On Tuesday, after months of delays, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, citing clinical trials that found it both safe and more than 90 percent effective in preventing symptomatic infection in kids.

Earlier reports greeted the trial results as “​​a ray of hope” for “weary parents” who have endured months of uncertainty about when their long-ineligible children might finally get inoculated — and who recently had no choice but to send them back to school unvaccinated while the hypercontagious Delta variant was hospitalizing a record 30,000 of their peers each month.

Robert Riccoban, 13, is inoculated by nurse Karen