US President Joe Biden wants 70 percent of US adults to have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine by the July 4 holiday, and has made vaccinating adolescents a key part of the next phase of the country’s immunization campaign.
However, targeting US teens is a controversial move among many experts, who say that it is a serious mistake to use the world’s limited supply of doses on a low-risk population while the COVID-19 pandemic surges in countries such as India and Brazil.
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech in March said that their two-dose regimen was shown to be safe and highly effective in a trial of 2,260 12-to-15-year-olds.
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An emergency use authorization is expected in the coming days, and Biden on Tuesday told White House reporters that “if that announcement comes, we are ready to move immediately.”
The president’s address comes as the nation’s immunization campaign is stalling after hitting a peak early last month.
More than 56 percent of US adults have received one or more shots, but as the rate of uptake falls, officials are devising new ways to reach vaccine holdouts.
These include discounts to shoppers who get vaccinated at grocery stores, promotions for fans at sports stadiums and more vaccines at rural health clinics, Biden said.
The federal government is also working on a program with pharmacies and pediatricians nationwide to reach the country’s estimated 17 million 12-to-15-year-olds ahead of school reopening in the fall.
However, many experts have voiced concern whether now is the right moment to reach this group as the global situation deteriorates.
The issue of vaccine disparity has been brought into sharp focus by India, which on Tuesday reported more than 350,000 new cases and recorded nearly 3,500 deaths — more than anywhere in the world.
“The overwhelming majority of 15-year-olds, we know are not at high risk of severe complications from COVID,” said Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor and director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University.
“It is absolutely raging around the world and we’re talking about how we’re going to vaccinate an incredibly low-risk population, when the overwhelming majority of healthcare workers around the world have zero protection,” he said.
Priya Sampathkumar, chair of Infection Prevention and Control at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, added that beyond being an ethics issue, exporting more vaccines is in the US’ own best interest.
“Vaccinating more people in the US is not going to help us if the variants in India, Nepal and South Asia get out of control and hit our shores,” she said.
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