(NEW YORK) — The Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for children ages 12 and up, widening the U.S. population that will be protected against the virus and bolstering chances for a safe return to full-time school in the fall, the Food and Drug Administration announced Monday.

“We know this is a big step for our country. Vaccinating a younger population brings us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy and to ending the pandemic,” acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said at a press briefing on Monday night.

Woodcock said parents and guardians can “rest assured that in making our decision, the agency undertook a rigorous and thorough review of all available scientific data, as we have with all the COVID-19 vaccine authorizations.”

Pfizer vaccines for kids age 12-15 could be administered as soon as Thursday, Woodcock said, so long as all goes well at Wednesday’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting, which is the next step in the vaccine rollout.

Pfizer announced in late March that its clinical trials showed the vaccine was safe and 100% effective in children ages 12-15, similar to the 95% efficacy among adult clinical trial participants.

It was the first vaccine to show data in children as young as 12, a promising first step toward vaccinating younger Americans. The vaccine was the only option for 16- and 17-year-olds in the U.S., with Moderna and Johnson & Johnson authorized for those 18 and older. Now, the FDA authorization means kids throughout middle and high schools will have the opportunity to be vaccinated before the fall, alleviating many of the hurdles schools face in stopping transmission.

Currently, about 115 million Americans are fully immunized — about 35% of the population.

After a trial with over 2,000 children, Pfizer found no cases of infection among the children who had been given the vaccine and 16 cases of infection among the children who received a placebo, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at the press briefing.

No cases of COVID occurred in the 1,005 adolescents that received the vaccine, while there were 16 cases of COVID among the 978 kids who received the placebo, “thus indicating the vaccine was 100% effective in preventing COVID-19 In this trial,” said Marks.

Adolescents experienced a similar range of side effects as seen in older teens and young adults — generally seen as cold-like symptoms in the two to three days after the second dose — and had an “excellent safety profile,” Marks said.

“Based on all this available information, the FDA determined the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has met all of the criteria required to amend the EUA, which concluded that the known and potential benefits of this vaccine in individuals 12 years of age and older outweigh the vaccine’s known and potential risks,” Marks said.

Marks encouraged parents who were hesitant to vaccinate their children to speak with their pediatricians, urging confidence in the trial and data.

“The vaccine had an excellent profile in children, and though one can say that often children don’t get terribly sick from COVID-19, there are kids who do get very sick from it and in addition, they can bring it asymptomatically around to their grandparents and others,” Marks said. “So this is part of the totality of getting our country protected against COVID-19, which is just waiting around the corner to come have another wave if we don’t get to a sufficient degree of vaccination.”

In an interview with ABC News ahead of the authorization, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said getting children the vaccine would be “great news,” not only for the kids, “but also for the parent, grandfathers and therefore the American society in general.”

Bourla acknowledged that some parents might be nervous to vaccinate their young kids, but said Pfizer has been “extremely careful with children” and waited to begin studying the vaccine with anyone 15 or younger until hundreds of millions of doses were studied in adults.

According to recent polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation, just 29% of parents of children under 18 said they’ll get them vaccinated as soon as it’s available for their age group. A third said they’re inclined to wait and see and the rest remained more hesitant.

“What we can promise to our parents is that we have done very thorough examination, more thorough than in any other vaccine, exactly because of the visibility that this vaccination is having,” Bourla told ABC News.

Moderna, the second mRNA vaccine approved for use in the U.S., said it is still studying the results among children ages 12 and up.

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on ABC’s Good Morning America recently that getting vaccines to kids “will make an enormous difference for infection numbers in the community and schools for fall as well.”

While children are not considered at high risk of severe illness from the coronavirus, they represent about a quarter of the U.S. population and vaccinating them is critical to stopping the spread of the virus.

Bourla also noted that kids can still spread the virus.

“When the kids are vulnerable, they are also contributing to the pool where the virus can replicate and, of course also, they are contributing to the chain of reinfections to other group ages,” he said.

“In addition to protecting the kids, as I said, the most important thing is that you can contribute to herd immunity in the country,” he added.

Experts predict the U.S. needs anywhere between 70% to 85% of the U.S. population to be vaccinated before it can reach herd immunity, when there is enough of a defense against the virus that it will no longer be able to spread. Specialists said the higher number of people with immunity the more difficult it is for the virus to spread, so every vaccinated person reduces the risk for those around them from getting COVID too.

Both Pfizer and Moderna are continuing to study the vaccines in trials of children ages 6 months to 11 years old. Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, confirmed that the company is expecting to have data on vaccines for elementary school students by the end of the year.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — A group of moms from across the country celebrated Mother’s Day this year with one wish — to find the bone marrow donors who will save their daughters’ lives.

