Fauci says it will be ‘months’ before children get COVID-19 vaccine – New York Post

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that it will be months before school-age children will be able to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said its important to see how the vaccine performs first with adults before administering it to kids.

Its going to be months. And the reason is traditionally when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to make sure, because children as well as pregnant women, are vulnerable, Fauci told NBC anchor Chuck Todd on Meet the Press.

So, before you put it into the children, youre going to want to make sure you have a degree of efficacy and safety that is established in an adult population, particularly an adult, normal population.

Once thats established, then clinical trials can be run to determine whether the vaccine works for children, he said.

The process will involve whats called a bridging study that will look for similar results as the adult trials, Fauci said.

You can say, okay, now we have safety in the children. We have comparable immunogenicity, namely the same type of immune response, Fauci said.

We can get this expeditiously approved for the children before going through a 30,000 person trial that may take a longer period of time.

Fauci also said Sunday that its very likely that adults who have recovered from COVID-19 will be encouraged to take the vaccine.

Since we dont know the durability of protection from someone who has already been infected, how long that protection lasts, it would not be surprising that we would be vaccinating people who have recovered from COVID-19, Fauci said.

He noted that recovered COVID-19 patients were among some of the participants in trials for leading candidates such as Moderna.

When the trials were done, the Moderna trials and other trials, and we looked at the data, there were people who, when you looked at their antibody response, they actually gave indication that they had already been infected and actually recovered quite well, Fauci said.

And at the time of the vaccine study, they were actually well and normal, as it were, and yet they still got vaccinated.

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Fauci says it will be 'months' before children get COVID-19 vaccine - New York Post