When Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center announced this spring that it would be one of the sites testing Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine in kids younger than 12, lead investigator Dr. Robert Frenck heard from 3,000 interested parents in the first week. Months later, he still gets up to 10 emails from interested parents every single day.
Clearly, a significant subset of parents are desperate to get their kids vaccinated as soon as possible. And for families who have not yet made it into a clinical trial—and the much larger group of parents who want their children vaccinated, but also preferred not to include their kids in these studies—the wait isn’t over. In fact, Frenck guesses they’ll be waiting until at least October for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to clear a vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11.
Why the delay, when Pfizer’s shot was authorized for 12- to 15-year-olds in May? A few reasons.
First, researchers had to find the right dosage for small kids before they could do any of the required safety and efficacy testing. Second, the FDA recently asked vaccine makers to enroll more kids in their trials, in hopes of amassing a sample size large enough to learn about rare side effects of vaccination. And finally, trial sites’ work isn’t finished once they’ve enrolled and vaccinated as many kids as they need. They still need to gather months of follow-up data for the FDA to review—a process that could push the timeline of emergency-use authorization well into the fall of 2021.
That may be frustrating for parents, particularly given the pediatric surges currently underway in parts of the U.S. South and Midwest. But Frenck urges parents not to forget about all of the precautions that were available long before vaccines. “In the meantime, masks work well. Appropriate distancing works well,” he says.
And for those parents who really can’t wait? Both Pfizer and Moderna are still enrolling patients for at least some of their study sites.
About 440 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of yesterday afternoon, of which nearly 359.6 million doses had been administered, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 52.4% of Americans had been completely vaccinated.
More than 216.3 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 8 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 4.5 million people have died. On August 29, there were 384,028 new cases and 6,162 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 4 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 38.7 million coronavirus cases as of 8 a.m. E.T. today. More than 637,000 people have died. On August 29, there were 36,383 new cases and 277 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Aug. 30, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Over the past week in the U.S., more than 100,000 people per day have been in the hospital with COVID-19. The situation hasn’t been that bad since this past winter, when most people in the U.S. were not vaccinated. The extra-transmissible Delta variant seems to be to blame for the current surge—in part because infection with Delta may increase your chances of developing severe disease, according to a study published Friday in the Lancet Infectious Diseases. Researchers analyzed the outcomes of more than 40,000 people infected with COVID-19 in the U.K. About 6% of those who tested positive for the Delta variant were admitted to the hospital or sought emergency care, compared to 4% of those infected with the Alpha variant.
European Union officials today advised member countries to ban nonessential travel from the U.S. as the Delta variant sends case counts skyrocketing. That recommendation, which also applies to travel from Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro and the Republic of North Macedonia, is non-binding, meaning each individual E.U. country can decide whether to follow it. The E.U.’s travel restrictions on the U.S. were initially lifted in June, before the Delta variant began spreading widely.
A contamination scandal triggered Japanese officials to pull more than 2.6 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine out of circulation, at least temporarily. Foreign substances have been detected in multiple Moderna vaccine vials in Japan, and two people have died after receiving shots from the affected lots, though their deaths may be unrelated, Reuters reports. Japanese health officials have called the suspension a precautionary measure, and said the contamination may have occurred due to needles being inserted into vials incorrectly, causing some of their rubber stoppers to break off.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S.’s top COVID-19 expert, said yesterday in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union that it’s a “good idea” for schools to require COVID-19 vaccines for eligible children. “We’ve done this for decades and decades, requiring polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis [vaccines],” Fauci said. “So this would be nothing new.” A California public school district this month said it is mandating vaccination for students older than 12, in what seems to be the first example of a U.S. school system requiring shots for eligible students as well as staff.
If you think it’s difficult to keep track of the COVID-19 variants that continue to emerge around the world, try being one of Pfizer’s “variant hunters.” This New York-based team—the subject of a new story from STAT—recreates newly mutated strains of the virus and tests them to find out how well the company’s vaccine stands up. So far, the shots seem to be working well. But the variant hunters have their work cut out for them. “My goal is to go to bed before the sun rises,” one scientist told STAT.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jamie Ducharme and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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