While clinical trials should soon allow Pfizer and then Moderna to file an authorization request, the vaccine campaign could be broadened quickly.
Will the United States follow in Cuba? While the Caribbean state has become the first country in the world to launch a vaccination campaign against Covid-19 for children, starting at two years old, Americans are considering authorizing the vaccine for 5- 11 years old, the Reuters news agency revealed on Friday (September 10th).
Several senior officials believe that the FDA (Food and Drug administration, the government agency that has the power to authorize the marketing of drugs, editor’s note ) could give the green light to Pfizer and BioNTech in the coming weeks.
The idea behind such a timeline is that the US-German alliance will by then have enough actionable data from clinical trials to apply for authorization. This could be done before the end of September, which would give the FDA several weeks to give its approval and allow the start of a campaign in November.
A vaccine campaign that is slipping
Doctor Anthony Fauci, the main voice on the subject of the coronavirus in the United States (both under Donald Trump , with whom relations were extremely complicated, and with Joe Biden , who appointed him advisor in this file), would even have already specified, assures Reuters, this calendar to thousands of employees of the American health system during a speech which was reserved for them.
In this speech, Dr. Fauci would have added that the Moderna vaccine would follow the same approval path as Pfizer, with a few weeks delay. For the moment, however, none of the companies concerned has confirmed this information.
Initially, the United States did not envisage the start of this campaign before 2022 , but the wave of contaminations caused by the Delta variant and potentially amplified by the start of the school year worries in high places. Indeed, after a fanfare debut and despite increasingly widespread vaccination obligations , the vaccination campaign is now skating across the Atlantic.
If children are far from being the population most exposed to severe forms of the coronavirus (350 have died in the United States since the start of the epidemic for more than 650,000 deaths in total), voices within the scientific community are beginning to worry about a situation in which the youngest are the only ones vulnerable to the virus.
What about France then?
As regards France, only a few thousand particularly fragile children – very specific cases – have received the vaccine against covid-19. For the vast majority, there is indeed no personal risk of developing a severe form of the virus. On the other hand, with the aim of researching collective immunity and protecting the weakest, vaccinating them to limit contamination could be an idea.
In addition, like what has been observed in the United States, where child hospitalizations are on the increase, the risk of having an adult population vaccinated (or more exactly from 12 years old, the minimum age for the access to vaccination in France) and not the youngest would eventually make Covid an exclusively pediatric disease. With potentially new variants and severe forms.
Anyway, the French health authorities have not yet spoken, waiting for the result of scientific studies to do so. The government keeps repeating that vaccinating children is not on the agenda.