Covid-19 vaccinations among the country’s newly eligible tweens and teens have given a much needed boost to the nation’s campaign, at a time when vaccination rates have fallen among the oldest age groups and mostly stalled among young adults, despite efforts by state officials to entice people to get a shot.
Average daily number of people in the U.S. receiving a first dose, by age
After falling sharply in April and May, daily vaccination rates have been inching upward again, driven in large part by the immunizations of 12- to 15-year-olds. In the two and a half weeks since this group has become eligible for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, about 2.5 million have gotten their first shot, making up about a quarter of all new vaccinations.
Even though 12- to 15-year-olds are just 5 percent of the population, numbering nearly 17 million, experts say that reaching them can have significant benefits for the rest of the country. Beyond reducing infections in their communities, vaccinated youth may encourage older family members to get a shot and help their families return to a feeling of normalcy.
“For 15 months, kids have experienced loneliness and heard a message that being close to other humans is risky and puts their families at risk,” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a volunteer vaccinator. “Many kids are eager to get vaccinated as they anticipate learning in a classroom and hanging out with friends with decreased risk of bringing the virus home.”
But public health experts also say that they expect the burst of vaccinations among adolescents to be short-lived, just as adults’ eagerness to get vaccinated rose and fell.
“I think people who were really excited about getting their kids vaccinated signed up and got it done quickly,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “There’s been a lot of availability over the last two weeks, so it was easy to do if you wanted to do it.”
“I think it’s going to be harder to maintain that interest,” she added.
There are signs that vaccinations among tweens and teens may increase. In a May poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 24 percent of parents of children 12 to 17 said their child had already received at least one shot, and another 18 percent said they would get their kids vaccinated right away. About 20 percent wanted to wait to see how the vaccines worked before getting a child vaccinated.
Inoculation rates among the youngest eligible Americans, those ages 12 to 17, have varied across the country; in 16 states, at least 30 percent of people in this group have received at least one shot.
But some states are much further behind.
“My concern is that the early data show limited interest in states that are already seeing waning interest across adult populations,” Dr. Weintraub said.
Some states are also lagging among the oldest groups. In more than a dozen states and Puerto Rico, about 20 percent of people 65 and older have not yet received a vaccine.
“While it’s good to get kids vaccinated, and it’s definitely a bonus in keeping rates down,” Dr. Sell said, “I still think the real focus should be on those older people, those people who were in the first priority groups.”
She added: “There are still gaps there. There are still people there who need to be vaccinated. Those are the people who are going to get really sick and end up in the hospital.”
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