Healthwatch: Dr. Leana Wen on the COVID vax for infants & toddlers

Happy Juneteenth! It’s another edition of our monthly Midday Healthwatch, with Dr. Leana Wen. The latest surge in the COVID-19 variant known as omicron is beginning to show signs it is receding, but the highly transmissible BA.2 variant has led the CDC to estimate that nearly 60% of Americans have already been infected. For children, the infection rate is even higher: closer to 75%. And help for our youngest children is on the way. On Friday, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization (EUA) to the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccines for children under the age of five. The CDC signed off on the panel’s recommendation on Saturday. This comes as a relief to many parents, and it presents a dilemma for many others, who may be vaccinated themselves, but who are hesitant about vaccinating their kids. Dr. Wen is herself the parent of two children under the age of five. She is a former health commissioner of Baltimore, an emergency physician, and she teaches at the George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. Dr. Wen is also a columnist for the Washington Post, a medical analyst for CNN, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health. Dr. Leana Wen joins us on Zoom…Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.