How the COVID-19 Vaccine for Children Differs From Adults’
Key Points:
- Pfizer recently announced its vaccine for children is more than 90% effective.
- In vitro diagnostics company Todos Medical announced the launch of their new COVID-19 antibody blood test which will allow unvaccinated and vaccinated people to monitor their immunity levels to the virus.
- Healthcare professionals weigh the utility of this type of testing given the amount of at-risk people they interact with on a daily basis.
Commentary:
The next step in the fight against the COVID-19 virus has been the approval of the vaccine for children. Most recently, Pfizer announced that the vaccine that was approved for children is 90 percent effective against COVID-19. Now that the children’s vaccine is here, what was its development like compared to the one for adults? Was it easier or harder? We sat down with Gerald Commissiong, CEO of Todos Medical, to get insight into how the industry has approached the task of vaccine research and testing for different demographics.
MarketScale also asked Commissiong about the recent announcement by Todos about the launch of its new COVID-19 antibody blood test, which will allow unvaccinated and vaccinated people to monitor their immunity levels to the virus. What role will such a test play in the larger ecosystem of COVID treatment and mitigation?
Abridged Thoughts:
Initially, it was thought, although it’s not clear why it was thought, that children were not going to be affected by COVID in the same manner that adults were. As a result of that, the primary focus was really adults who were traveling from place to place, country to country who can spread the disease.
And the focus was on being able to really get people back into the office, back to work. What we found, obviously, is that getting back to work requires children to be able to get back to school. And so as we’ve made progress with the initial set of vaccines and really an undefined, unknown dosing schedule that has been figured out through real world decisions by different countries to do different things than the clinical trials, that kind of approach could have been disastrous in children because we know that their immune systems are not anywhere near as developed and that potentially impacting their immune systems in a robust way very early on in development could have significant long term impacts.
Because of that, I think correctly, everyone focused on developing an effective and safe vaccine for adults and then began to think through how to use the data from adults to develop for kids. There was some acceleration in the 12 to 15 year age gap with the Pfizer vaccine. I think that is being rethought extensively now, given some of the data and the younger kids where there is no evidence of myocarditis with a much lower dosing schedule that could potentially be even further reduced with lengthening the spacing between doses.
