On Monday, the district said it was not ready to respond to news about the Pfizer trial results for children under 12. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said that the promising results from Pfizer did not change his conviction that student vaccine mandates were the wrong approach. Given how rarely children become severely ill, the trial was not designed to draw meaningful conclusions about the vaccine’s ability to prevent Covid or hospitalization. Instead, the researchers looked at measurements of the youngsters’ immune response, on the assumption that the protective levels of antibodies seen in older people would be as protective in younger children. This approach has been used to assess other vaccines, and was also used to evaluate the performance of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines in older children.

Source: New York Times September 20, 2021 10:41 UTC