CINCINNATI — It’s possible the COVID-19 vaccine could be available for children 5-years-old and older by the start of the next school year, according to an Ohio doctor leading a Pfizer trial in children.
Dr. Robert Frenck, the director of the Gamble Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s hospital, told Spectrum News 1 during a news conference Monday that emergency use authorization for children 5 and older could come as soon as August or September.
Cincinnati Children’s began a trial for the Pfizer vaccine on 5- to 11-year-olds last month, being only one of four hospitals in the country participating in the Phase 1 trial.
Frenck said he is confident authorization for children 12 and older is imminent. He said the 12 and older age group could be receiving the vaccine by the end of April.
“With how things are progressing, how well things are going, it may even be by August or September that we would have a vaccine available by EUA (emergency use authorizations) for kids 5 to 11 years of age,” Frenck said.
On March 30, Pfizer released preliminary data that showed its vaccine was safe and effective on children as young as 12. In a study of 2,260 U.S. volunteers ages 12 to 15, no cases of COVID-19 were reported among the adolescents who were fully vaccinated, compared to the 18 participants in the group who received dummy shots, according to Pfizer.
The company said the side effects for kids were about the same as adults, including fever, chills and fatigue.
Frenck said the hospital has had no issues finding parents to volunteer children ages 5 to 11 to for its study.
“It's been an overwhelming response,” Frenck said. “We have over 3,000 children on a waitlist that have been interested in participating. That goes from all the way down to six months of age up to 17 years of age.”
For the first part of the study, Frenck explained the focus is figuring out the right dose to give to children. He said only 100 children are enrolled in the Pfizer study as of now. About 30 to 40 kids are enrolled through Cincinnati Children’s, Frenck said. He hopes that nationally, they can get 5,000 kids enrolled.
Frenck said it is critical to vaccinate children in the U.S. Even though they are less likely to become severely ill, children are spreaders of COVID-19, and more than 12,000 children have contracted the virus and more than 300 have died, he said.
Pete Grieve contributed to this story.