Vaccine appointments for kids ages 5 to 11 are now available in Stark County

Stark County health officials are planning vaccination opportunities for children ages 5 to 11 following a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Nov. 2, the CDC officially recommended that kids in that age group receive the pediatric Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to protect against COVID-19. The pediatric formulation is a 10 microgram dose rather than the 30 microgram dose used for people ages 12 and older, and is administered in two shots given three weeks apart.

The Massillon City Health Department has pediatric vaccine clinics scheduled for Nov. 13 and Nov. 29, and second-dose followups in December. The clinics will be only for children in the 5 to 11 age group and will not accept walk-ins. Parents can schedule the appointments by calling the Massillon Health Department at 330-830-1710.

More: Vaccine clinics scheduled in Stark County under mix-and-match guidelines

More: Stark Health offering $100 gift cards to first-dose vaccine recipients

The Stark County Health Department will offer the pediatric Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at twice weekly clinics on Saturdays from 9 to 11 a.m. and Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., beginning this weekend at the agency offices in 7235 Whipple Ave NW in Jackson Township. The Tuesday clinics are only for the 5 to 11 age group and the Saturday clinics are available for all ages. Appointments can be made through ArmorVax.com or by calling 330-451-1681.

Residents who receive a first dose at the Saturday or Tuesday clinics will get a $100 gift card while supplies last.

Akron Children’s Hospital will offer vaccine clinics for kids at its Akron and Beeghly campuses. Appointments can be made on the Akron Children’s website at www.akronchildrens.org.

The hospital system plans to offer the pediatric vaccine at primary care offices and urgent care locations by mid-November and will include the 5 to 11 vaccines at its school-based clinics through the fall and winter.

Vaccination appointments are also available through retail pharmacies, including CVS and Walgreens. Other providers can be found through the Ohio Department of Health’s vaccine finder at https://gettheshot.coronavirus.ohio.gov/.

Meanwhile, other health departments in the region are currently planning their own vaccine clinics.

The Alliance and Canton health departments are still working on determining dates and locations for clinics, and both cities are discussing the possibility of vaccine opportunities with their school districts.

Canton Health Commissioner Jim Adams said that while his department will provide vaccines, the best way for children to get vaccinated is with their primary care provider.

"We think it's very important that the family has a relationship with their primary care provider and that they maintain their immunization schedule the way they should for all childhood immunizations," Adams said. "We think the child's health care provider is going to really have the best understanding of the child's needs and can best provide this vaccine."

Over the course of the pandemic, Stark County reported more than 5,000 positive cases of COVID-19 among kids under the age of 18. According to the CDC, the county is currently experiencing high levels of community transmission of COVID-19.

Pediatric vaccine called a 'game-changer'

The availability of the COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 is a “game-changer” in the fight to end the pandemic, but schools should not abandon masking and social distancing until kids can be fully vaccinated, physicians said Wednesday during a statewide news conference.

The availability for school-age children will protect the larger community from COVID infections, complications, hospitalizations, deaths and milder COVID infections with longer-term complications, Dr. Michele Dritz, a pediatrician at Cornerstone Pediatrics in Miamisburg, said during an Ohio Department of Health news conference.

“Anything that allows us to really maximize that ability to protect our kids, I embrace that wholeheartedly,” said Dritz, a delegate at-large for American Academy of Pediatrics' Ohio Chapter. “It certainly goes hand in hand with the many other ways we know have been effective in helping us fight against the coronavirus — like masking, like hand-washing, like distancing and trying to minimize how many people are around at one time.

“But hopefully, the more we are able to get our community vaccinated, the more we will be able to pull back some of those other protective factors because of the vaccine’s effectiveness in helping to protect all of us, including our kids."

However, it will take some time before children will be two weeks past the second dose and considered fully vaccinated, Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff said.

Parents who want their children fully vaccinated by Christmas will need to receive their first shot by Nov. 20, Vanderhoff said.

“It’s still incredibly important for students and parents to be thinking about the importance of masking as the vaccinated children will not be fully protected for some time,” he said.

