COVID-19 vaccines could soon be approved for people as young as 12 years old.
The New York Times reports:
The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to authorize use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in adolescents 12 to 15 years old by early next week, according to federal officials familiar with the agency’s plans, opening up the nation’s vaccination campaign to millions more Americans.
The Times reports that its sources say by the end of this week, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel will consider an emergency use approval that could result in young people being vaccinated as early as next week. It would go a long way toward raising the national immunity level.
Pfizer announced recently that none of the young people in its current drug trial had any serious reactions and the drugs seemed to be working in the young people just as they do in adults.
The first hint that the drug company was ready to go before the FDA came on CBS’s “Face the Nation” when Dr. Scott Gottlieb estimated that 5 million children between the ages of 12 and 15 would immediately receive the vaccine following approval, while another 5 to 7 million would likely be vaccinated before the beginning of the fall 2021 school year.
Pfizer asked the FDA to start its review a few weeks ago.
Moderna is also testing its vaccine on teens, but the results of those trials are not ready yet. The company is also testing its vaccine on even younger children and may have those results sometime after mid-year but before the new school year.
There are a lot of vaccine doses available in the U.S. even as other parts of the world are pleading for more. The CDC said Monday that 65 million doses had been delivered but not administered. About half of those are the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. 25 million doses of Moderna vaccine are on standby and about 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine are ready to be shipped.
At some point, there will be medical ethics conversations about whether supplies should be used to vaccinate lower-risk American teens or whether they should go to other parts of the world where at-risk populations are being infected.
This might be an opportunity to think about how it was teens who made the polio vaccine “hip.” Health authorities planned school dances called “Salk hops” around vaccination clinics.
Why herd immunity may no longer be possible
The overused and misunderstood phrase “herd immunity” is a post-pandemic goal that may be out of reach. The concept has implied that the virus won’t have a place to thrive once a high percentage of the population is vaccinated.
But if there was a chance that could happen, it is slipping away.
Experts say the virus’ mutations may mean we will be fighting this virus forever. Experts are starting to believe that the best we can hope for now is to manage the virus to keep illness and deaths minimal. The New York Times reports the sobering outlook this way:
It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.
“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”
The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.
Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.
“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.
Science journal Nature reported a month ago that herd immunity was becoming increasingly unlikely because so many people — even those who have access to vaccines — were taking a pass:
That threshold is generally achievable only with high vaccination rates, and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse, herd immunity would permit society to return to normal. Most estimates had placed the threshold at 60–70% of the population gaining immunity, either through vaccinations or past exposure to the virus. But as the pandemic enters its second year, the thinking has begun to shift. In February, independent data scientist Youyang Gu changed the name of his popular COVID-19 forecasting model from ‘Path to Herd Immunity’ to ‘Path to Normality’. He said that reaching a herd-immunity threshold was looking unlikely because of factors such as vaccine hesitancy, the emergence of new variants and the delayed arrival of vaccinations for children.
Long-term prospects for the pandemic probably include COVID-19 becoming an endemic disease, much like influenza.
There is another big complication to consider when trying to forecast herd immunity: We do not know yet how long the vaccines protect us. Even if a high percentage of people get vaccinated, it might be that we have to keep hitting that percentage over and over as people need boosters to remain protected.
Is it bad if you feel good after your COVID-19 vaccination?
The experts tell us that feeling under the weather following your COVID-19 shot is a sign that the vaccine is doing what it should. But what if you feel nothing? Does it mean your vaccination is not working?
The vaccine experts tell us that we all react differently, and some people have a slower immune response. A person’s age and overall health may also affect how much they feel the effects of a vaccination.
NPR explores the issue:
But that doesn’t mean people who don’t react to the vaccine severely are less protected, says Dr. Joanna Schaenman, an expert on infectious diseases and the immunology of aging at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. While the symptoms of illness are undoubtedly part of the immune response, the immune response that counts is protection, she says. “That is preserved across age groups and likely to be independent of whether you had local or systemic side effects or not.”
The immune system responses that produce post-vaccination symptoms are thought to be triggered by proteins called toll-like receptors, which reside on certain immune cells. These receptors are less functional in older people, who are also likely to have chronic, low-grade activation of their immune systems that paradoxically mutes the more rapid response to a vaccine.
But other parts of their immune systems are responding more gradually to the vaccine by creating the specific types of cells needed to protect against the coronavirus. These are the so-called memory B cells, which make antibodies to attack the virus, and “killer T cells” that track and destroy virus-infected cells.
Why are so many police officers unvaccinated?
