COVID-19 vaccine for kids age 6 months and older

The COVID-19 virus is a coronavirus that spreads easily among people. A COVID-19 vaccine can prevent your child from getting COVID-19 and spreading it at home and in school. If your child gets COVID-19, a COVID-19 vaccine could prevent severe illness. While children are less likely to become severely ill with COVID-19, some children need to be hospitalized, treated in the intensive care unit or placed on a ventilator to help them breathe. Rarely, children who get COVID-19 develop a serious condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Children can also experience long-term health effects due to COVID-19.

Vaccines teach the immune system to recognize the COVID-19 virus in different ways. Two COVID-19 vaccines contain genetic instructions for a piece of the virus that causes COVID-19. Those instructions, called messenger RNA, use your cell's machinery to make proteins the virus would use to infect a cell. After the vaccine injection, your cells follow these instructions and make the viral proteins. When your immune system locks onto those proteins, it forms a memory that helps prevent serious illness when the complete virus makes it into the body. These vaccines are known by their manufacturers: Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Another type of COVID-19 vaccine does not send instructions to the cells. It has the actual protein pieces of the COVID-19 virus. The immune system responds directly to those proteins and forms a memory to fend off infection in the future. That vaccine is made by Novavax and is authorized for children age 12 and older.

This vaccine shouldn't be given to a child who has:

• Had a severe allergic reaction after a previous dose of this vaccine
• Had a severe allergic reaction to any of this vaccine's ingredients