A child receives his first dose of Pfizer coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine as a man dressed as Captain America sits next to him, during the vaccine rollout for children aged 5-11
(Picture: REUTERS)Three doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine will offer strong protection for children younger than 5, the company announced on Monday.
It could pave the way towards allowing the youngest children to get vaccinated with Pfizer planning to give the data to regulators this week.
The 18million toddlers under 5 are the only group not eligible for Covid-19 jabs in the United States, sparking anxiety amongst parents as Covid cases continue to rise.
In the UK many parents will be weighing up whether or not to take up the offer of a vaccine for healthy children with over 5s eligible for the jab since April.
The Government said for most children Covid-19 is a mild illness that may require a few days off school but rarely leads to complications. For a very few children, the symptoms may be more serious or last longer.
The current Omicron variant appears to be particularly mild in children. It is not known if future variants will be as mild.
In the US the Food and Drug Administration has begun evaluating data from rival Moderna, which hopes to begin offering two kid-sized shots by summer.
Pfizer has had a bumpier time figuring out its approach. It aims to give tots an even lower dose — just one-tenth of the amount adults receive — but discovered during its trial that two shots didn’t seem quite strong enough for preschoolers.
So researchers gave a third shot to more than 1,600 youngsters — from age 6 months to 4 years — during the winter surge of the omicron variant.
In a press release, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said the extra shot did the trick, revving up children’s levels of virus-fighting antibodies enough to meet FDA criteria for emergency use of the vaccine with no safety problems.
BioNTech’s CEO, Dr Ugur Sahin, said the final third-shot data would be submitted this week.
“The study suggests that a low, 3-microgram dose of our vaccine, carefully selected based on tolerability data, provides young children with a high level of protection against the recent COVID-19 strains,” he said in a statement.
Preliminary data suggested the three-dose series is 80 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic Covid the companies said but warned the findings were based on just 10 cases diagnosed among study participants.