Because of the delta variant, children can still get serious COVID

While children did not seem to get COVID as much during the first wave, the delta wave was different, said Dr. Michael Forbes, a pediatric intensive care specialist at Akron Children’s Hospital.

“We’ve seen severe disease illness in children that really highlights the need for vaccination,” said Forbes.

Forbes said he was pleased that scientists “didn’t copy and paste the study and just do the same thing in 5- to 11-year-olds” for vaccines as adults.

“We used science and realized we can be very effective with less side effects, frankly almost no side effects, for children 5 to 11 ... to spare them the consequences of this terrible infection and raise community health," he said.

Statewide, more than 206,000 children have had COVID-19 infections, Vanderhoff said.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, as of Oct. 28, nearly 6.4 million children younger than 18 have had COVID-19, he said.

As of Monday, Nov. 1, more than 2,000 Ohio children have been hospitalized with COVID-19 and 15 have died, Vanderhoff said. Nationwide, 800 children have died.

Children’s hospitals throughout the state have shared that all of the children hospitalized who were 12 and older — and vaccine eligible — were unvaccinated, Vanderhoff said. That mirrors recent data, which shows among all ages, 95% of COVID-19 hospitalizations from January were unvaccinated and 96% of all COVID deaths were among the unvaccinated, he said.

Here are some other questions and answers for parents posed during the news conference:

Will there be supply issues to get the vaccine for my child in Ohio?

The first shipments of the 367,000 pediatric doses have already arrived in Ohio, Vanderhoff said. Additional shipments will be arriving in the coming days.

Vanderhoff does not anticipate supply issues similar to those seen earlier in the pandemic.

Contact your local pediatrician, health department, pediatrician’s office or pharmacy or go through https://Gettheshot.coronavirus.ohio.gov or call 833-4-ASK ODH (833-427-5634).

What kind of side effects have younger children shown to the vaccine?

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, which participated in some of the clinical trials, saw side effects similar to those reported in adults. However, in children they are actually less frequent and less severe, Chief of Staff Dr. Patty Manning-Courtney said.

“I don’t know if that means children are more sturdy. I suspect that could be the case,” she said. "Children have tolerated this vaccine very well, and they have benefited. It's safe, it's effective and it's the right thing to do."

Are there future fertility issues and myocarditis concerns from the vaccine?

“There is no impact from these vaccines on fertility,” Manning-Courtney said.

“It’s sometimes an unsatisfactory answer to give because the seeds that were sown around this risk were based in some very incorrect science,” she said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that fertility is affected by these vaccines.”

Myocarditis, or an inflammation of the heart, was an initial concern of COVID-19 and is very rare, Vanderhoff said.

Manning-Courtney said no Cincinnati study participants developed myocarditis and when it was seen in other participants, it was mild.

“It is six to seven times more commonly seen when you get COVID. So if you’re worried about myocarditis in your child, you don’t want them to get COVID and if you don’t want them to get COVID, you want them vaccinated,” she said.

Am I better off letting my child get a mild case of COVID-19 with natural immunity than subjecting them to the vaccine?

“It feels like an unnecessary risk to take that your child would get COVID and you’re banking on it being mild,” Manning-Courtney said. “We’ve seen children every day, including today at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, with moderate to severe COVID.”

Children do not need to have pre-existing conditions to get COVID-19 and can suffer long-term effects, she said.

Some pre-existing conditions that increase the severity of COVID are very common things like asthma and obesity, she said.

"Going the route of sort of natural immunity or let them just get the disease feels like a risk to take with your child when we can tell you confidently that this is a vaccine-preventable disease and vaccines have prevented diseases and death in so many children and other ways," Manning-Courtney said.

"The risk is far greater if you if you want to take the chance of your child getting COVID than from the vaccine," she said.

Sam Zern can be reached at szern@cantonrep.com or 330-580-8322.

Beacon Journal staff reporter Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at 330-996-3724 or blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her @blinfisherABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/BettyLinFisherABJ. To see her most recent stories and columns, go to www.tinyurl.com/bettylinfisher.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Parents can schedule COVID-19 vaccines for kids ages 5 to 11