Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine was highly effective in preventing severe COVID-19 infections in children and adolescents during the Delta and Omicron variants, according to a large, national study recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 15.6 million U.S. children were reported to have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic and the age group represents less than 1 percent of total COVID-19 deaths.
Vaccination rates among children vary widely by state, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, ranging from 3 to 45 percent having received their first dose.
The new study included data from more than 200,000 young people from children’s hospitals around the country during the Delta and Omicron waves of the pandemic. During the Delta wave, the BNT162b2 vaccine was found to be more than 98 percent effective against infection in children under 18 compared to those who were unvaccinated, according to the study. During Omicron, effectiveness against documented infection among children was estimated to be 74 percent compared to unvaccinated counterparts.
The BNT162b2 vaccine was most effective in preventing severe COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, according to the study. Investigators found no significant side effects of the vaccine, but did find that vaccine effectiveness waned over time, especially during the Omicron period of the pandemic.
The results show that the BNT162b2 vaccine was a safe and effective way to prevent COVID-19 and the complications that can come with a serious infection, said Ravi Jhaveri, MD, division chief and the Virginia H. Rogers Professor of Infectious Disease in the Department of Pediatrics, who was a co-author of the study.
”The main takeaway is an important result that comes up in virtually every study that’s done on this: vaccination has a really powerful protective effect against COVID-19,” Jhaveri said. “There may be subtle differences depending on what variant and what era you’re looking at, but the bottom line is that for children, there’s a really powerful effect.”
Moving forward, Jhaveri hopes to study the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing long COVID in children, he said.
“What we want to do is to better define the protective effects of vaccines for post-COVID syndromes, including the long COVID fatigue and the multi-system, inflammatory syndrome that we saw in children,” Jhaveri said. “We’re really working hard to try to see if we can show that the vaccine protects against those sequelae.”
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the RECOVER: Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery initiative.
