While scientists are rushing to develop an immunisation for adults, no one has started the process yet for children.
The pandemic has many parents asking two burning questions: First, when can I get a vaccine? And second, when can my kids get it?
Once they were ready to test those vaccines, they started down a well-worn path of rigorous protocols developed over decades to determine if a vaccine is safe and effective. Blood samples from volunteers participating in a phase three vaccine trial at the University of Miami.Only if researchers discovered no serious side effects would they start testing them in children, often beginning with teenagers, then working their way down to younger ages.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, some vaccine makers figured out how to combine phases, gathering more data in the same period of time. Governments and philanthropic organisations offered support for expensive clinical trials and for building factories to produce vaccines that had yet to prove themselves.
Vaccine makers will need to write protocols and get them approved by the FDA. They’ll need to recruit volunteers - a process that is more time consuming for paediatric vaccines since parents must give informed consent. Getting to the first injections could take a couple of months. “Given limited time and resources to do these trials, I can understand why the initial focus is on those more than 18 years of age.”Parents and children taste freedom in Melbourne amid concerns about health impact of lockdown
But Dr Anderson and his colleagues don’t want to wait so long. In their commentary, they said that Phase 2 trials on children “should begin now".
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