Vaccine trials ongoing with teens, children

Dr. Supriya Sharma, Health Canada’s chief medical adviser, recently predicted that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may be the first to receive approval for such use in the country in the coming months.

Pfizer and BioNTech said last week that their COVID-19 vaccine, BNT162b2, is safe, with „demonstrated 100 per cent efficacy” in preventing the disease in those aged 12 to 15.

In the trial of 2,260 adolescents, there were 18 cases of COVID-19 in the group that got a placebo shot and none among those who received the vaccine. Side-effects were similar to those reported in clinical trials in adults, such as pain at the injection site, headaches, fever and fatigue.

The data hasn’t been peer-reviewed or scrutinized by regulators like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada.

It’s only when vaccines roll out in the real world to children with diabetes, heart disease and other underlying conditions that answers on effectiveness will be clearer.

„We want to protect everybody in our community, even those who cannot be immunized or will not respond to the vaccine,” said Dr. Noni MacDonald, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Dalhousie University in Halifax who researches vaccine safety. „To do that, we need children, we need teenagers, we need young adults, we need middle-aged adults and we need older people.”

Meanwhile, Moderna is also conducting a clinical trial in Canada for children aged five to 11. The results are expected early in 2022. In March, the company also launched a U.S. trial for children under 12 years of age and as young as six months old.

Johnson & Johnson, which recently won approval for its vaccine in adults in Canada and the U.S., expanded its Phase 2 trial for those aged 12 to 17 and plans to include younger children.

Alyson Kelvin, an assistant professor at Dalhousie working on COVID-19 vaccines at the VIDO lab in Saskatoon, said she’s excited about how the vaccines could help children return to school and sports.

„Children can be infected with the virus and pass on the virus,” Kelvin said. „Even though we might not see clinical disease in kids or the clinical disease might not be as severe as in adults, it’s really important that children are not able to be part of the transmission chain.”