CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This week the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will consider whether to authorize and recommend the first COVID-19 vaccines for kids under the age of five.
This vaccine would be for children ages six months to four years old.
Doctors in the Charlotte area plan to watch the approval process closely.
"The next couple of days there's going to be a good amount of information that comes out about vaccines for children under five,” Dr. Katie Passaretti, vice president and enterprise chief epidemiologist for Atrium Health, said. “Certainly, it's an important population to get vaccinated, review the data and the safety data."
If the vaccine passes the review processes, the Biden Administration announced its plans to roll out the first vaccines as early as the week of June 20.
The White House said it will have ten million doses available initially and more available in the coming weeks.
It plans to distribute the vaccines with a focus on making the vaccines available in convenient places parents and families know and trust, like pediatricians’ offices and primary care providers, children’s hospitals and health systems, state and local public health clinics and sites, and local pharmacies.
Mecklenburg County Public Health is preparing for the possibility the vaccine for this age group will pass the review process.
"Hopefully they'll be available this month, which would then allow us to say that we pretty much have universal vaccine coverage for everyone in our community in terms of availability,” said Dr. Raynard Washington, Mecklenburg County Public Health Director. “We're gearing up now with our partners to make sure we're ready to provide those vaccines as soon as they're available."
With COVID-19 cases back on the rise in the Carolinas due to Omicron subvariants, doctors said they're seeing infections among all groups, including young children.
"They are a good chunk of the population that we need to protect and also kind of mitigate them from spreading to other higher-risk groups,” Passaretti said.
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WCNC Charlotte is part of seven major media companies and other local institutions reporting on and engaging the community around the problems and solutions as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a project of the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative, which is supported by the Local Media Project, an initiative launched by the Solutions Journalism Network with support from the Knight Foundation to strengthen and reinvigorate local media ecosystems. See all of our reporting at charlottejournalism.org.