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In a White House COVID-19 Response Team press briefing today, government officials said that 900,000 children between the ages of 5 and 11 will have received their first COVID-19 vaccine dose by the end of the day.
The federal government authorized shots for that demographic last week.
Jeffrey Zients, counselor to the President, estimated that parents had made some 700,000 additional appointments at local pharmacies.
Jeff Zients at a COVID-19 briefing. Image courtesy of the White House.
At present, only the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and BioNTech (NSDQ:BNTX) is available to children 11 and younger.
Zients also observed that vaccinations of unvaccinated individuals had also accelerated recently. The pace is now averaging about 300,000 daily shots.
The federal government has pursued vaccine mandates to spur further vaccination, prompting 26 states to seek to block such policies.
Zients defended the strategy in the briefing. “The simple truth is that vaccination requirements are working,” he said, adding that policy helped lower the rate of unvaccinated Americans at least 12 years of age from 100 million in late July to less than 60 million.
More than 25 million Americans have received COVID-19 boosters to date.
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