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