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 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the
COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE for
children aged 5 to 11 years old, paving the way for some 50 million
doses to start being distributed to states. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention is expected to give final clearance for the
shot to be administered to this age group as soon as Tuesday.
From there, the path to inoculating children will vary greatly
depending on their location, according to more than two dozen state
officials surveyed by Reuters.
"We're going to be left with a bifurcated situation like we have
with the adults, where you have the northeast, West Coast, and some
of the Upper Midwest vaccinated, and then the rest of the country
partly vaccinated at best," said Ira Loss, a senior healthcare
analyst at Washington Analysis, a research firm.
California, New York and Washington, all led by Democratic governors
who have promoted vaccination and mask-wearing during the pandemic,
are setting up mobile sites and high-volume vaccination clinics for
children and launching advertising and social media campaigns to
promote pediatric vaccines, spokespeople for those states' public
health department said.
California has also mandated that school-age children get a COVID-19
vaccine once their age group is eligible, a measure being considered
in New York and Washington.
On the contrary, Republican state governors have largely resisted
measures such as mask mandates or vaccine requirements in
workplaces, schools and public venues. More than a dozen states,
including Florida and Texas, have made efforts to prevent businesses
or schools in their state from imposing such requirements
themselves.
Public health officials in some of those states, including Arkansas,
Nebraska, Indiana, and South Carolina, told Reuters they plan to
rely on local healthcare providers to make shots available to
children.
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 "We plan to use the current
vaccination infrastructure already in place for
vaccinating children rather than have large
scale events," said a spokeswoman for Arkansas'
public health department.
Nebraska has not prepared an advertising
campaign to promote children’s COVID-19
vaccination and it is leaving the task of
administering shots primarily to local health
departments and healthcare providers, a
spokesperson told Reuters. A
spokesperson for South Carolina said that the supply shots in the
state has consistently exceeded demand but it has "enough vaccine
available to accommodate what we hope will be a heightened demand"
for children's vaccines.
While children becoming seriously ill or dying from COVID-19 is rare
compared with adults, cases among unvaccinated people under 17 have
increased in recent months due to the easily transmitted Delta
variant of the coronavirus and now account for more than 25% of U.S.
infections. Infected children can also pass COVID-19 to other people
at higher risk of serious illness, including people who have already
been vaccinated.
Some public health experts say the most effective way to ensure
children get vaccinated is to make it mandatory for school
attendance, but few states are considering such a move.
"We think that this is the best way to protect children from any of
the consequences of the illness but also their relatives and their
immune suppressed friends," said Pamela Zeitlin, the chair of the
department of pediatrics at National Jewish Health, hospital in
Colorado.
But too many states "are hands off about this sort of thing," she
said.
(Reporting by Carl O'Donnell; editing by Diane Craft)
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