From The Tribune staff reports
WASHINGTON — With COVID-19 cases still crippling Alabama’s hospitals — even though the overall numbers have taken a slight downturn — good news may be on the horizon for parents of small children.
Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN that vaccines for children as young as 5 years old may be available this autumn.
“If you look at the studies that we at the (National Institutes of Health) are doing in collaboration with the pharmaceutical companies, there will be enough data to apply for an emergency use authorization both by Pfizer, a little bit later by Moderna,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said. “I believe both of them — with Pfizer first — will very likely be able to have a situation where we’ll be able to vaccinate children. If the FDA judges the data sufficient enough, we could do it by the fall.”
The FDA put out a statement on September 10 that the agency will carefully review the data presented for a child-friendly version of the vaccine once that data is available and that the FDA is “prepared to complete its review as quickly as possible, likely in a matter of weeks rather than months.”
Alabama has had 754,000 COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic in 2020, with 12,718 deaths attributed to the virus.
