My child is turning 12. Which COVID-19 vaccine should they get?
Since children ages 5-11 get a smaller dose of vaccine—10 mg instead of the 30 mg dose older kids and adults receive—parents often wonder whether they should delay their tween’s vaccination until they’re eligible to receive the larger dose. It’s a question Dr. Kristin Moffitt, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric infectious diseases doctor and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, says she gets all the time from her patients’ parents.
The vaccine trials included kids in different stages of development, including before and after puberty. “We’re still seeing excellent immune responses across those ranges,” says Moffitt.right now is another very good reason to get your child vaccinated as soon as possible, says Moffitt. Vaccines take time to confer protection, and the sooner children get vaccinated, the sooner they will be shielded from severe illness.
Because 10 and 11 years tend to vary a lot in terms of their development and size, a wide range of weights and heights was represented in the Phase 3 clinical trial, Moffitt explains. Given the strong immune response in the age group, “that suggests that what we have known about vaccines all along really held true: they are not weight dependent in terms of the expected response from a given dose,” she says. “The response really has to do more with how mature their immune system is.
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