USA TODAY
A COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, is safe and effective enough to give to younger teens, the Food and Drug Administration said Monday in authorizing its use.
The decision means adolescents ages 12 to 15 could qualify for shots as soon as Thursday, after the Wednesday meeting of an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Joe Biden said last week that 20,000 pharmacy locations are ready to begin vaccinating adolescents once the necessary approvals come through.
Shots also will be available soon through pediatricians offices, the president said. And if teens are on the move this summer, they can get their first shot in one place and a second shot elsewhere.
GENEVA A new global system should be set up to respond faster to disease outbreaks to help ensure no future virus causes a pandemic as devastating as COVID-19, an independent World Health Organization review panel said on Wednesday. The experts found crucial shortcomings in the global response in early 2020 - including a delay in declaring an emergency, a failure to impose travel restrictions and an entire lost month when countries neglected to respond to warnings - that let the virus quickly spread into a crippling pandemic. To address those problems, the WHO should be given the power to send investigators swiftly to chase down new disease outbreaks, and to publish their full findings without delay.
To do better next time, the group proposes a top-to-bottom overhaul of the pandemic preparedness system, including the creation of a new global health council akin to the United Nations Security Council and more money and power for the World Health Organization (WHO). “Pandemics pose potential existential threats to humanity and must be elevated to the highest level,” the authors write.
“It s a frank assessment of literally systematic failure in the COVID response at every level, from WHO down to country level,” says Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. But Gostin says the panel is vague on how to bring about the massive changes it seeks and has missed an opportunity to call out countries bad behavior, including China’s early handling of the outbreak. “The independent panel had the opportunity to give WHO political cover to name names, to identify fault, honestly, where it occurs. And they didn