Israel begins Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for at-risk children under 12

Israel authorized the use of Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine for vulnerable children between five and 11 years old, as cases of the highly contagious Delta variant rise sharply.

Israeli officials said young children should be given the shot if they have a high likelihood of serious illness or death from Covid-19 because of underlying conditions such as severe obesity, chronic lung disease, immunosuppression or heart failure.

The health ministry said each individual case would require special approval and children would be given a lower dosage of the vaccine—10 micrograms instead of the usual 30 micrograms—in accordance with data provided from Pfizer. A spokesman for Pfizer said dosing regimens reside with health authorities as opposed to the pharmaceutical company.

Pfizer is testing the 10-microgram dose in children five to 11 years old, but hasn’t released any clinical data yet. It said it expects to have study results in September, when it expects to ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to authorize the use of its shot for this age group.

Israel’s authorization on Tuesday, one of the first in the world, comes after the U.S. FDA raised the minimum number of young children that should be in current Covid-19 vaccine trials to better detect any side effects. The FDA wants to better understand side effects, such as a rare heart condition known as myocarditis, that have surfaced in small numbers of people.

Israel’s decision to fast-track shots for vulnerable children was based on an assessment of the potential side effects versus the consequences of not giving at-risk youngsters the vaccines, said Eyal Leshem, director of Israel’s Sheba Hospital’s Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases. The move would likely allow hundreds of at-risk children to be inoculated, he said.

“You cannot wait for clinical trials when the disease is rampaging outside and you can’t lock people home for months and months,” he added.

Israel’s seven-day average for new cases of the coronavirus rose to over 1,400 Tuesday, up from around 10 for the first half of June. The total number of severely ill cases stands at 138. More than 80% of the adult population in Israel has been fully inoculated, largely with the Pfizer vaccine.

Earlier in July, Israel became one of the first countries to begin providing a third shot of the vaccine to immunocompromised individuals, such as those who have undergone organ transplants. The country also has returned to some restrictions it had largely abandoned after rolling out a rapid vaccination campaign, such as enforcing indoor mask wearing and allowing only vaccinated individuals, those recovering from the virus or with recent negative tests into events. But the government has sought to manage the virus, rather than initiate another national lockdown.

Several countries, including the U.S. and Israel, are offering the Pfizer shot to children 12 years and older. China has approved two of its vaccines, from Sinovac and Sinopharm, for emergency use in children three to 17 years old. The U.K. has held back from offering vaccines to older children under 18, unless they have certain serious illnesses.

So far, Israel has given a first shot to 41% of children 10 to 19 years old, according to the Israeli Health Ministry.

Most children infected with the coronavirus tend to develop mild cases, if they have symptoms at all, according to doctors and epidemiologists. The most comprehensive study, by U.K. researchers, found that 99.995% of 469,982 children in England who were infected over a year survived. WSJ