The US vaccine approval for five- to 11-year-olds has brought an end to speculation and dither – and joy to parents
Along with a lot of other people, over the summer I had responded to news about Covid vaccine trials in young children mainly by sitting on the fence. When the time came, I thought, I’d probably get my two six-year-olds vaccinated, but possibly not in the first wave. It seemed unnecessary to run for the door, given the low impact of the disease on young children and the high number of teens and adults (nearly 80% in our zip code) in New York who have had at least one dose of vaccine. A big surprise, therefore, has been not only how keen I am to get my kids vaxxed, after Tuesday’s announcement that 28 million five- to 11-year-olds in the US are now eligible, but how emotional this moment feels.
It has been a feature of Covid that every projected end-point has been pushed back beyond the horizon. To remember March 2020 is to invite bitter laughter at the naivety of those early days of lockdown, when we thought this thing might be over by summer, or by autumn, or by the first Christmas – definitely by the time the vaccine programme rolled out, in early 2021. And it did get much better. Viewed from the US, people in the UK look deranged, sending their unvaccinated kids to school unmasked, behaving as if Covid is over while the numbers surge. But even here in New York, where precautions are still stringent – the kids are under mask mandates at school and no one I know is having indoor playdates or birthday parties – it is, of course, a vast improvement on where we were last year. If this is the new normal, we had, I thought, done a good job of adjusting.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
