On Monday, Pfizer announced that its COVID-19 vaccine is both safe and effective in children ages 5 to 11 — and no less of an authority than Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, predicted “there’s a really good chance” younger kids would finally be getting vaccinated “before Halloween.”

Initial reports greeted the news 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.

But what if