F.D.A. advisers recommend that the agency authorize Moderna’s and Pfizer’s long-awaited Covid vaccines for young children.

The FDA's outside advisers voted unanimously on Wednesday to recommend that the agency authorize the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech coronaviruses vaccines for young children.

Pfizer has a three-dose vaccine and Moderna has a two-dose vaccine. Millions of doses have been ordered by the states. The administration of doses could start on Tuesday depending on what regulators do.

According to the F.D.A., each vaccine met the criteria for safety and effectiveness in the age group.

The lack of a vaccine for children younger than 5 in the United States has dismayed many parents. The F.D.A. and the CDC are expected to act on the recommendations this week.

Both Moderna's and Pfizer's vaccines were recommended to be authorized by the panel of advisors. The death rate from Covid and young children may not be very high. He said it was terrifying to have your child hospitalized.

He said that we owe it to the parents to give them the choice to get the vaccine.

The vaccines that the committee considered on Wednesday seem to be less effective than the adult vaccines. According to the F.D.A., Omicron is better at evading the vaccines than the original version.

Regulators said children who would get Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines would most likely need a booster. Moderna's vaccine could be three doses, while Pfizer's could be four.

Children who received Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna's vaccines had similar levels of neutralizing, or virus- blocking, antibodies to those in teens and young adults. Since last year, Pfizer's vaccine has been approved for children under the age of 15.

Pfizer's vaccine was only effective after two doses in preventing infections in young children. Pfizer said the vaccine was 80 percent effective after a third dose, but only 10 cases were included in the study. The tiny number of cases on which the efficacy finding was based was a subject of concern for committee members and regulators on Wednesday.

Pfizer's data was called preliminary by a senior federal vaccine Regulator. He said that they considered it to be potentially unstable. Further data is needed on the vaccine's efficacy after dose three.

Moderna found that the vaccine was effective in preventing infections in children from 6 months to 2 years old and 2 to 5 years old. The results seem to be in line with studies of adults during the Omicron era. Strong protection against diseases that lead to hospitalization and death is still offered by immunization.

The regulators and company officials talked about the side effects of vaccines. Irritated and crying, fatigue, and loss of appetite were some of the things that children in clinical trials were able to tolerate.

In younger age groups, the symptoms of a fever can be more disabling and require more urgent medical attention. The first two shots are given three weeks apart, with the third coming at least eight weeks after the first. The adult dose of Moderna used a quarter of the strength.

There are some difficult questions that still need to be answered. The vaccine has not been tested against subvariants. When the Omicron variant prevailed, the clinical trials were mostly done. Within a month, two subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5.

The need to protect these children from Covid is great according to Dr. Peter Marks. Hundreds of children have died of Covid, a rate he said is comparable to the deaths of children during the swine flu epidemic of 2009.

There is a possibility that this could be the case.