--- title: Why to Get Your Young Kids Vaccinated Against COVID-19 description: There are many reasons why parents are still worried about getting their youngest kids vaccinated. Here’s the latest data on what we know and don’t know about the shots. canonical: https://time.com/6192941/young-kids-covid-19-vaccine/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-07-05T17:56:56.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:37:03.330Z article:section: Health og:title: What to Know About Vaccinating Your Young Child Against COVID-19 og:description: 5 good reasons to vaccinate your kid, according to the latest data og:url: https://time.com/6192941/young-kids-covid-19-vaccine/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt11f46bea1a233551/698a3360cabb1dde0ee506f2/covid-19-vaccine-toddler.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2121 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: covid-19-vaccine-toddler og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What to Know About Vaccinating Your Young Child Against COVID-19 twitter:description: 5 good reasons to vaccinate your kid, according to the latest data twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt11f46bea1a233551/698a3360cabb1dde0ee506f2/covid-19-vaccine-toddler.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 5 Good Reasons to Get Your Young Kid Vaccinated Against COVID-19 > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=981fe0d8-14be-4876-8e9a-a8ed4d75ee3e&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine [Watch (HLS stream): The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BTNvQC2o.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2021-12-13. For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts._  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jul 5, 2022 5:56 PM UTC For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts.  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jul 5, 2022 5:56 PM UTC Everyone in the U.S. 6 months or older is now eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccine, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) authorized [the shots in June for very young children](https://time.com/6187674/covid-19-vaccines-kids-under-five-fda/), from 6 months to 5 years old. They’re the last age demographic in the U.S. to become eligible to get vaccinated during the pandemic. Despite the regulatory green light, many parents of young children are wondering whether it’s even necessary to get their [kids vaccinated](https://time.com/6189036/covid-19-vaccines-kids/) at this point in the pandemic, since infections have become so common and, in general, the virus causes relatively mild symptoms in most kids. But while studies that follow kids for longer periods of time are ongoing, the current evidence points to more benefits than risks of the vaccines for little ones. Below are some common concerns among parents, along with the latest consensus from experts about what the science shows so far. ## Hospitalizations **and deaths of the youngest kids are on the rise** COVID-19 does tend to cause milder disease in children compared to adults. But Omicron has raised the stakes in this population. Data from [CDC’s COVID-19 Data Tracker](https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19%5F3.html) show that during the peak of the initial Omicron wave, in January to February 2022, rates of hospitalization for infants and toddlers under 4 years old were more than four times that of the rates for children ages 5 to 17 years. Part of that, public health experts say, could be attributed to the fact that the younger children were not yet eligible to be vaccinated, while the older children were. The rates strongly suggest that children of any age who are not vaccinated and get COVID-19 could develop severe enough disease to need hospitalization. ## **Real-world data show COVID-19 vaccination is safe for kids** Some parents are concerned that the mRNA vaccines haven’t been tested for long enough in children. But the research submitted to the FDA by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, the two companies that have received pediatric authorization for COVID-19 vaccines, is pretty thorough. [Moderna’s study](https://www.fda.gov/media/159189/download) involves nearly 1,600 children from 6 months to 5 years old, while [Pfizer-BioNTech](https://www.fda.gov/media/159193/download)’s includes more than 4,500 children from 6 months to 4 years old; some of those children served as controls and received placebo shots, while others received the actual vaccine doses. In both cases, the companies followed up with the kids in the studies about two months after they received the second of their two-dose primary series of vaccines. And in both cases, the rates of adverse reactions were similar to those observed for older children and adults, including from real-world data collected from hundreds of millions of adolescents and adults who have been vaccinated with the shots already. None of the young children who were vaccinated in either company’s studies developed severe adverse reactions. The most concerning side effect that has been documented in older children, mostly adolescents, involves inflammation of heart tissue; it’s extremely rare even in that age group, and so far hasn’t been seen at all among younger vaccinated children. The CDC’s system for monitoring side effects and reactions to vaccines will continue to comb through data to pick up any signs of increases in known side effects, or reports of new ones. And the vaccine manufacturers will also continue to study the safety and effectiveness of their shots in young children. ## **Kids’ shots are likely about as effective against Omicron as adult vaccines** Back in 2020, the mRNA vaccines generated stunning efficacy numbers upwards of 90%. But [efficacy rates for the youngest children’s shots](https://time.com/6189036/covid-19-vaccines-kids/) aren’t as