Fauci: ‘It’s Going To Be Months’ Before Vaccine Is Approved for Children

EXCERPT:

FAUCI: “Well, traditionally, Chuck, the direct answer to your question, it will be months. And the reason is traditionally, when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to make sure because children, as well as pregnant women, are vulnerable. So before you put it into the children, you want to make sure you have a degree of efficacy and safety that is established in an adult population, particularly an adult normal population. Then there are ways to get children vaccine by, let’s say, maybe in January. And again, this is my estimate, may not be exactly that, that you go ahead and you do what’s called a phase one and a phase two trial in children. In other words, you find out is it safe in children and does it induce the kind of immune response that’s comparable to that in adults, an immune response that you know protects adults, and then what you can do is you can do a study, what’s called a bridging study. You can say, 'Okay, now, we have safety in the children. We have comparable immunogenicity, namely the same type of immune response. We can get this expeditiously approved for the children before going through a 30,000-person trial that may take a longer period of time. So, we’ll start the process very likely in January to get it to the children sooner rather than later.”