Pfizer announced Monday that it has received FDA approval to enroll children as young as 12 years old in its COVID-19 vaccine trial. The expansion is aimed at understanding whether the vaccine would be safe and effective for adolescents.
Until now, children under 16 have not been included in any of the COVID-19 vaccine trials in the U.S., and the average age of participants has skewed much older.
” I think this is a really big deal,” says L.J. Tan, chief strategy officer of the Immunization Action Coalition. “Without clinical trials actually done in children, the only way to actually extend the use of the COVID-19 vaccine into children would be to rely on the adult data,” Tan says, which is not ideal.
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