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