A vaccine from 12 years old. The US Medicines Agency, the FDA, has announced Monday have extended to adolescents aged 12 to 15 the emergency authorization given to the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against Covid. Since its first authorization five months ago, it was only available from the age of 16. The other two vaccines authorized in the United States, that of Moderna and that of Johnson & Johnson, are, for their part, authorized from the age of 18. The United States is following in the footsteps of Canada, which gave the green light to Pfizer’s vaccine for children last week.
This measure “allows a younger population to be protected from Covid-19, which brings us closer to a return to a sense of normalcy and the end of the pandemic,” said the acting director of the FDA, Janet Woodcock, in a statement. “Parents and guardians can rest assured that the Agency has undertaken a rigorous and thorough review of all available data, as we have done for all of our emergency use authorizations,” she said. .
The protocol will be the same as that for adults, says the FDA, which made its decision after the results of a clinical trial conducted with 2,260 adolescents. The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) are yet to share their recommendations for administering the vaccines this week.
Protect more
The youngest do not represent a population at high medical risk. Between March 2020 and the end of April 2021, 1.5 million cases were reported in adolescents aged 11 to 17 in the United States, and they “generally have a milder course of the disease than adults,” says the FDA , without however giving precise figures on serious cases. But vaccinating a large number of adolescents would further protect the entire population.
“The authorization of a vaccine for a younger population is an essential step to continue to reduce the immense public health burden caused by the pandemic,” said Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biological Assessment and research at the FDA. However, some voices are raised, deeming it unnecessary to vaccinate populations that are not very fragile when other countries are sorely lacking in doses.
Vaccine compulsory for students
According to the Bloomberg agency, 46% of the population in the United States has already received at least one dose of vaccine . The rate of vaccinations also rose slightly, to 2.1 million injections per day on average this last week, when it had fallen below the 2 million mark. However, it remains far from the 3.4 million daily injections at the peak of the campaign, a month ago.
Joe Biden has relaunched a series of initiatives to boost vaccination, and wants 70% of the population to have received at least one dose of vaccine on July 4, National Day. In New York, for example, centers are opened in subway stations, and each injection is accompanied by a free subway card for seven days. The governor of the State of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announced in parallel, Monday, that the students of Cuny and Suny, two local universities, should be compulsorily vaccinated in order to be able to attend face-to-face classes from the fall.
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