A few weeks ago I posted, on Twitter, that I was increasingly furious with the FDA for taking so long to authorize COVID vaccines for children under 12. Then I deleted the tweet, because I know that as desperate as I am to get my kids inoculated, I’m not qualified to make judgments about how the FDA collects safety data.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, however, is qualified, and last week it sent a letter essentially calling on the FDA to speed things up. “What has concerned us is there hasn’t seemed to be the same level of urgency in authorizing a vaccine for younger kids as there was for adults,” Dr. Lee Savio Beers, the president of the group, told me.
Everyone believes that the FDA should be prudent in evaluating vaccine safety. But at some point, too much institutional risk aversion is a risk itself.
Last month, the FDA asked the vaccine manufacturers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to expand the number of 5- to 11-year-olds in their clinical trials in order to better…