“If she gets the bone marrow transplant, she’ll be a normal baby,” Anessa Haden said of her 8-month-old daughter, True, who has been told by doctors she likely won’t live past the age of 3 without a matching donor. “A bone marrow transplant is literally her hope to a long life.”

True was diagnosed three months ago with congenital amegakaryocytic thrombocytopenia (CAMT), a rare disease in which bone marrow no longer produces platelets, which are critical to blood clotting and preventing bleeding, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Haden, of Huntsville, Alabama, said True, her first child, was quickly categorized as an “emergency transplant” case because she needs a bone marrow transplant to survive.

The past three months of Haden’s life have, as a result, been a dizzying mix of hospital stays and doctors’ appointments for True, while Haden does everything she can to find a bone marrow match for her daughter.

Making the task more difficult is True’s interracial background — a mix of African American, Indian, Puerto Rican and Caucasian — which makes it harder to find a match because these ethnicity groups are underrepresented in the global donor pool, according to DKMS, an international nonprofit organization that works to find bone marrow matches.

“It’s definitely an isolating experience,” said Haden. “A lot of people hear bone marrow transplant and they don’t really get to see the life and face of a kid who needs a bone marrow transplant.”

After finding each other through both DKMS and social media, Haden has formed a lifelong bond with three other mothers from across the country who are also searching for matching blood marrow donors who could save their daughters’ lives.

Destiny Van Sciver, of California, is looking for a matching donor for her two daughters, Kylie, 9, and Kimora, 13, both of whom were diagnosed with sickle cell disease at 6 weeks old.

Doctors have told Van Sciver that one matching donor could help both of her daughters but they have yet to find that donor. Like True, the girls’ race, Black, has made it harder to find a donor because people of color are underrepresented on the bone marrow registry.

People of color account for 7% of all registrants on the registry, according to DKMS.

“We always fantasize about a day where we won’t have to do all these things,” said Van Sciver, whose oldest daughter, Kimora, recently had to undergo a hip transplant. “It’s so frustrating seeing my daughter trying to learn how to walk every day, knowing that there’s a cure out there that can save her.”

In Louisiana, Jaimie Havard is looking for a bone marrow match for her 16-year-old daughter, Courtlynn, who was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria in October. The high school sophomore went from playing baseball and softball to undergoing weekly blood and platelet transfusions to stay alive, according to Havard.

“Her life is totally different now,” said Havard. “A [bone marrow] transplant is the cure. It’s truly a difference between life and death for these children.”

Just before Mother’s Day, the three moms and one more, Tara Forrest, of Boston, whose 14-year-old daughter Ali Pantoja is battling acute myeloid leukemia, met on Zoom for the first time after spending weeks connecting by phone, texts and social media.

“You instantly have a connection with them because you feel the pain and desperation,” said Havard. “It’s just amazing to be able to talk to somebody who actually knows what you’re feeling on the inside.”

“Other people can be sympathetic but they can’t be empathetic because they’re not quite walking in my shoes,” said Haden. “To have other moms or dads who understand, it’s definitely vital. It means the world to us to be able to connect.”

All four moms are working with DKMS to recruit bone marrow donors for their daughters.

“It truly is all consuming,” Havad said of the search for a donor. “The focus is on your child and their future. Knowing that their future lies in a stranger’s hand, your mindset then goes to what can I do to get this story out, to get people to swab their cheek and get on the donor list to save a life?”

Only around 30% of patients are able to find a compatible bone marrow donor in their family, according to DKMS co-founder and chairwoman Katharina Harf, whose family started the nonprofit when Harf’s mother died of leukemia after not being able to find a bone marrow donor match.

Each year in the United States, around 18,000 people are diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses where a bone marrow transplant or umbilical cord blood transplant is their best treatment option, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA).

All it takes to join the bone marrow registry is to request a swab kit, which DKMS offers online, and to swab the inside of your cheeks.

If a person is found to be a match, in most cases, the process of donating their bone marrow or stem cell is an outpatient procedure and one that does not require surgery, according to Harf.

“You’re giving a second chance at life to a person,” said Harf. “A lot of our patients really celebrate the day they receive the stem cells as a second birthday.”

Van Sciver said she and the moms she has met while searching for cures for their daughters may come from different backgrounds and have different stories but they are all just “moms asking for help.”

“I really hope that people hear this message and want to get out and make a difference,” she said. “One person would make a difference.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The Biden Administration announced Monday it will move to protect gay and transgender people against sex discrimination in health care.

The Department of Health and Human Services said it will roll back a Trump administration policy that tried to narrow the legal protections against discrimination in health care by issuing rules defining sex as gender assigned at birth.

“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” HHS Secretary Xavier Beccera said in a statement.

Beccera said this action today puts HHS in line with a 6-3 Supreme Court decision last year, which established that federal laws against sex discrimination on the job also protect gay and transgender people.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.