Parents eagerly await COVID vaccines for kids under 5 | WJHL

“We’re seeing a lot of cases we have seen especially in the month of January, very high number of cases, more cases than we saw with delta and delta was more than anything before so definitely it is hit more pediatric cases, including down to infants, ”Ley said.

Data from the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) show that positive cases among kids under the age of 5 who remain ineligible for a vaccine are much higher than during the delta surge.

During the first 22 days of September, during the peak of the delta surge, Northeast Tennessee’s seven counties registered 398 positive cases among kids aged birth through 4.

By the first few weeks of December, that number was a little over half the September peak, at 216.

But in the first 22 days of January — the latest data available from TDH — there were a whopping 641 cases among little ones, a rate 61% higher than the previous September peak. While that high rater may have abated somewhat the past 10 days, the wide spread and greater numbers of kids hospitalized for COVID than ever before have at least some parents eager for the chance to get little ones vaccinated.

Pfizer announced Tuesday it began the approval process for its COVID-19 vaccine for children aged six months to four years.

The Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee will meet later this month to decide whether the data indicates the vaccine’s efficacy and safety for the only age group left ineligible for a COVID-19 vaccine to date.

“I think it’d be important to see what the committee recommends as they review the full data, and I’d like to see more of the data myself too,” Ley said.

He said he had looked over some of the data released by the vaccine provider already.

“The data on safety is very good that there is efficacy. Data suggested that the 6-month to 2-year-olds is very good. Maybe not as much for the 2-year-old to 4-year-old. So I ‘d need to see more data on that, ”he said.

High School statistics teacher and father of 4-year-old twins, Buddy Wahlquist told News Channel 11 he’s been poring over the data himself.

“So it has been shown to be safe. The downside? It wasn’t showing like the effectiveness that they were hoping for but they’re hopeful that a third dose is going to be the thing that really puts it over the edge,” Wahlquist said.

Wahlquist and his wife are both fully vaccinated and boosted, so when the 2022 school year started, they sent their little boy and girl back to preschool. They hoped the Pfizer vaccine would be available to their kids by February.

Then the omicron variant reached the region.

“Around the same time you had omicron putting tons of kids in the hospital, and then Pfizer coming out and saying,’Oh, by the way, the vaccine’s not going to be coming that soon and so we just decided,’ let’s keep them at home,’” he said.

TDH reported pediatric hospitalizations by late January had skyrocketed over 12 times their rate of mid-December across the state.

Ballad Health reported record highs in COVID inpatients in Jan. 2022, maintaining those high hospitalization numbers.

“For the most part, COVID poses more of a risk for adults and for older adults than it does for children. But we’ve been seeing a lot of kids that are ending up in the hospitals right now. So you know, anything we can do to keep them safe, I’m all for it, ”Wahlquist said.

Parents like Wood, the mother of the vaccinated 6-year-old and her 3-year-old brother, hope to keep their kids in as normal an environment as possible and hope the impending vaccine might help with that.

“We want to keep our kids safe and we want them to participate in their life. And so that’s such a hard balance to find and at different points in this pandemic, it’s meant different things,” she said.

She and her husband have been able to have flexible work schedules to accommodate their kids being home from school and daycare over the last two years due to COVID quarantines and school shutdowns.

Their daughter is already fully vaccinated, but their son is still ineligible until the Pfizer vaccine is approved by the FDA.

“For us, it would mean that he would get to be in school more safely. We would feel more comfortable with him, and it’s so important, especially developmentally for his age, you know, we saw what it was like for us all to be home and we see what it’s like for them to be in school and we just so desperately want them to live their lives safely, and so these vaccines are such great tools, ”she said.

Omicron has proved to be much more contagious than previous strains of COVID-19, and that evolution has caused many parents to alter their lives.

“A lot of information first came out that it wasn’t transmitting as easily from kid to kid and then if it was, it was not as severe and then with each coming wave and each coming variant that doesn’t seem to be the case , ”Wood said.“ So we’re constantly having these conversations like,’okay, do we go March-2020-lockdown-level again when we knew nothing and went nowhere?’”

She said after their experience the last two years, her family would make every sacrifice they could while trying to be safe, to keep their kids in school.

“For us as parents, we feel like, for us, we will make every sacrifice that we absolutely can in order to allow our children to maintain some semblance of normalcy in their school setting because they get so much from the learning and the socialization, ”She said.

Steph Frye-Clark is the parent of two girls aged 3 and 10.

Their 10-year-old daughter attends school, is fully vaccinated, and wears a mask whenever she can.

“She’s very happy to do so, mostly right now for the health of her sister because her sister cannot be vaccinated,” Frye-Clark said. “It is very concerning though that you know, the vaccination rate is as low as it is. ”

For children aged 5 to 11, Northeast Tennessee’s vaccination rate far trails the state and nation, though even the nation’s uptake is only at 30.7%

Frye-Clark told News Channel 11 they encourage other parents to get their eligible children vaccinated against COVID-19.

“My kind of thought process on this is, you know, we listen to and rely on experts for all sorts of things in life to provide both valid and useful information,” they said.

“It might be nutrition, it might be exercise. Our teachers in schools on a variety of subject matters. We trust that they’re giving us valid information, even like things like what repairs should be done on our cars. So to me, It makes sense to rely on the experts when it comes to vaccinations. So if an expert says the vaccine is effective, and it’s safe, I’m going to choose to believe them just like in these other areas of life. ”

As they watch the numbers carefully, they said they are concerned about the safety of their unvaccinated daughter.

“I think the reason omicron is a bit scarier is… people have been told it’s milder, which it is for the most part, but it isn’t for everyone,” they said.

The risk for their unvaccinated daughter leaves them with a level of fear.

“But those that are not vaccinated and then especially our children population that are not vaccinated. Yeah, they’re still getting very, very sick, and or some are and that is I don’t know if it’s a lack of information or a sense of denial in that but that’s what I think is scary. As a parent, it’s very scary, ”Frye-Clark said.