To date, vaccines have not been available to children under 16 years old, except those who joined the Pfizer study last year. The 2,260 adolescents who signed up included patients of Austin Regional Clinic.
"ARC had about 5 percent of that enrollment. So about 100 of those 12-15 year old's in the study came through ARC, from the community here from Austin," said Dr. Anas Daghestani, CEO of Austin Regional Clinic, in this recent interview on Fox7 News.
"Judging from the response of parents bringing their children in for these COVID-19 trials, there's a lot of excitement," said ARC Chief Medical Information Officer and internal medicine physician Dr. Manish Naik in another interview on KXAN News.
For those parents who may still be skeptical, however, Dr. Naik says the data looks promising that the Pfizer vaccine is proving safe for kids. Some parents also point out that even is their kids get COVID, the complications are not as dire. "We hear a lot, and it's true, that children at that age do very well, but I just looked at the Travis County dashboard earlier this week, 2 percent of the hospitalizations were in that age group in children. So yes, they do very, very well, but some still get sick," Dr. Daghestani said.
Dr. Naik says the FDA will still have to study those findings, but he expects that at the least, older children could be offered a vaccine in time for the 2021-22 school year.
Last week, Pfizer began testing their vaccine on children 5 to 11 years old and the company has plans to include children as young as 6 months as trials continue. Results from those studies are expected to be available later this year.