December 27, 2022
2 min read
December 27, 2022
2 min read
As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its 4th year, its effect on children continues to be widely studied.
We compiled a list of pediatric COVID-19 stories reported over the course of the past year.

The AAP reiterated its support for pediatric COVID-19 vaccination after Florida’s surgeon general said that the state would recommend against it. Read more.
A study in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health found that the risk of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, became “substantially lower” following a COVID-19 vaccination. Read more.
Around 18 months after the first adults began receiving COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, the FDA authorized and the CDC-recommended vaccines for children as young as age 6 months. Read more.
In August, the CDC recommended Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in adolescents aged 12 to 17 years, the first non-messenger RNA vaccine recommended for the age group in the U.S. Read more.
Researchers estimated that 10.5 million children globally have lost a caregiver to COVID-19, including 7.5 million who were orphaned after losing a parent or primary caregiver. Co-authors H. Juliette T. Unwin, PhD, a research fellow at Imperial College London and Joël-Pascal Ntwali N’konzi, MSc, a mathematician at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kigali, Rwanda, discussed the data. Read more.
Moderna applied for and received authorizations on its request for a 50 µg dose for adolescents aged 12 to 17 years, and another emergency use authorization request on a 25 µg dose for children aged 6 to 11 years. Pfizer’s booster, which is already recommended for children aged 12 years and older, was authorized for children aged 5 to 11 years. Its adapted vaccine targets the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants but in a 10 µg dose — one-third the size of the vaccine recommended for the older age group. Read more.
Boston-area school districts that lifted mask mandates earlier this year experienced nearly 45 more cases of COVID-19 per 1,000 students and staff than school districts that kept their mandates in place, a study found. Read more.
The FDA expanded its emergency use authorization of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s omicron-targeting bivalent COVID-19 boosters to include children aged as young as 6 months in the United States. Read more.
The CDC and Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists published a revised case definition of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, a potentially serious complication of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Read more.
The incidence of myopericarditis among adolescents and young adults who received messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines is very low, according to a systemic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics. Read more.