Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to the president said that children under the age of 5 may be able to get vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus by spring 2022.
In an interview with Business Insider, Fauci said that “likely” beginning in 2022, the vaccine will be recommended to all children down to six months of age.
"Hopefully within a reasonably short period of time, likely the beginning of next year in 2022, in the first quarter of 2022, it will be available to them," Fauci told Insider.
However, Fauci acknowledged that there’s no way to know for sure whether or not the vaccine will be made available to that age demographic in that time frame.
"Can't guarantee it,” he added in the interview. “You've got to do the clinical trial.”
Insider noted that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has received authorization from the Food and Drug Administration and recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for children ages 5 to 11, would be the “likely frontrunner in the race to vaccinate babies and toddlers, because it’s pediatric vaccines trials are already underway.”
Last month, in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Fauci said that children should get vaccinated as soon as they are able.
“It would be a good idea to vaccinate the children,” he stated in the interview.
“It’s important to vaccinate children,” Fauci added. “You want to make sure that we don’t have a situation where the children, inadvertently and innocently, when they get infected – many of them without any symptoms - are spreading it within the family unit. Which is something that recent studies indicated that might be the case.”