CHI St. Alexius Health Williston administered their first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to patients under 18. Scarlett Wolf, 9, and sister Vivienne, 8, both received their first doses of the Pfizer vaccine on Friday morning. Mother Anna Wolf, DNP, APRN, FNP-C at CHI St. Alexius, said she was thrilled that her children were able to take advantage of the vaccine.
"It really eases my mind now, if they were to come in contact with the virus," Wolf said. "We know that children ages 5 to 11 it has a 90 percent rate of keeping children from getting the severe disease or ending up in the hospital. Those are odds that I like."
On Nov 2, CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, M.D., M.P.H., endorsed the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendation that children 5 to 11 years old be vaccinated against COVID-19 with the Pfizer-BioNTech pediatric vaccine. The CDC now expands vaccine recommendations to about 28 million children in the country in this age group and allows providers to begin vaccinating them as soon as possible.
"It offers that layer of protection that we can't give them without vaccines," Wolf added. "It's not a virus that we purposely want to infect children with. We just don't know how it's going to affect children long-term. Yes children typically do very well when they sick with the virus, but we just don't know long-term what it's going to be, and we know the vaccine is empirically safe."
Individuals wanting to vaccinate their children can contact CHI St. Alexius Health Williston at 701.572.7651 for more information.
By Mitch Melberg [email protected]