As kids and parents begin to prepare for the third pandemic-influenced school year and lawmakers explore the state of play for vaccinations for young kids, a former FDA commissioner said a COVID-19 vaccine for children younger than 12 will probably not be ready until after winter break.
Former U.S. Food and Drug Administrator Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member who began advising Gov. Charlie Baker early in the pandemic, gave an update on the drugmaker’s progress towards a vaccine for kids younger than 12 during an appearance Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The vaccine in trials is a 10-microgram vaccine, a smaller dose than the 30-microgram vaccine used for people who are 12 and older, he said.
Clinical data from the trial looking at the vaccine for children aged 5 through 11 “should be available in September,” Gottlieb said, with a vaccine becoming available in the months to follow.
“The FDA recently indicated that it’s unlikely to be available before midwinter because I believe that the FDA is likely to require at least six months of follow-up, four to six months of follow-up of the children in that clinical trial,” he said. “So that puts it more in the winter timeframe.”
A day after Gottlieb’s projection, the Joint Committee on Public Health and Joint Committee on COVID-19 and Emergency Preparedness and Management are calling together an oversight hearing on COVID-19 vaccinations for children.
Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders, Acting Public Health Commissioner Margret Cooke, Vice Chairman for Emergency Preparedness in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital Dr. Paul Biddinger and others are expected to testify.
The hearing begins at 10 a.m. and will be streamed live on the Legislature’s website.
It takes place with the Museum of Science, and nearly a month of rising COVID-19 case counts, as a backdrop.
Last week, a dozen Democrats in the Legislature sent the governor a letter urging him to reimpose a mask mandate in early education and elementary school settings as the more infectious Delta variant of COVID-19 pushes case counts higher.
“We don’t have plans to change our current policies with respect to school in the fall,” Baker said Thursday during a stop in Sandwich. “I think what’s got to be the rule of thumb here is that people make decisions based on the current state of play with respect to the virus in their states, and we’re in a very different place than most other parts of the country.”
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