The global search for the 2019 coronavirus vaccine (Covid-19) for young people is just beginning, a backward start that has some American pediatricians concerned about whether vaccines are running for young people in time for the next school year.
Other older people would probably be the most vulnerable to coronavirus, but ending the pandemic will also require vaccinating young people. Last week, Pfizer Inc. obtained approval to verify their vaccine in young Americans as young as 12, one of the few attempts in the world to begin exploring whether experimental adult injections can also affect young people.
“I just think the more tests they had to do, the faster they could get a vaccine and that other people might be healthy,” said Katelyn Evans, 16, who has become the first teenager to get an injection. Pfizer examined at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Several candidate vaccines are in the latter stages of studies in tens of thousands of adults, and scientists hope that the coming months will provide evidence that at least some of them are effective enough for widespread use.
But when the first vaccines arrive, they’re unlikely to be for children. Vaccines cannot be given to other young people if they have not been evaluated in the organization of their age, a major impediment to efforts to reopen schools and resume the more general activities that are essential for the well-being of families.
“The public does not perceive this,” said Dr. Evan Anderson of Emory University, who lobbied for pediatric testing of Covid-19 vaccines. Although encouraged through the Pfizer adolescent test, he finds it “very worrying” that young people under the age of 12 will be vaccinated next fall.
Children account for approximately 10% of documented Covid-19 cases in the United States. Although young people are much less likely than adults to be seriously ill, about 120 have died alone in the United States, according to an american Academy of Pediatrics account. This is the number of young Americans dying of influenza in an average year. In addition, a small amount developed a severe inflammatory disease related to coronavirus.
Overall, Anderson says the effect of Covid-19 on young people is greater than that of other diseases that require a pediatric vaccination regimen.
In addition to their own fitness risks, there is an unanswered question about how young people can infect others without problems. In a letter to federal fitness officials, the IPA cited recent evidence that others over the age of 10 can spread the virus as easily as adults.
Add in the lack of school and other child-specific factors, and it is unethical “to allow young people to carry heavy loads with this pandemic without the opportunity to get a vaccine,” wrote Dr. Sara Goza, president of the Academy of Pediatrics. .
Globally, paediatric studies arise with doubts. In China, Sinovac and SinoPharm have opened studies to evaluate children up to 3 years old.
In this photo from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Clinical Research Coordinator Stacy Ranz (left) discusses procedures with Katelyn Evans (right), a trial participant, and her mother Laurie Evans before receiving an injection at Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center on Wednesday, October 14, 2020 (Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center via)
A British study of an AstraZeneca vaccine is testing a low dose in some children, but the company says it will not recruit other young people until it has “sufficient” knowledge about adult protection.
In the United States, Moderna Inc. , Johnson
This is essential, Dr. Robert Frenck, who runs the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children.
“If we immunize adolescents, and potentially younger ones, we will have the effect of preventing these young people from becoming infected. But then they don’t report the infection to parents and grandparents,” he said.
Frenck discovers a lot of interest in evaluating Pfizer’s teens, with 90 families more data just a week after his team filed a call for volunteers over the age of 16 and 17. .
Katelyn, a volunteer from suburban Cincinnati, doesn’t know if she won a fake vaccine or the genuine vaccine, but the school’s best student is very happy to be part of the study and, with the scientific elegance still fresh, took advantage of researchers’ data. explanation of how Pfizer’s vaccine works: a piece of genetic code to exercise the framework for recognizing whether coronavirus occurs.
“I learned DNA and RNA and everything that happens in biology in my first year. And I guess I didn’t know, for example, how it was implemented in the genuine global until now,” he said.
It makes sense to start pediatric tests on adolescents and gradually decrease their age, Frenck said, because teens get doses from other adult vaccines and, so far, with Pfizer injections, severe protective disorders have not given the impression on adult tests.
Assuming that The Pfizer injection has been shown to be effective in adults, Frenck said the key would be for the vaccine to stimulate adolescent immune formula in the same way, without other side effects. He said that if all goes well, it is imaginable that scientists will have an answer about the organization of more than 12 years during the spring.
But young people want their own proofs. Anderson, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Healthcare in Atlanta, said studies may also be more complex because younger patients may want other doses or, because of their more physically powerful immune system, have other reactions to injections.
“It’s very important for us to start the procedure because it will take some time to do the studies the right way,” he said.
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