What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Where Are The Little Kids' Vaccines?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2022
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
Today on What Next TBD: What is going on with little kids' vaccines? Why don’t they seem to be a priority for the government or the pharmaceutical companies, while parents are stressed to a breaking point? We discuss with Meg Tirrell, health and science correspondent for CNBC, and co-host of the Readout Loud podcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Late last week, I was going through Twitter looking for any crumbs of information I could find |
| 0:09.0 | on when my kid might be able to get a COVID vaccine. He's 18 months old. He was born in the pandemic. |
| 0:16.0 | It's been his entire life, even though he's totally unaware of it. |
| 0:26.7 | We don't let him do much. With Omicron all around us and pediatric hospitalizations increasing, |
| 0:34.5 | I've honestly gotten more and more anxious, both that he'll get sick and that our finely-tuned balance of child care and work will come crashing down. |
| 0:39.2 | Back in November, kids who were five to 11 became eligible for a COVID shot. |
| 0:44.1 | Today is a monumental day in the course of this pandemic and one that many of us have been very eager to be. |
| 0:51.9 | It seemed like maybe the littlest kids would be next soon, and I got my hopes up. |
| 0:56.8 | But then November, turned into December, and then January, which is how I found myself searching Twitter Friday night. |
| 1:04.5 | Another parent pointed me to a news story from Wisconsin, where part of Moderna's pediatric vaccine trial is happening. |
| 1:10.3 | Dr. William Hartman is leading UW Health's Moderna vaccine trials for kids ages six months to |
| 1:16.0 | four years old and says it recently expanded. |
| 1:18.6 | The FDA a couple weeks ago had asked nationally that the population of kids be expanded by a couple |
| 1:25.9 | hundred kids. And so we've all added more participants |
| 1:31.5 | into the trial. That little tidbit that the FDA had asked for more kids in the trial |
| 1:37.7 | likely means the timeline is slower and that a vaccine for little kids is even further away. |
| 1:45.5 | That news was devastating. |
| 1:47.9 | But it also felt so weird that I had to go digging for this information. |
| 1:52.5 | It felt like people without little kids just don't care. |
| 1:56.4 | To figure out more, we called up an expert, Meg Terrell. |
| 1:59.5 | I cover health and science for CNBC, and for the past two years, that has essentially been the COVID beat. And I also co-host a biotech podcast for stat called The Read Out Loud. |
| 2:12.4 | Meg also has an unvaccinated toddler, one who has basically been at home with her for two years. |
... |
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