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Pfizer has just announced that they will be asking for U.S. authorization to begin vaccinating children from ages 5 to 11.

Currently, the Pfizer vaccine is available to children from as young as 12 and older but with a majority of American kids back in school and the highly contagious delta variant continuing to spread, they believe it is time for younger children to get vaccinated.

According to Fox, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said, “Over the past nine months, hundreds of millions of people ages 12 and older from around the world have received our COVID-19 vaccine. We are eager to extend the protection afforded by the vaccine to this younger population, subject to regulatory authorization, especially as we track the spread of the Delta variant and the substantial threat it poses to children.”

“The safety profile and immunogenicity data in children aged 5 to 11 years vaccinated at a lower dose are consistent with those we have observed with our vaccine in other older populations at a higher dose,” said Dr. Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech.

Currently over 5 million children have contracted COVID-19 since the pandemic started and of those 5 million, 460 have passed away.