COVID Vaccines For Kids Under 5, IVF Status After Roe V. Wade. June 17, 2022, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
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🗓️ 17 June 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Parents of young kids may finally breathe a big sigh of relief.
On Friday the FDA granted emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines for kids under the age of five. The agency approved a two-dose regimen from biotech firm Moderna and three-dose regimen from Pfizer. Small children could begin getting vaccinated as early as next week.
Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins Ira to talk about COVID vaccines for little kids, the largest forest fire in New Mexico’s history and a Google engineer who claims an AI chatbot is sentient and more.
What Would Happen To IVF If Roe V. Wade Is Overturned?
An overturn of Roe v. Wade could have rippling effects far beyond access to abortions. Some state laws designed to ban or severely restrict abortion could also disrupt the process of fertilizing, implanting, and freezing embryos used in in vitro fertilization. That’s because some of these laws include language about life beginning at conception, raising questions about in vitro fertilization’s (IVF) legality.
Roughly 2% of all infants in the United States are born following the use of some form of artificial reproductive technology. While that figure might seem small, it’s nearly double what it was just a decade ago.
Ira talks with Stephanie Boys, associate professor of social work and adjunct professor of law at Indiana University, about the legal implications of an overturn of Roe v. Wade on IVF treatment. Later, Ira also interviews Dr. Marcelle Cedars, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at UC San Francisco and president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, about the science behind IVF and what people often get wrong about when and how life begins.
Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour we'll be talking about the potential |
| 0:05.0 | ramifications of an overturn of Roe vs. Wade on Invitro fertilization. And we'll be answering |
| 0:10.8 | your questions live on the air. So give us a call on number 8447248255. That's 844 |
| 0:19.2 | Scyte Talk where you can tweet us at Scyte Fry. The first big news on the COVID vaccine front |
| 0:25.5 | where parents and caregivers of young kids may finally breathe a big sigh of relief. |
| 0:31.7 | The FDA has approved COVID-19 vaccines for kids under the age of 5. Today the FDA granted |
| 0:38.9 | emergency use authorization for the vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna. Joining me now to unpack |
| 0:45.9 | this latest vaccine news and talk about other top story science stories. This week is my guest |
| 0:52.2 | Umarir Fon, staff writer for Vox based in Washington. Welcome back to Science Friday Umar. |
| 0:58.7 | Thanks for having me back. Let's talk about these newly approved vaccines for young kids and infants. |
| 1:03.5 | Tell us about that. Yeah, so this has been a long time coming and that's largely because adults |
| 1:09.6 | were frankly a higher priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully very young children have |
| 1:14.9 | faced lower risk from the disease, but that low risk is not zero. We've had close to 400 children |
| 1:20.4 | up to the age of four die from COVID-19 in the United States. And so this is still an important |
| 1:25.6 | gap. There's about 18 million children and now finally the regulators say that they have enough |
| 1:30.4 | data, but it required the max manufacturers to sort of tweak their formulation because you know, |
| 1:35.6 | a lot of immunologists will tell you kids are not little adults. And so they had to retest |
| 1:40.5 | these vaccines at lower doses to make sure that they didn't cause more severe side effects. So |
| 1:44.8 | the Pfizer vaccine is actually administered as three doses at one tenth of the adult dose |
| 1:50.0 | for children under five, whereas the Moderna vaccine is administered at a quarter of the adult dose |
| 1:54.9 | over two doses. And how soon could these be available? Well, now that the FDA has approved it, |
| 2:00.7 | the Centers for Disease Control has to put out its guidelines, but very likely it could be as soon |
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