USA Today: “A federal advisory committee Tuesday voted 17-0 to authorize use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine in children ages 5-11. Children are far less likely than adults to be hospitalized with COVID-19 or suffer long-term consequences from the disease – putting a higher burden on the vaccine to prove safe and effective to justify its risk.
“The committee of vaccine experts and pediatricians said, while they are concerned about the unknowns, they felt the data is sufficient to support using Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine in this age group, because it is likely to benefit far more children than it will harm. Families that are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 need to have access to the vaccine, several members said in describing their support for the measure. And the virus continues to pose a risk to children, they said.
“’It’s very hard for me to believe that the risk for a severe outcome is going to come close to the known risk that we’ve seen for this virus in this age group,’ said Dr. Patrick Moore, a virus expert at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. ‘On top of that, thousands of kids that have been hospitalized, some of them are disabled from the virus, one top of the external cost to parents, to society, to schools, so forth. So to me, it seems like it’s a hard decision, but a clear one.’”