FGCU medical expert answers parents’ questions about vaccines for children under 5

COVID-19 vaccines for children under 5 years old are expected to be ready in less than two weeks. Some parents say they’re relieved the shot is coming, while others say they will never get their children vaccinated.

WINK News asked via its Facebook page on Thursday if parents would get their children vaccinated, and more respondents said no than yes. But those who said yes still had some worthwhile questions that we took to Bob Hawkes, director of the physician’s assistant program at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Although White House officials report that the government has already secured enough vaccine supply for all 18 million children between 6 months and 4 years old, there are some questions health experts say they don’t have the answers to, like whether or not children that young will need two or three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. How and where these vaccines will be distributed is also unclear.

But two questions parents had: What are the potential side effects? And why is there very little data for this age group?

“The expectation is the side effects would be similar with, really, any vaccine that a child of that age is getting,” Hawkes said. “It’s very common that they do kind of have, you know, the muscle aches, just kind of those slight aches and pains… now we’re looking between 6 months and 4 years old. The hard part is we don’t have a lot of data, we’re kind of making some assumptions.”

One mother told WINK News that she got the vaccine earlier this year while she was pregnant in her second trimester because her doctor said her antibodies would be passed on to her son. Would that child benefit from getting the vaccine?

Hawkes could not say for sure; although it is known that maternal antibodies can be passed to infants, there is very little information on how much protection that child would have against COVID-19. He says more data may be available in the coming years.

Pfizer and BioNTech say that the two doses they will offer for children 6 months to 4 years old, if approved, will be one-tenth the volume of the vaccine doses for people 12 and older.

But data regarding the effectiveness of 3 doses for children that young will not be available until at least March. Hawkes says since vaccines for children that age typically require multiple dosing, the same could be expected when it comes to COVID-19 shots.

“This is what the FDA and the CDC are going to look at: Is two enough?” Hawkes said. “Are we really expecting that in order to get that high rate of effectiveness? Is it going to take three vaccines? That has not been definitively determined ​at this point… we’re trying to give them as much possible protection as we can.”

Hawkes says it’s hard to say whether getting this age group vaccinated will have a significant impact on viral transmission in Southwest Florida, but he doesn’t think it will; that is typically not the age group helping to spread the virus, and this would be more for their protection.