for this age group in the EU. Experts expect approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) by the end of the year.
Corona vaccination: Serious illness in children more often in the USA than in Germany
Children are much less affected by the coronavirus than older people. But the virus can also be dangerous for them. According to the CDC, 8,300 children between the ages of five and eleven have been hospitalized for Covid-19 disease in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic. There were 146 deaths.
In Germany, the chairman of the Standing Vaccination Commission (Stiko), Thomas Mertens, was cautious about corona vaccinations for children from the age of five. The Covid 19 disease burden in children is “apparently higher in the USA than in Germany,” he told the Düsseldorf “Rheinische Post” this week. (ska / AFP)
