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Seattle Children’s starts COVID-19 vaccine trial for children 11 and under

KING COUNTY, Wash. — Seattle Children’s Hospital is participating in the Pfizer clinical trial for children 11 years old and younger. This summer it will go all the way down to include infants as young as 6 months old.

While teens and tweens were given the same dose as adults, this trial will involve smaller doses. Half of the children involved in the study will get a placebo.

The trial is considered a bridging study, branching off from the research on adults.

“We don’t have to prove the vaccine is effective, we already know it is effective and we already have what we call a ‘correlate of protection’. We know the blood values of the protection we need, we know what antibody levels we need,” said Dr. Janet Englund, who is leading the clinical trial at Seattle Children’s.

The adult trials involved 40,000 participants. The trial for children will be much smaller.

Seattle Children’s enrolled less than 100 children.

At Stanford Medicine in Palo Alto, there are 200 children participating. They say 2,000 families were interested.

Zoe Perales, 6, and her brother Max, 8, are a part of it.

“It keeps you from getting COVID,” said Zoe Perales. Her brother, Max, hopes he does not get the placebo.

“I can go back to playing with my cousins. Right now we’ve only been playing video games and calling each other on FaceTime,” said Max Perales.

Pfizer expects to have initial trial results in September for the 6- to 11-year-olds, and 2- to 5-year-olds soon after. The trial with infants up to 2 years old is expected in October or November.

Pfizer will request emergency use authorization from the FDA as each set of results comes in.