After much anticipation, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 5 through 11 years of age on Friday, Oct. 29. The decision led the way for the vaccine to be made available to 28 million unvaccinated children across the United States, subject to subsequent approval by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), which came a few days later, on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

 

In New York City, the first wave of eligible children to receive the shot got vaccinated the very next day, on Nov. 3, at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Norwood, as reported, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has also announced that the vaccine is also now available at all City-run sites.

 

But much like COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among some adults, some parents in the Bronx are similarly hesitant to vaccinate their young ones. “I’m a very worried mom,” said 36-year-old, Norwood resident, Amy Tsai, on vaccinating her two kids, aged 6 and 9 respectively.

 

Tsai said she’s not alone when it comes to concerns over vaccinating kids against COVID-19. “I’m in a large parent group, and I hear a lot of vaccine hesitancy,” she said. Tsai, who said she, herself, is not vaccinated, is vice president of New York City Coalition for Educating Families Together (CEFT).

 

The group describes itself on social media as “advocating for, and educating the most marginalized among us, fighting to create a system that responds to every child’s and family’s needs.” They recently relaunched as a citywide organization, having been known previously as Bronx Parent Leaders Advocacy Group (BPLAG). As reported, the group led at least one protest in July 2021 outside New York City Department of Education (DOE)’s office and called for the continuation of a remote learning option in public schools for children.

 

According to CEFT president, Farah Despeignes, the new group is made up of Bronx Community Education Council (CEC) and Parent and Parent Teacher Association (PA/PTA) members, as well as other community partners who represent “thousands of parents.” Despeignes added, “The core membership (folks who participate in regular meetings, etc.) is over two hundred parents, educators and community partners.”

 

Ultimately, CEFT officials said they want the DOE and all decisions, whether they be about a COVID vaccine or overcrowded classrooms in the Bronx, to be centered around families so that they can respond to the needs of students. Parents from the group said repeatedly that they know what’s best for their kids, not the DOE, unions, or the mayor.

 

CEFT is active on most social media channels as well as on YouTube. Officials wrote in a recent press release, “Several of us who helped build Bx PLAG first learned to organize with Obama for America, Organizing for America, and Organizing for Action, and it’s time to apply those successful strategies to meeting the educational needs of our children and families so we can foster lasting change.”

 

We asked Despeignes if CEFT has a policy on the COVID-19 vaccine. She replied, “NYC CEFT doesn’t have an official stance on vaccinations for children and adults, except to say that adults who are comfortable with the vaccines should get them and adults who are comfortable with getting their children vaccinated should get their children vaccinated.” We asked if she, herself, was vaccinated for COVID-19. We did not receive an immediate response.

 

Given that former U.S. President Barack Obama has been openly campaigning to promote COVID-19 vaccinations on more than one occasion, and as recently as last month, we reached out to the office of the former president to inquire if the president had any comment on being referenced, albeit loosely, in the CEFT’s campaign materials. We did not receive an immediate response.

 

The FDA granted the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for kids aged 5 through 11, after an FDA advisory panel reviewed a Pfizer study showing that the vaccine was 90.7 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 in children.

 

The three-phase study included approximately 3,000 participants who were randomly broken up into two groups. One group received the Pfizer COVID-19 shot in two 10 microgram doses (adults and children over 12 years old currently receive a 30-microgram dose) and the other group was given a placebo, a substance or treatment designed to have no therapeutic value.

 

While some study participants reported experiencing side effects such as pain at the injection site, headache, fever, and chills, there were no cases of myocarditis, a condition that results in the inflammation of the heart muscle.

 

Over the past 11 months, as vaccines became more widely available, cases of myocarditis were being reported primarily in adolescent males after receiving the second dose of the COVID-19 Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. However, according to research by Harvard Medical School, these cases have been mild, and as of July 2021, out of 1,000 reported cases of myocarditis detected in teens and young adults, 79 percent have recovered.

 

The number of cases reported in Harvard’s research also included instances of pericarditis, a condition where the tissue that forms a sac around the heart becomes inflamed.

 

Despite the Pfizer study results, Anna Lourelle Pelayo, a vaccinated, Norwood mother of two boys aged 7 and 10, who both attend P.S./M.S. 280, also thinks it’s too soon to introduce the vaccines to younger populations.

 

“I just don’t feel that it has been tested properly to introduce to the little ones because they’re so little, they’re so vulnerable,” said Pelayo. “We don’t know what the side effects will be in the long run for those little children.”

 

After the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for kids aged 5 through 11, a CDC advisory panel reviewed the FDA’s decision and voted on whether the vaccine should be recommended for all children or only a targeted subset of the age group. The vote took place on Tuesday, Nov. 2, and CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, did not reference any exceptions or subgroups to the planned roll-out in her Nov. 2 press release.

 

Distribution of pediatric vaccinations across the country started Nov. 2, with plans to scale up to full capacity starting the week of Nov. 8. Vaccines will be available at thousands of pediatric healthcare provider offices, pharmacies, Federally Qualified Health Centers, and more.  

