In an effort to improve the vaccine immunity as new Covid-19 cases are on the rise, FDA has just approved booster doses for children aged 5-11

The number of new Covid-19 cases has been on the rise lately, an increasing trend seen for the very first since the Omicron wave in the January.

According to New York Times Covid-19 tracker, America added a total of 147.834 new cases on Monday, May 16, bringing the 14-day average to 95.813 daily cases. This upward trend means that we might be entering to a new Covid-19 wave, something that numerous health experts have been saying we might face since all of the pandemic measures were lifted.

Since recently, people aged 50 or older, as well as immunocompromised, are eligible to get second booster dose to further improve their immunity and stay protected against the Omicron subvariants, variants that have the ability to easily evade both natural and vaccine immunity.

On Tuesday, the FDA cleared the first booster for children aged 5-11 for the first time in an effort to further improve the protection against the deadly virus.

According to the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization, healthy children aged 5-11 with at least five months since the second vaccine dose will be eligible to get a third, booster dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

There is one more hurdle: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must decide whether to formally recommend the booster for this age group. The CDC’s scientific advisers are scheduled to meet on Thursday.

As we have already reported several times, children aged 5-11 are receiving only third of the Pfizer vaccine dose for adults.

The vaccination for children aged 5-11 was approved last November, and according to the data provided by the CDC, only 30% of the children of this age group have been fully vaccinated so far. It remains unknown how many of the parents of the fully vaccinated children will opt for booster dose at this time.

For now, the only group that is still not eligible to get any of the available vaccines are children aged under 5. The FDA officials said they will soon evaluate data from Pfizer and Moderna about the results of the testing.