Moderna Inc.’s and Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE’s COVID-19 vaccines are now available for children as young as 6 months, but parents’ eagerness for the shots is muted so far. In the first days of the campaign, 42% of U.S. parents with children under 5 said they will definitely or probably get their kids vaccinated, while 13% said they probably won’t and 32% said they plan to skip the shots altogether.
Asked why they plan to forgo vaccination for their kids, most wary parents cited concerns over the safety of the shots and the vaccine development process — issues that unvaccinated adults overall commonly cite as their own top reasons for skipping the vaccines.
Early vaccine hesitancy among parents with young kids is in line with the sluggish immunization campaign among older children. As of June 22, just 29.6% of children ages 5 to 11 were fully vaccinated, compared with 59.8% of those ages 12 to 17, federal health data shows.
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