Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have

ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, the producer of Public Health On Call.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Kauser Talat, who led one of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine trials

in adults about when vaccines will be approved for children, a crucial population if the United

States is going to reach population-level immunity. Let's listen. Kouser Talat, thanks so much for

joining me. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for having me today.

So today I want to talk about vaccine. I know that you have been involved in vaccine trials for the

Pfizer vaccine for adults. I want to talk about children. So one of the groups that's absolutely not eligible is our children.

And so I wonder if you could explain to me why children are not eligible at this time.

So the first thing is to look at the what's happened with our, in all over the world. And the people who are

most vulnerable to severe disease from COVID have been adults, especially older adults and adults

with preexisting conditions. And so it was really important to get vaccines out as quickly as

possible for that population. And, and we've managed to get two vaccines authorized in less than a year and a third on its way.

And so that's absolutely incredible and fantastic.

When we look at kids, they have been far less affected by the pandemic,

...