Muted response to vaccine roll-out for American kids aged 5 and younger

WASHINGTON • Health workers across the United States began to give Covid-19 vaccinations to children six months to five years old on Tuesday, another milestone in the coronavirus pandemic that came 18 months after adults first began to receive injections against the virus.

But the response from parents was notably muted, with little indication of the excitement and long lines that greeted earlier vaccine roll-outs.

An April poll showed that less than one-fifth of parents of children younger than five were eager to access the shot right away. Early adopters in this age group appeared to be outliers.

Dayton Children's Hospital in Ohio was one of the first sites to vaccinate the youngest children, with the three-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine meant for the age group. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has also endorsed a second option for young children, a two-dose regimen from Moderna.

Mr Brian Wentzel, 38, brought his two-year-old son Bodhi at 9.15am. Bodhi clutched a stuffed dog and bravely took the shot in his leg. His mother is a physician at the hospital.

"It was important to get him vaccinated," Mr Wentzel said. "It is extremely effective at preventing severe illness."

At a White House news conference on Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden called the expanded vaccines "a monumental step forward".

"The United States," he continued, "is now the first country in the world to offer safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines for children as young as six months old."

The President also addressed, albeit obliquely, a controversy in Florida, where the state declined to pre-order vaccine doses for young children. Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican with presidential ambitions, said last week: "We are affirmatively against the Covid vaccine for young kids."

On Tuesday, Mr Biden said "elected officials shouldn't get in the way and make it more difficult for parents".

Florida has since allowed healthcare providers to order the shots, but in many places, including Florida and New York, the vaccines did not yet appear to be widely available. Some paediatrician clinics reported that they had not yet received the shots or that they planned to deliver the vaccines mostly at regularly scheduled well visits.

Yet, clamouring from families is limited. The reasons for parental vaccine hesitation are varied. Two years into the pandemic, many families have become resigned to living with the virus, and a majority of American children have already been infected, mostly experiencing mild symptoms.

While the vaccines remain highly effective at protecting against severe illness and death, they have become less effective at preventing infection as the virus has mutated, leading to disappointment and some cynicism from the public towards the injections.

Some parents have encountered widespread misinformation about risks, while others are concerned about rare side effects or simply do not want their children to be among the first to get a newly accessible vaccine.

That is the case even though parents and young children have endured some of the longest-running public health and educational restrictions, because of their lack of access to a vaccine. Parents are exhausted after years of disrupted routines and report that their young children have never experienced school or socialising under normal conditions.

Dr Joseph G. Allen, a Harvard University expert on indoor environmental quality who has studied the coronavirus and schools, said he believed it was time for most restrictions on young children to be lifted.

Even if uptake of the newest paediatric vaccine is limited, he said, young children are "lowest-risk and have had the highest burdens as adults go around doing whatever they want to do".

NYTIMES