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Federal health regulators said for the first time late Friday that kid-size doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine appear highly effective at preventing symptomatic infections in elementary school children and caused no unexpected safety issues. The Food and Drug Administration posted its analysis of Pfizer’s data ahead of a public meeting next week to debate whether the shots are ready for the nation’s roughly 28 million children ages 5 to 11. The agency will ask a panel of outside vaccine experts to vote on that question and is expected to authorize the vaccine for young children as early as next week. (Santucci and Carless, 10/23)

The review found that for four scenarios that were weighed, “the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine 2-dose primary series clearly outweigh the risks.” But in one, when the virus was at its lowest levels, there could be more hospitalizations related to a rare heart side effect associated with the vaccine than the number of hospitalizations prevented from covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. Even then, the review found, “the overall benefits of the vaccine may still outweigh the risks under this lowest incidence scenario” because of how hospitalized cases of the two conditions differ. The vaccine-related myocarditis cases have tended to resolve in a few days, unlike covid-19 infections, which can lead to death. (Johnson and McGinley, 10/22)

Vaccines for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 will likely be available in the first half of November, top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said on Sunday, predicting a timetable that could see many kids getting fully vaccinated before the end of the year. "If all goes well, and we get the regulatory approval and the recommendation from the CDC, it's entirely possible if not very likely that vaccines will be available for children from 5 to 11 within the first week or two of November," Fauci said in an interview with ABC's This Week. (Pamuk, 10/24)

An 11-year-old girl was petrified -- her word -- of needles, so much so that she didn't want to talk about it with me. She couldn't talk about it without becoming visibly upset. Her heart raced, her breathing became rapid, and her stomach hurt when she tried to answer my questions. So, we backed up and started from the beginning. I first had her look at cartoon images of children getting vaccines. When I asked her how it felt to do that, she rolled her eyes and reminded me that it wasn't real. Next, I had her look at photos of medical needles. She reported that she didn't like the pictures, but she could handle looking at them. (Hurley, 10/25)

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Sunday encouraged families to celebrate Halloween and other holidays amid the Covid-19 pandemic, though still urged “prevention strategies.“ Speaking to host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” she said, “I would say put on those costumes, stay outside and enjoy your trick-or-treating.“ (Cohen, 10/24)