There are good reasons for the delay in greenlighting vax for kids, however. “Children are not little adults,” Mary Jo Trepka, a Florida International University epidemiologist, told The Daily Beast. “They are physiologically different from adults and from adolescents.”
Vaccine-makers need more data in order to be confident in the jabs’ safety for under-12s. “It’s not just that the immune systems function differently in kids,” Irwin Redlener, the founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told The Daily Beast. “We also don’t know what proper doses of vaccine are at different ages and weights for kids. I appreciate the caution in making sure the process is done correctly.”
Shortcuts are unacceptable to the key decision-makers. Burned by the painful testing of the polio vaccine 70 years ago, government and industry are reluctant to take chances with kids’ health.
The consensus is that vax trials for under-12s should proceed slowly, in gradually expanding phases with incrementally increasing doses of vaccine, only after jabs are proving safe in the older population. Even if that means allowing a nearly two-year pandemic to rage even longer.
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