The “Vaccine for Children Safe and Effective” says the Hawaiʻi Department of Health. The Hawai‘i Department of Health has authorized certified vaccination providers to administer Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5-11 immediately. This authorization is consistent with recommendations made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday.

“The CDC reviewed the clinical data and determined the vaccine is safe. The Pfizer vaccine is effective in preventing severe illness and death. The vaccine will provide another important layer of protection in keeping our children and the entire community safe,” said Health Director Dr. Elizabeth Char, FACEP.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine for children age 5-11 last week.

The Pfizer vaccine dose for children ages 5-11 is 10 micrograms, 1/3 the dose used for adults.

Shipments of the state’s initial order of 41,700 doses of vaccine for children began arriving Monday. Vaccination providers can begin administering the vaccines as soon as their deliveries arrive and their clinics are established.

Vaccinations for children will be made available at more than 200 locations statewide including medical facilities, community health centers, mobile clinics, pharmacies, pediatrician’s offices, and more than 130 public, private and charter schools.

Some participating schools will begin administering COVID-19 vaccinations on Monday, November 8. A majority of the school vaccination sites will be closed to the general public. Parents should contact their child’s school directly to see if and when their school will be offering vaccinations to students.

Information on where children’s vaccines are available will be updated regularly at https://hawaiicovid19.com/vaccine/.

DOH estimates there are 119,473 children ages 5-11 living in Hawaii. The state’s initial order of vaccines for children is enough to provide 35% of the estimated population with the first of two recommended vaccinations. The second vaccination should be administered three weeks after the first vaccination or shortly thereafter.

Parents / legal guardians are required to submit signed consent forms before anyone 17 and younger can be vaccinated.

According to the CDC, although children are less likely to get severely ill from COVID-19, 1.9 million kids between the ages of 5 and 11 have been infected. Those infections resulted in 8,300 hospitalizations and nearly 100 deaths within this age group. Just one death has been reported in Hawaii so far. A traveling infant whose parents tested positive for Covid-19.

A clinical trial ran that tested the vaccine in 5-to-11-year-olds showed that the vaccine was over 90 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 for this age group. The common side effects of the vaccine in kids ages 5 to 11 mirror the same side effects in adults, in the sense, that they can get redness, pain, and swelling at the injection sites. The clinical trials for 5-to-11-year-olds were too small to detect safety signals. In other words, parents and caregivers are understandably worried about the potential for myocarditis [inflammation of the heart muscle] related to the vaccine, but the trial did not show that safety signal. That’s not to say that myocarditis couldn’t exist or can’t happen. And that we won’t see that as more and more children around the country get vaccinated. Myocarditis can happen as a result of viruses, including COVID-19; there’s a rare but real potential for vaccine-related myocarditis particularly in young men and teenage boys, but again, the risk of COVID-19 on the heart is greater than the potential risk for myocarditis in this population.

There is not enough evidence yet to determine from the small clinical trial on the 5-to-11-year-old age category that the vaccine reduces transmission, but it would really break the understanding of immunology and biology if the vaccine in this age group didn’t reduce transmission from the recipient of the vaccine to other people. First of all, you have to have an infection with coronavirus in order to transmit it to other people. So insofar as the vaccine reduces your risk of being infected, it also reduces your risk of transmitting the virus to other people. Secondly, that’s what vaccines do. They neutralize the virus so that the host, the recipient of the vaccine, is less likely to get sick and they’re less likely to then pass it on to other people.