When will the COVID-19 vaccine be ready for kids, and should they take it?

The COVID-19 vaccine is being rolled out to health care workers, older adults and others. But many of us, including kids, will have to wait a bit longer. We checked in with Dr. Peyton Thompson, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at UNC Health Care, to find out when the vaccine will be ready for some kids, how it works and why she's eager to see kids vaccinated.

Not really. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is approved for those ages 16 and up, so teens ages 16 and 17 can take it. But no vaccine has been authorized for younger ages, Thompson said. The Moderna vaccine is approved for people 18 and up.

But it will still take some time before both are approved for use in tweens and teens.

"By the beginning of the school year, in the fall, we could expect for children ages 12 and up to be eligible to get the vaccine," Thompson said. "It depends on how quickly they can enroll in these trials as well."

Typically, several thousand people must be enrolled in a study, she said. "Children aren't little adults, which is why they need them in these research studies."

Thompson said, unequivocally, yes.

These vaccines don't rely on a live virus, she said. Instead, they rely on messenger RNA, a sophisticated new technology which basically prompts our immune system to make antibodies to protect us from the coronavirus if we were to be infected by it.

"There's no way you can get COVID from the vaccine," she said.

Side effects can include arm pain at the injection site, fatigue, body aches and a headache in some. Thompson said it's generally expected that about 50% of people will have these side effects. "A minority will have a fever," she said. But that's really to be expected.

"We haven't seen anything serious beyond that," she said.

And while there have been a handful of allergic reactions, they have been manageable, she said. "For every million doses of vaccine, regardless of what vaccine it is, we expect 1 person" to have a severe allergic reaction, she said. "This is just part of giving vaccines. That's why we have a monitoring system in place."

After getting a vaccine, people wait for 15 minutes to ensure there are no issues. Thompson notes that she has a friend who has had a severe reaction to allergy shots, but plans on getting the COVID vaccine (and will have her EpiPen ready if needed).

"It has been a very quick process," Thompson said. "It's hard to know what to trust and all the information that's coming at these parents. I understanding being fearful, being hesitant."

But, she noted, parents should take comfort in the process. Government agencies, of course, must approve the vaccines and continue to monitor them as they're rolled out to the public. At the same time, March 2020 wasn't the first coronavirus that researchers have studied or developed a vaccine for.

"There are coronaviruses that are similar to COVID-19, such as MERS and SARS, that have been studied for a decade at least," said Thompson, including at UNC. "It's not that they haven't been studied until March of 2020. They have been studied for a long time. There have been vaccines in development that are similar to the COVID vaccine for a long time."

When it comes time to vaccinate your child and you remain concerned, Thompson recommends parents contact their child's doctor.

"I am so hopeful about the vaccines, and I do think they are our hope for going back to our quote unquote new normal," she said. "I don't think we'll ever go back to our normal before pandemic time. But we can get to a place, if enough people are vaccinated."

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