Pediatricians plead with FDA to move quickly on Covid vaccine for kids

The Food and Drug Administration must work “aggressively” toward authorizing a Covid-19 vaccine for children under age 12, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote in a letter to Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the FDA.

The urgent plea comes as the U.S. experienced the “largest week-over-week percentage increase in pediatric Covid cases since the start of the pandemic,” Dr. Lee Savio Beers, the academy’s president, wrote in the letter Thursday.

Pediatric cases of Covid-19 have soared in recent weeks in part because of the highly contagious delta variant, raising worries among parents and doctors just as schools are reopening for the fall semester.

“The delta variant has created a new and pressing risk to children and adolescents across this country,” Beers wrote in the letter to the FDA.

According to the latest data available from the pediatric academy, 38,654 pediatric Covid cases were reported during the week of July 22. Within a week, on July 29, that number jumped 85 percent, to 71,726.

Already, parents of younger children are increasingly asking their kids’ pediatricians for Covid-19 vaccines, said pediatrician Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I’ve had parents with kids as young as age 9 asking for the vaccine,” said Besser, who is now president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “We’ve had to say no.”

Only the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine has been authorized for adolescents and teens, ages 12-17.