DETROIT – Many parents are wondering when a COVID vaccine will be available for children under the age of 12.
Vaccines may be available for those age 5 and older as early as this fall. Pfizer and Moderna are both testing their vaccines in children.
Pfizer plans to enroll 4,600 children age 5 to 11 in the United States, Finland, Poland and Spain. Daemo Gregorie-Cradick is 9 years old. His mother, father and 13-year-old brother Ezra have all been vaccinated.
“When I heard that Ezra got his vaccination I was excited for him but was kind of sad that I couldn’t get one and still had to wear that sticky, smelly, disgusting mask,” Gregorie-Cradick said.
Gregorie-Cradick is part of Pfizer’s vaccine trial at Children’s Hospital Colorado. When his family found out about the trial, his father said they signed him up without hesitation.
Dr. Payal Kohli said kids in the trial are playing an important role.
“We now have a delta variant. We now have all these aggressive variants and we don’t know what the long-term implications of being infected with those types of variants at a young age are,” Kohli said.
Gregorie-Cradick doesn’t know if he received the real vaccine or a placebo, but he should be receiving his second dose soon. Even if it is the placebo, he will be one of the first to get the actual vaccine once it’s approved.
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