White House says vaccines for children aged 5-11 to be ‘fully up and running’ starting next Monday

As expected, the Covid-19 vaccines for children aged 5-11 are about to be rolled out early this month and the latest confirmation now comes from the White House.

According to White House officials, the program for vaccinated children against Covid-19 is expected to be at full strength next week.

“Starting the week of November 8, the kids’ vaccination program will be fully up and running,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said Monday.

“Parents will be able to schedule appointments at convenient sites they know and trust to get their kids vaccinated.”

“And the number of sites will continue to increase throughout the month as more vaccine sites open their doors and administer the vaccines,” he added.

The most recent reports say that children will be vaccinated with doses of the Covid-19 vaccine once approved. What we already know is that the vaccine for children will be in lower doses compared to the regular Pfizer vaccine for adults. The second dose will be administrated three weeks after the first one.

Once the vaccine for children aged 5-11 is authorized, the White House said that nearly 28 million become will become eligible to get vaccinated. If everything goes as planned, the CDC is expected to approve the vaccine today Tuesday, November 2, while the vaccination is planned to start as early as next week.

With FDA’s action, Pfizer plans to begin shipping millions of vials of the pediatric vaccine — in orange caps to avoid mix-ups with the purple-capped doses for everyone else — to doctors’ offices, pharmacies and other vaccination sites.

Since the start of the pandemic last year, we have seen that children are usually with lower risk of hospitalization or death. However, with the latest Delta wave things have changed since more than 8,300 children aged 5-11 were hospitalized, while about a third ended up on intensive care. Since the start of the pandemic, 146 deaths have been reported in that age group.

While parents are expecting the approval of the vaccines in children, health officials across the country are already preparing for the process with opening vaccines sites in schools, pediatrics were given vaccine guidelines for children and the existing vaccines sites including pharmacies are preparing to see lines again.

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