Moderna Will Begin Testing Its COVID-19 Vaccine on Children

students early next year. Peter loftis healthcare reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Peter, thanks for having me. The vaccine rollout continues, obviously targeted at adults and and those that are most vulnerable right now, but the other part of the puzzle is being looked into now. Maderna is testing its COVID nineteen vaccine on

young children. The trial that they're going through is going to involve children ages six months to eleven years, and as I mentioned, this is kind of the important other part. Thankfully kids are spared the worst effects of COVID nineteen, but they still can get it, and they still can transmit it. So Peter tell us a little bit about what Maderna is doing. The vaccine has been approved for use in adults eighteen and older, and same with the

Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The Fiser vaccine is approved for

people sixteen and older. So basically the focus of the vaccination campaign so far has been on adults because ages is an important element and who is vulnerable to severe disease and the older you are, the more vulnerable you are, and so and so the risk and children of getting severe disease is lower relative than to what it is of adults, but if there still is some risk, and so what the companies have been doing is in steps, they've been studying the vaccine in people younger than eighteen,

and so Fiser and Maderna had already started trials in adolescents basically twelve and up, and the results of those trials they could be released relatively soon, just seeing whether it's safe and effective in them. And now what this news this week represents is moving down on the age scale, and so Maderna is now testing in kids under twelve pretty soon. I think Fiser will also start to study

I believe in five to eleven year old. But yeah, so this will basically complete the testing of the full age range, and they want to just see how how it performs in kids. Health officials said that if all goes according to plan and the studies turn out positive, that junior high and regular high school students could have access maybe in the fall, and elementary school aged children maybe in early so obviously still some time to go through there. They are, as you mentioned, testing very young

kids here, kids as young as six months. That seems pretty young. Is there anything that a particular reason why they're going that young. Yeah, I think that's grabbing a lot of people's attention. It's important to keep in mind that there are existing child hood vaccines that are given to infants. There was a vaccine trial for a rotavirus vaccine about fifteen years ago that I think enrolled about seventy thousand babies on whom that vaccine was tested and

then and it proved to be successful. I think that Maderna is just trying to get a sense of how it performs in the different age groups. They don't want to go any younger than six months for now, at least, just because they feel like that's pretty young, and the and the and the baby's immune system is less mature

before that time. So they're going to do it in phases, and they're gonna they're going to test different doses in kids in the first part of the study to try to arrive at what is the appropriate dose, because it might be different from what the adult dose level is. And then once they arrive at a dose, and they'll broaden the study and just get a better assessment of how safe and effective it is. The Maderna study, they said, is going to be kind of a mind phase two

and phase three trial. They're looking to enroll about six thousand, seven fifty children and all this and then kind of go through those two parts that you just mentioned. The dosing, which I'm sure isn't to get a lot of attention to, especially since the kids are younger, right, their immune systems are still developing, so they want to make sure that

they get that dose it right. They really want to strike the right balance between you know, effectiveness on the one hand, and any sort of even temporary or transient side effects like so we've seen with the adult population some of these vaccines, particularly in the two dose vaccines. After the second dose can really lay a person low for like a day or two and give them symptoms like food like symptoms or just headache and fatigue. And so you know, it's possible that some of those symptoms

also could be seen in kids. That's what they need to test it for. But I think there's also a recognition that that becomes maybe a more more magnified issue as parents think about do I want to expose my kid to have those side effects, even if it's temporary, given the relative risk of COVID nineteen disease to the kids. I mean, it will be interesting to see what these studies show. As you mentioned, Fiser and others have already kind of been looking into some of the stuff, and

we could get some data there pretty soon. So you know, hopefully we'll get some good news out of all of this and it'll be safe and effective, and then we can have our children vaccinated as well. Peter loftis healthcare reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort Today's big

news stories. You can check me out on the daily Dive podcast every Monday the Friday, so follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast