The 2024–2025 formulations of COVID-19 vaccines had an effectiveness rate of 76% at preventing emergency or urgent care visits in children aged 9 months through four years, according to a new report.
COVID-19 vaccines lowered the risk of emergency or urgent care visits associated with the disease by 76% in young children, as compared with those who were not immunized.
This finding comes from the CDC’s latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published Thursday. The agency looked at observational data from more than 44,500 children aged nine months through four years, of whom 1,292 were diagnosed with COVID-19 and the remaining 43,249 were not. Nearly 1,900 were given a 2024–2025 COVID-19 shot.
Results showed that from 7 to 179 days after vaccination, COVID-19 shots had a vaccine effectiveness rate of 76% in reducing disease-associated visits to emergency departments or urgent care, as compared with children who were unvaccinated. This figure grew slightly to 77% when expanding the window of analysis to 7 to 299 days post-vaccination.
The CDC also analyzed data from nearly 53,500 children and adolescents aged five through 17 years. In this group, 2,488 were immunized with the 2024–2025 formulation of the shot and 1,325 contracted COVID-19. Vaccine benefits appeared to be more muted in older children, with an efficacy rate of 56% in preventing emergency or urgent care visits versus those who weren’t given the shot.
Still, these findings suggest that the updated vaccines “provided protection against COVID-19–associated [emergency department/urgent care] visits among children and adolescents,” the CDC wrote in its report. The agency’s report did not look at safety.
The CDC’s weekly report comes as the FDA looks into alleged deaths attributed to COVID-19 vaccines. Late last month, Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, stated in an internal memo that at least 10 children have died “because of” the coronavirus vaccines, though he did not provide specific data to back this claim.
“For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children,” he wrote.
The deaths were first flagged by acting Center for Drug Evaluation and Research director Tracy Beth Høeg, a senior advisor at the FDA at the time, who dug into reports of side effects filed in the agency’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Safety concerns logged on VAERS are unverified and the FDA itself noted that reports on the system “generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.”
Høeg, who has a public history of anti-vaccine statements, was appointed as head of CDER earlier this month after Richard Pazdur—one of the FDA’s longest tenured leaders—retired just three weeks after taking the post.
