Parents will strongly oppose the Covid-19 vaccines for children aged under 5 once approved, recent survey shows

According to the most recent Covid-19 data provided by the New York Times, there have been more than 76 million confirmed Covid-19 cases in United States since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. Last week, the country passed the 900,000 deaths mark and is slowly, but surely moving to the 1 million Covid-19 related deaths.

Although the Covid-19 vaccines have lower level of protection when it comes to Omicron, they remain the best available weapon in fighting the deadly virus providing significant protection against developing severe condition, hospitalization and death. So far, Americans aged 5 and more are eligible to get vaccinated against coronavirus and America is one of the countries with the highest Covid-19 vaccination rates.

The data provided by the CDC indicates that 251,070,439 Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccines (75.6% of the eligible population), while 212,806,521 are considered fully vaccinated with two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, or single dose J&J vaccine (64.1% of the eligible population). Nearly 90 million have received booster dose, the highest level of protection against Covid-19.

While the health and the government officials are doing everything in their power to boost vaccination rates, children aged under 5 remain unprotected because there are no authorized vaccines for that category of people. As multiple sources already reported, Pfizer and BioNTech already developed vaccine suitable for little children and the companies already initiated a request for the FDA to authorize their child-sized coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in the United States among children age 6 months to up to 5 years.

But recent survey results show that not many parents are interested in vaccinating their little children against Covid-19. According to the survey, just 3 in 10 parents of children under 5 say they’ll get their child vaccinated right away once a Covid-19 vaccine is approved for their age group. While that’s lower than the rate for older children, it’s still up from one in five parents in July.

Parents are more willing to get their older children vaccinated: Just 33% of parents of 5- to 11-year-olds say their child has had at least one COVID-19 shot, though that’s up from 16% in November, while 61% of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said their child had received at least one shot, up from just under 50% in November.

Few days ago, Pfizer and BioNTech officially filed a request to the federal regulators seeking authorization for the Covid-19 vaccine for children under 5. If everything goes as planned with the emergency authorization process, the first shots are expected to be applied in children under 5 by the end of February.

Once the vaccine is authorized, the federal government believes it will further improve the vaccination rates and will slow down the spread of the virus especially in the periodical waves like the one we have with Omicron this winter.

One thing is for sure: The younger the child, the more reluctant the parents.