“I am worried that we still have some tough days ahead,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the Dean at Brown University School of Public Health. “Even though we’re doing reasonably well on vaccines, we’ve got to do much better because the Delta variant is very good at finding people who are unvaccinated and infecting them.”
“What’s going to determine whether this is the end of this surge or not really is up to us,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, the Associate Dean of Strategy and Innovation for the School of Public Health at Brown University.
What’s needed is for more people to get vaccinated as well as to wear masks indoors in high-spread areas and get children vaccinated, she said.
Children under 18 make up 22% of the US population but account for 27% of all cases nationwide, according to data published Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“I think we have underestimated the impact on children,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday. “Look at the pediatric hospitals throughout the country … they’re seeing a lot of children in the hospital with severe infection.”
And the Dean of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine Dr. Peter Hotez said he is still concerned about the rest of the year. The colder months bring conditions that facilitate the spread of the virus, and the US is still under-vaccinated, he said.
“We’re still in for a pretty rough ride for the rest of the year,” Hotez said.
Children could have a vaccine by early November, Ranney says
Vaccines, which experts cite as the best protection against the virus, are only available to children as young as 12. But health officials hope that will soon change.
Child deaths from a preventable illness like Covid-19, no matter how few, are motivation for authorizing a vaccine in children, the US Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official said Tuesday.
“In this latest wave of Covid-19, particularly down south, there have been thousands of children hospitalized. And, frankly, it’s an embarrassment in a developed country to have even 100 children, like we’ve had, die of infectious disease that’s preventable,” Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Dr. Peter Marks said in a town hall hosted by the Covid-19 Vaccine Education and Equity Project.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 645 children have died from Covid-19 in the US.
“No parent should have to lose their child to a vaccine-preventable illness if we have a vaccine that can be deployed that is safe and effective. And we will only allow something to be authorized that we find to be safe and effective,” Marks said.
The US Food and Drug Administration said Friday its vaccine advisers will meet October 26 to discuss data from Pfizer’s vaccine trial among children 5 to 11.
There are still a few steps on the vaccine’s way to authorization. The FDA vaccine advisers would have to first make a recommendation, and the FDA would vote on it.
Then, the CDC would have to sign off before children ages 5 to 11 could start getting vaccinated.
“Most of us in the public health community are expecting that we’ll see approvals of vaccines for this younger age groups sometime in early November,” Ranney said.
“Many of us, of the people who work at FDA have young children or they have grandchildren,” Marks said. “And this is clearly one of the most important issues to get done so we’re not going to be wasting any time.”
And once a vaccine is made available to younger children, it would be up to parents to decide, which may prove to be an obstacle.
Only around one-third — 34% — of parents of 5- to 11-year-olds say that they will vaccinate their child as soon as a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available for that age group, according to Kaiser Family Foundation Vaccine Monitor results published Thursday
Preteens and teens still have the lowest Covid-19 vaccination rates of any age group, according to the CDC. And Hotez told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that in the South only about a third of 12 to 17-year-old have been vaccinated.
“We have a lot of education to do around these mRNA vaccines,” Hotez said.
A promising new antiviral
An antiviral drug promises to reduce impacts of the infection, but experts warn that it is not a replacement for vaccines.
“This pill is terrific and, as an ER doctor, I cannot wait to have this as another tool in my toolbox to give to patients who are sick with Covid-19,” Ranney said. “But better than taking a pill is not getting sick in the first place which means getting vaccinated.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story did not include the most complete average daily case count. The current average is 105,054 cases a day as of Tuesday morning.
CNN’s Jen Christensen, Holly Yan, Susannah Cullinane, Virginia Langmaid, Ben Tinker, Jacqueline Howard and Mallory Simon contributed to this report.
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