 

Last year, Norwood News interviewed Dr. Edward E Conway Jr., chief of pediatric critical care and vice chairman at Lewis M. Fraad Department of Pediatrics, and professor of pediatrics at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx about treating critically ill child patients who had contracted Multi-Symptom Inflammatory Syndrome for Children (MIS-C), a then-new, pediatric condition which medical experts believed was potentially linked to the coronavirus, after three children in New York State died of the condition in May 2020, as reported.

 

In a recent phone interview with Norwood News, Dr. Mark Siedner, a clinical epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said concerned parents, like Pelayo, do need to understand the risks of vaccinating their children.

 

However, he said when deciding whether to vaccinate their youngest children, parents should consider that the risks, even cases of myocarditis, aren’t significant enough to outweigh the widespread benefits of vaccinations. Siedner said recognizing this will require parents to ask a more nuanced set of questions about how vaccinating their children can help facilitate their community’s return to some form of normalcy.

 

He added, “We have to ask; will this vaccine keep my kid in school more school days? Will it stop classrooms from having to be broken up into quarantine? Will it stop people in our community who may be immunosuppressed from getting sick? Will it allow children to go back to a way of life where they can travel without a risk or a constant anxiety and fear of infection or of spreading the infection to others?”

 

These are the secondary benefits that, Siedner said, impact lives in ways that are hard to measure. “That’s why this is a much more difficult conversation to have,” said Siedner. “Some of these benefits are not to the children themselves, but to other people in society.”

 

According to the American Medical Association, immunocompromised people account for at least 2.7 percent of U.S. adults, about 7 million people. This includes those who have had organ transplants, stem cell transplants and cancer, as well as those with primary immunodeficiency and those treated with immunosuppressive medications.

 

Meanwhile, every year since 2009, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation County Health Ranking Report has ranked the Bronx as number 62 out of New York State’s 62 counties in terms of health outcomes, a point highlighted during the July 2020 virtual “Discussion of Health Disparities and COVID-19,” moderated by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., as reported.

 

As an example of the high rates, compared to other boroughs, of immunocompromised Bronxites, according to a September 2021 report by NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, there are several, high-poverty, Bronx neighborhoods which, persistently, have the highest rates of asthma-related morbidity highest rates of asthma-related morbidity when compared with the rest of New York City. Two-thirds or more of these neighborhood residents comprise people of color.

 

Officials at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University estimate that as of Nov. 1, over 5 million people across the globe have died from the COVID-19 virus. Around 700,000 or 15 percent of those deaths have occurred in the United States (U.S.). In New York City, 4,688 Bronxites died from the virus, the most in any borough relative to its population at 0.32 percent, followed by Queens at 0.31 percent, Brooklyn at 0.29 percent, Staten Island at 0.25 percent and Manhattan at 0.19 percent.

 

According to the same John Hopkins report, only 58 percent of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, suggesting that among those eligible for the jab, 42 percent are still vaccine hesitant.

 

Meanwhile, a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor, an initiative that tracks the public’s attitudes and experiences with COVID-19 vaccinations, detected a similar hesitancy among parents. When asked if they would get their children vaccinated when a COVID-19 vaccine was authorized, 27 percent of parents said they would, 30 percent said definitely not, while 33 percent said they would wait and see. A mere 5 percent of parents said they would only vaccinate if given a mandate.

 

The results also revealed that over 50 percent of parents worry that a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in schools will force their children to be vaccinated even if they don’t want them to be.

 

When the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was given emergency use authorization for 12 through 15-year-olds in May 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio strongly encouraged the vaccine but hasn’t mandated the jab for this age group to attend school.

 

However, according to the NYC DOE’s website, vaccines have been mandated for all students, 12 years and older who participate in what are considered high-risk, after-school, extracurricular activities, like chorus, musical theater, dance, band, marching band, orchestra, cheerleading, step teams, and flag teams.

 

When asked at the final NYC mayoral debate, on Oct. 26, whether he would support a vaccine mandate for 5 through 11-year-olds, Eric Adams, New York City’s projected winner of the mayoral race, said he’s open to discussing options for parents, including remote learning, but didn’t definitively say whether he would impose a mandate.

 

“COVID devastated our City, our economy; the communities and families are still living with the trauma of COVID. I’m not going to go backwards; we must protect the people in this city,” he said.

 

In the meantime, Fatema Mustafa, 36, a vaccinated mother in Parkchester, continues to weigh her options. With a 6-year-old son diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism, the vaccine decision is a grueling one to make, but what keeps Mustafa awake at night is the fear associated with making the wrong one.

 

“I’m the one who’s going to take my son to get vaccinated, which means potentially I’m the one who’s going to destroy his future,” said Mustafa. “And once I go that route, there won’t be any coming back, and there will be nobody to hold liable for that because I did that to my child. I don’t think I can live with that kind of guilt.”

 

On Monday, Nov. 15, it was announced that an information session on the COVID-19 vaccine and children with developmental disabilities will be held on Wednesday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m., with Montefiore doctor, Lisa Shulman, M.D. Spanish interpretation will be provided. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/LetsTalkReg-Nov17… Need help registering? Call: 718.839.7278. See attached flyer for more information.

 

 

*Síle Moloney contributed to this story.