impressive. Why not? A different version of SARS-CoV-2 was circulating when the shots were first developed. Both vaccines were developed to target the original virus strain, which is no longer responsible for the majority of COVID-19 cases. That strain has been replaced by a series of variants, the latest of which is Omicron and Omicron’s subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, which now account for [half of infections in the U.S.](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) In Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s studies of younger children, participants were given the same version of the vaccine—targeting the original virus—at smaller doses. But because these studies occurred more recently, during the first Omicron wave this past winter, the efficacy of the vaccines in this age group, as measured by antibodies that can neutralize the virus, reflect immunity against Omicron, not the original strain, which accounts for the drop. The antibodies that were tested, however, continue to provide protection against serious COVID-19 disease, and make up only one part of the immune response generated by the vaccines. ## **Even though they can’t completely stop infection, vaccines slash the risk of bad outcomes for kids** People who are vaccinated and boosted can (and do) still get COVID-19\. But that’s no reason not to get the shots. No vaccine, including those targeting childhood diseases such as measles, is 100% effective. Vaccines are primarily designed to protect people from getting severely ill from a given disease, and not to ensure that they don’t get infected in the first place. The infections occurring among vaccinated adults are due to the Omicron variant and its subvariants. Adults are immunized with vaccines that targeted the original virus; the strength of that immunity has dropped as new variants have emerged—especially against Omicron. That said, the original vaccines are still effective at generating a broad immune response to counter the worst impacts of all of SARS-CoV-2’s variants, from Alpha to Omicron. In other words, even if vaccinated adults are getting infected, the shots are still largely protecting them from getting seriously ill with COVID-19 and needing to be hospitalized. Adults who have been vaccinated and boosted have generally reported milder symptoms and milder disease than people who are unvaccinated. Experts say the same appears to be true for children as well. ## **Getting Omicron is safer if young kids are vaccinated** Studies have documented Long COVID, a constellation of lingering symptoms involving the brain, heart, and other body systems that could represent lasting health effects of an infection—but the [true extent of Long COVID remains unknown](https://time.com/6191655/long-covid-under-diagnosed/). The data on Long COVID are even less complete for children, so most public health experts believe that the preventative benefits of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines outweigh any potential risks. In adults, data show that [getting vaccinated reduces the risk of Long COVID](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0#:~:text=The%20researchers%20found%20that%20vaccination,found%20much%20higher%20protection%20rates.). Studies are starting to show that people who get infected after being vaccinated also tend to experience milder symptoms and less severe disease compared to unvaccinated people who get infected. ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en I think vaccines are misunderstood, and maybe it's because it seems like magic. That simplicity and the mystery of it is something that ends up creating a lot of skepticism. People are fooled by the speed. Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready. Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development. In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. But this was truly a moment of the right fix - a brand new kind of vaccine technology - at exactly the right time. I started out in math, and I moved to biology. And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. And so the first part of my career was trying to understand the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease and trying to make vaccines safer. I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work and discover something that no one else in the world knows on any given day. It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. When I first came to Penn from the NIH, pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. Although mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection, it took doctors Karikó and Weissman 16 years to figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. So I repeated the experiment and we could see that there was no inflammation in human cells. We're both scientists. We're not baseball players who cheer when we hit a homerun. We knew that it had great potential. But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. One of the really important problems in coronaviruses that had not been solved is really simple. What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. At that moment, you realize that you have almost what is a universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly. The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months, and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. "Do it mama!" (laughter) Most scientists never get to see a product actually used. And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, those were special moments. I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, and they reported that they received the vaccine. There were like 200 elderly in that home. And nobody died. On social media, when children were going back to visiting their grandparents again. Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases. Influenza, even cancer. 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