COVID-19 Vaccination Potent for Babies and Young Children

According to a multistate study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s VISION Network, COVID-19 mRNA immunization shields infants and young children from COVID-19-related trips to the emergency room or urgent care facilities. According to the study, children under the age of five who received both the outdated COVID-19 vaccine and the original COVID-19 vaccination were shielded from the need for COVID-19 treatment in an urgent care center or emergency room.

Visits to the emergency room or urgent care are seen as signs of moderate sickness. The evaluation of vaccine efficacy against more severe outcomes was hampered by the modest number of hospitalizations among children aged six months to five years.

The VISION Network project, one of the first to examine vaccination efficacy in infants and young children, was carried out to assess the efficiency of the vaccines as well as to provide information and guidance for future vaccine policy creation for this age range.

Eight states—New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and California—were involved in the data collection.

“In most cases, we have seen throughout the pandemic that the prevalence of COVID among children has been lower than among adults. But there has been limited analysis of vaccine effectiveness in young children due to limited availability of data. A large research network like the VISION Network provides sufficient data,” said study co-author Shaun Grannis, M.D., M.S., vice president for data and analytics at Regenstrief Institute and a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine.

“Based on our analysis we found that, for this age group—children five and younger, even one dose of the two-dose vaccine series provided some protection. Based on this data, parents should consider vaccinating their children for COVID and I further encourage parents to discuss vaccination with their child’s physician.”

By June 2023, SARS-CoV-2 had caused more than two million COVID-19 illnesses and more than 400 fatalities among children between the ages of six months and four years in the United States.

For children aged six months to four years (Pfizer-BioNTech) and six months to five years (Moderna), the initial monovalent mRNA vaccines were authorized in June 2022. In December 2022, recommendations were expanded to include bivalent vaccines.

The COVID-19 vaccine series should be started as soon as children are eligible (at age six months), according to the CDC, and should be finished within the advised time frame for the optimum protection. The study discovered that the patterns of protection loss for infants and young children resembled those for older children and adults.

The Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine protected older kids and teenagers, aged 5 to 17, against both moderate and severe COVID-19 outcomes, according to a prior multi-state VISION Network research.

“Effectiveness of Monovalent and Bivalent mRNA Vaccines in Preventing COVID-19–Associated Emergency Department and Urgent Care Encounters Among Children Aged 6 Months–5 Years—VISION Network, United States, July 2022–June 2023” is published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

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