Fauci Says Children 4 and Younger Will Get Three-Doses of the Pfizer Vaccine
Children 2-4 years old will require three shots of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday after a previous trial failed to establish the shots’ efficacy in young people.
“It turned out that the other dose, namely the other group, from 24 months to four years did not yet reach the level of non-inferiority, so the studies are continued,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. “It looks like it will be a three-dose regimen. I don’t think we can predict when we will see an [emergency use authorization] with that because the company is still putting the data before the FDA.”
Clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine in children under five are underway. One trial is testing the efficacy and safety of the shots in children between the ages of 6 months and 2 years, as well as a study in children 2 to 4 years old. Pfizer announced last month that children between the ages of 2 and 5 did not mount an adequate immune response after receiving two full doses of the vaccine and that it would begin testing a third low dose for children under 5 to be taken two months after the second dose.