Infographic – U.S. Kids Vaccine Status Matches Parents

Click on image for full-size view (YouGov)

29 May 2021. If you want to discover the Covid-19 vaccination status or plans of children in the U.S., check if their parents are vaccinated. Those are the findings of a new survey conducted by the polling company YouGov for the Economist newspaper and reported yesterday.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration extended its emergency clearance for the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to children as young as 12 years old, with parental consent, based on encouraging safety and efficacy data from clinical trials with children age 12 to 15.  And vaccine developer Moderna reported this week similar efficacy and safety results for its Covid-19 vaccine from a clinical trial of children and adolescents age 12 to 18. Moderna plans to submit its emergency authorization request for vaccinating this age group as early as next week.

Findings from the YouGov poll show the likelihood of children in the U.S. getting a Covid-19 vaccine depends largely on their parents’ vaccination status or plans. Among parents overall, about two-thirds (65%) say they already got their children vaccinated or plan to do so, while the remainder (35%) definitely plan not to vaccinate their children or are unsure. Among parents who already got or plan to get the vaccine, some eight in 10 (81%) say they plan to do the same for their children. However, nine in 10 parents not planning to get the vaccine or are unsure (90%) say they will not get their children vaccinated or don’t know.

Today’s New York Times indicates many adolescents in the U.S. eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine aren’t wasting any time getting their shots. In the two-and-a-half weeks since FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for this age group, some 2.5 million adolescents received their first of two shots, making up about a quarter of all vaccinations. This new surge is causing the overall daily vaccination rate to begin ticking up again in the U.S., after declining since early April.

YouGov conducted the online poll among 1,500 adults in the U.S. from 22 to 25 May. Participants were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel, which the company says is representative of the U.S. population, and weighted by U.S. Census demographic data, participation in the 2020 presidential election, and voter registration. The findings have a confidence interval, sometimes called margin-of-error, of about 2.9 percent for the overall sample.

More from Science & Enterprise:

• Infographic – Covid-19 Vaccine Acceptance Gains Worldwide
• Infographic – Half of US Public Still Not Taking Vaccine
• Infographic – U.S. Covid-19 Shots on the Rise

Disclosure: The author owns shares in Pfizer.

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