Covid-19 New: Latest on Vaccines for Children and the F.D.A. Panel

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Federal officials on Tuesday stressed the importance of a pediatric coronavirus dose to a key advisory panel, arguing that thousands of children between the ages of 5 and 11 have been hospitalized with Covid 19 and nearly 100 have died over the course of the pandemic.

The advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to vote later Tuesday on whether to recommend authorization of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for that age group, setting in motion a string of decisions that could lead to children getting shots as early as the end of next week.

Younger children are “far from being spared from the harm of Covid-19,” Dr. Peter Marks, who heads the agency’s division that oversees vaccine approvals, told the committee. He said Covid-19 is now one of the top ten causes of death among children 5 to 11. Nearly two million in that age group have been infected and 8,300 have been hospitalized, a third of whom have needed intensive care, he said.

Federal officials hope that the pediatric dose can help close a major gap in the U.S. vaccine campaign that has worried parents, educators and public health leaders. If the F.D.A. grants authorization, about 28 million children will become eligible for shots. Only the youngest Americans, children under 5, would remain uncovered. (You can watch the meeting here.)

The committee’s recommendations on whether to authorize vaccines are not binding, but the F.D.A. typically follows them. The vote is expected to go more smoothly than a series of votes over recent weeks about whether to recommend authorization of boosters for adults, an issue that divided regulators and the outside experts that advise them.

Dr. Fiona Havers, a viral diseases specialist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that children aged 5 to 11 make up 10.6 percent of all cases but only 8.7 percent of the population. Children have higher levels than adults of the neutralizing antibodies that are essential for preventing infection, she said, but are at least as likely as adults to be infected, she said. She said there appear to be many more cases of infection than are publicly recorded.

Covid hospitalization rates in the 5 to 11 age group are three times as high for Black, Hispanic or Native American children as for white children, she said. More than 2,000 schools with over one million students were forced to close between early August and October because of outbreaks, she said.

The C.D.C. also presented blood test data indicating that 42 percent of young children had antibodies, sparking questions about whether many of them had been infected and developed natural immunity. Dr. Havers cautioned, however, that the children tested were already under clinical care and may not represent the general population.

“We saw the highest hospitalization rates in the 5- to 11-year age group in September, during the Delta wave,” she said. “So there’s clearly a lot of susceptible children still out there that are vulnerable to…