COVID-19 vaccines for children are headed to local pharmacies, and some will start vaccinating children locally as early as Saturday.
Walgreens will begin Saturday administering COVID-19 vaccines to children ages 5 to 11.
The pharmacy made the announcement Wednesday morning following the guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday night.
Ahead of the first vaccine shipments scheduled to arrive at select pharmacies later this week, parents or legal guardians can already schedule appointments, Walgreens said. Appointments will be available beginning Saturday and can be made at Walgreens.com/ScheduleVaccine, through the Walgreens app or by calling (800) Walgreens. More appointments will be available in the coming weeks as Walgreens receives additional vaccines.
Walgreens has pharmacies in at least nine cities in the Rio Grande Valley.
“The recommendation of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for this age group comes as children are at least as likely to be infected with COVID-19 as adults are and at risk of severe illness. As many families prepare to travel and gather for the holidays, and COVID-19 variants continue to emerge, individuals including children are at high risk to contract and spread COVID-19 and experience more severe symptoms,” Walgreens stated in a media release.
CVS Pharmacy announced that select pharmacies will begin administering Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines to children starting on Sunday.
Because the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the only FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine for children in this age group, patients are strongly encouraged to schedule an appointment online at CVS.com or through the CVS App to ensure availability, CVS said in a media release. The scheduling tool will only display appointments at CVS Pharmacy locations that have the Pfizer-BioNTech pediatric vaccine once the patient’s age is provided.
CVS Pharmacy locations that will be administering the vaccine to children ages five to 11 years were selected because these locations have vaccinators on site who are solely focused on administering vaccines.
Meanwhile, the Texas Department of State Health Services has instructed the CDC to ship Pfizer’s pediatric COVID-19 vaccine to over 900 providers in 155 Texas counties over the next week. The CDC will deliver 1,010,700 doses of the vaccine to Texas vaccine providers and 349,200 doses will be delivered to pharmacies in the federal pharmacy program to vaccinate children between the ages of 5 and 11, the state agency said in a media release.
More than 400,000 doses of vaccine have already arrived with 162,000 expected to arrive Wednesday, and delivery of the full amount will continue through the next week.
