Vaccines for young kids could be available as soon as June, a top FDA official says

Vaccine maker Moderna requested emergency use authorization for its vaccine for children 6 months to 5 years old on Thursday, and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, are expected to submit the full data on a three-dose regimen for children 6 months to 4 years old in coming weeks.

Marks said the agency will not delay one vaccine to wait for the other. Each product’s application, he said, would be considered when the data are ready.

“We are not going to delay things unnecessarily here,” Marks said.

FDA officials will decide closer to the meeting dates which product will be reviewed when, depending on the status of the reviews, he said.

Marks’s promise to handle the vaccine applications expeditiously was partly a reaction to a recent story in Politico that said the FDA was considering holding off on clearing the two-dose Moderna vaccine so that it could review that product alongside the three-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The story suggested regulators might be uneasy about authorizing an acceptable but less-effective shot when it was possible a more potent option might be just weeks behind. Angry parents decried any potential delay involving the Moderna vaccine.

Marks said in the interview that if the vaccines are ready for consideration within a week of each other, he might present them to the agency’s vaccine advisory committee close together, on successive days. But if there is a longer lag time, he will hold separate advisers’ meetings, he said.

Marks also said that if the companies’ data hold up to scrutiny on safety, efficacy and quality, “we would anticipate June authorizations for one or more of the pediatric vaccinations.”

The FDA has come under enormous pressure to move quickly — or, at minimum, explain its plans — on pediatric vaccines.

Parents, pediatricians and politicians have expressed rising frustration that children younger than 5 remain ineligible for the shots, long after other Americans have received vaccinations and, in many cases, booster doses. Many people have sworn off masks and other protections and are attempting to revert to a pre-pandemic lifestyle, increasing concerns for unprotected unvaccinated children.

In a statement Friday, the FDA said it understands the urgency of getting vaccines to the youngest Americans but added that the vaccine makers’ submissions are not “fully complete.” The agency said that as it reviews incoming data from the companies, it will provide details on the meetings and that it would take action quickly, assuming information supports “a clear path” to authorization.

Marks said the vaccine reviews might take a few weeks longer than past emergency vaccine authorizations because of the complexity added by the variants and the need to closely examine the safety profile. Vaccine-induced fevers in young children can be more serious than in adults, he noted, causing febrile seizures.

Jeremy S. Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a parent of a child in this age group, said the timeline should be faster than the FDA has laid out, more in keeping with the review of the Pfizer vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, which took less than a month.

“I agree the FDA needs to assess the side-effect profile. It would take me about six minutes. I wouldn’t need six weeks. Just show me the data,” Faust said.

The FDA also announced plans to meet June 7 with its outside advisers — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee — to discuss an emergency authorization request for a coronavirus vaccine made by Novavax for people 18 and older. A vocal group of investors and some people who say they prefer the more traditional vaccine technology have been pushing for access to that vaccine for months.

Novavax submitted an application for emergency use authorization in late January. The vaccine uses a protein-based technology, with some novel twists. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are produced using a new messenger RNA technology.

Last June, Novavax said the vaccine was 90 percent effective in preventing people from falling ill in a 30,000-person trial conducted when variants had begun to complicate the pandemic in the United States and Mexico. The firm has had manufacturing problems,…