Dr. Fauci says children will not have access to the COVID-19 vaccine for months.
Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force says it will be months before children have access to the COVID-19 vaccine.
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“It’s going to be months. And the reason is traditionally when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to make sure, because children as well as pregnant women, are vulnerable,” Fauci told NBC anchor Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. “So, before you put it into the 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.”
As for the general population, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, says Americans could begin having access to the vaccine by Dec. 11: “Our plan is to be able to ship vaccines to the immunization sites within 24 hours from the approval,” said Slaoui. “So I expect maybe on day two after approval on the 11th or the 12th of December.”
Fauci says even those who have already recovered from COVID-19 will be advised to get the vaccine: “When the trials were done, the Moderna trials and other trials, and we looked at the data, there were people who, when you looked at their antibody response, they actually gave indication that they had already been infected and actually recovered quite well,” Fauci said. “And at the time of the vaccine study, they were actually well and normal, as it were, and yet they still got vaccinated.”