LDH advocates vaccine for all eligible children

The nation’s infants, toddlers and preschoolers are finally getting their chance at COVID-19 vaccination as the U.S. rolls out shots for tots this week. Shipments arrived in some locations over the weekend.

The Louisiana Department of Health is recommending all eligible children receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

All Louisiana children ages 6 months and up are now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, following the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) accepting the recommendation of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorization of the three-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the two-dose Moderna vaccine.

LDH has published a list of all providers who have ordered initial allocations of the COVID-19 vaccine for under-5-year-olds on its website: ldh. la.gov/kidsvax

The dosing schedule for each vaccine are as follows:

The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is administered as a primary series of two doses, one month apart.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is administered as a primary series of three doses, in which the initial two doses are administered three weeks apart, followed by a third dose, administered at least eight weeks after the second dose.

The Food and Drug Administration greenlighted the Moderna and Pfizer kid shots on Friday and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended them Saturday. In the U.S., COVID-19 vaccines were first tested and given in late 2020 to health care workers and older adults. Teens and school-age kids were added last year.

“This is certainly an exciting moment in what has become a very long campaign to vaccinate people against COVID-19,”said Dr. Matthew Harris, an emergency room pediatrician at Northwell Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York.

Many parents have been anxiously awaiting the rollout, and Harris said shots for his own 9-month-old are a “matter of when, not if.’’

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