UPDATE: Vaccine is now available.
TRANSCRIPT: Denver Public Schools and Denver Health are pleased to announce that the Pfizer COVID vaccine will be widely available soon for children ages 5 to 11. The COVID-19 vaccine has not been approved by the CDC for children ages 5 to 11, and it will be available starting Monday, November 8th in our Denver Health School-Based Health Centers as part of the routine care they offer. Denver Health School-Based Health Centers will be holding vaccination clinics for eligible children (ages 5 to 11) beginning Monday, November 15th at various DPS campuses. To learn more about these clinics and to make an appointment, call 303-602-8958... or visit denverhealth.org.
Hi everybody, it's Dr. Federico again. Super excited this week to hear the good news that the CDC has approved the COVID vaccine for our kids 5 to 11 years old. So now they can join their fellow DPS students - the teenagers - who have done such a great job of getting vaccinated. So hopefully parents, students, we'll all take advantage of this opportunity starting this weekend to get our COVID vaccine - making our schools even safer.
Some parents have expressed the desire to get vaccinated all together. Now we have that opportunity. And now if your child is 5 to 11 years old, and / or you have teenagers, we all can get protected at the same time. So if you've been vaccinated, I encourage you to bring your 5 to 11 year olds to also get vaccinated. If you haven't been vaccinated, I encourage you to come in as a family and get vaccinated, and work together with all of us to continue to decrease the transmission of COVID, make our schools and our community safer, and to turn another page from this difficult pandemic.
Why is it important for children to get vaccinated?
Kids need to get vaccinated for a couple of reasons. It is true that kids get hospitalized or die much less frequently than adults. However, kids do get COVID, they do get hospitalized. In fact, over 8-thousand kids have been hospitalized due to COVID across the United States in this age group. In order to prevent kids from getting COVID, or getting a rare severe impact from COVID, it's super important to vaccinate them. Furthermore, we know that kids can transmit COVID. They can transmit it to their parents, to family members, to their teachers, to each other. So it's important to get kids vaccinated. It's a decreased number of cases in our community, but also to decrease the amount of transmission. Now another question I get is, is it safe? That's what the FDA and the CDC said this week. It is, in fact, safe, after the initial study was released. Over 3-thousand kids were vaccinated in this age group. And in fact, across the United States, we've given 7-million doses of the COVID vaccine to teenagers. So I'm very confident in the safety of this vaccine being administered to our kids at this moment in time. I think it's going to make a big difference in decreasing COVID, and increasing our ability to have in-person learning.
My child already had COVID. I already had COVID. Do we still need to get vaccinated?
Yeah - a question that has commonly come up in our clinic is: "Doc, I already had COVID. Do I still need to get vaccinated? And the answer is, yes. You should wait 90 days after your infection. But after those 90 days have passed, you should get vaccinated. And recent studies show that getting vaccinated is more protective than having had the infection. So you're at more risk of getting COVID again if you're not vaccinated and you're simply relying on your immunity from the infection. So I would encourage everybody to get vaccinated, including those who have already had the infection, after 90 days.
To learn more about COVID vaccine clinics through Denver Health School-Based Health Centers and to make an appointment, call 303-602-8958, or visit Denverhealth.org