Your Questions on Children and Covid-19 Vaccines, Answered
What you need to know about trials, timelines, variants, school openings, and more
With adult vaccinations against Covid-19 well underway in the U.S., attention is turning to pediatric vaccines for children under the age of 16.
I sat down with three pediatric and vaccination specialists from Mayo Clinic — Robert Jacobson, MD, Nipunie Rajapakse, MD, MPH, and Joseph Poterucha, DO — to get answers to some of the most common questions around children and Covid-19 vaccines.
Do children need to be vaccinated against Covid-19?
Yes. “We definitely will need vaccines for children against Covid-19 infection,” says Jacobson. “While rates and severity of infection are lower in children, children do still spread the infection and occasionally develop severe disease.”
Compared to adults, children are at less risk of severe outcomes from Covid-19 infection. Children under the age of 18 account for about a quarter of the population in the U.S., but make up less than 1% of the deaths from Covid-19. And only about 2% of children who get Covid-19 end up in the hospital.
But as of April 8, 2021, more than 35 million children have been infected with…
