“The light at the end of the tunnel is growing, and today it got a little brighter,” said President Joe Biden on Monday.
After the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared the Emergency Use Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include adolescents.
Joe Biden has asked states to make the vaccine available to younger adolescents immediately and expressed, “This is a promising development in our fight against the virus.”
“If you are a parent who wants to protect your child, or a teenager who is interested in getting vaccinated, today’s decision is a step closer to that goal,” the US President added.
“The safe and effective vaccines are curbing the spread of the virus, saving thousands of lives, and allowing millions of Americans to start returning to a closer to normal life,” he said.
Acting FDA commissioner Janet Woodcock described the move as a “significant step in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.”
“Today’s action allows for a younger population to be protected from Covid-19, bringing us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy and to ending the pandemic,” Woodcock said in a statement.
“Parents and guardians can rest assured that the agency undertook a rigorous and thorough review of all available data, as we have with all of our Covid-19 vaccine emergency use authorizations,” she added.
Pfizer’s vaccine is the only one authorized for 16- and 17- year-olds in the United States and around 2 million people in that age group have so far received at least one shot.
Also Pfizer has said that it expects to have safety and efficacy data on the vaccine for children ages 2 to 11 in September when it plans to ask for that age group to be included in the emergency authorization.
