Fauci: US Still Months Away From COVID-19 Vaccine Approval for Children

Although US health care workers have started receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine, vaccines for children won’t be available for “months”, according to Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci told NBC's "Meet the Press" that it will take months to test vaccine candidates in phase 1 and 2 trials and then a bridge study—which allows drugs approved in one region of the world to be deployed in another—will be conducted.¹

"You can say okay, now we have safety in the children, we have comparable immunogenicity, namely the same type of immune response—we can get this expeditiously approved for the children before going through a 30,000-person trial that may take a longer period of time," Fauci said.

Before administering the vaccine to children, “you’re going to want to make sure you have a degree of efficacy and safety that is established in an adult population, particularly an adult normal population,” Fauci added.

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