The last couple of months have been difficult for American parents with young children.
The vaccine for the youngest children was scrapped 10 days later because of doubts about its effectiveness.
The vaccine was only weakly protective against infections with the Omicron variant among children aged 5 to 11 and it appeared to offer little defense against moderate Covid illness among adolescents aged 12 to 17.
On Monday, Florida's surgeon general declared that healthy children don't need to be immunized, advice that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, called deeply disturbing.
While the Omicron variant may be able to penetrate immune defenses and cause illness, the vaccines still prevent severe illness and death, and may do so for years.
The need for vaccines for children under the age of 5 was underscored by the record number of children hospitalized during the Omicron surge. The agency said that 90 percent of Americans can stop wearing masks in public indoor spaces, even in schools with young children.
Who could blame parents for not knowing what to do?
Anne Gonzalez is a 41-year-old mother of two who manages volunteers for a large religious nonprofit.
The coming weeks will bring some clarity. Pfizer and Moderna will report the results of their vaccine trials. If the results are positive, there will be a new round of regulatory review that may allow for tens of millions of vaccinations.
As the Omicron variant fades in the United States, it will be difficult for parents to decide whether to vaccine their children.
Less than one in four children are fully protected. Only a small percentage of adolescents have received a booster dose of the vaccine. In the United States, those percentages are even lower.
The balance of risk and benefit was never the same for children and adults. According to recent data from the C.D.C, as much as 95 percent of the country has some degree of protection from the virus because of vaccines or prior infections.
The most recent findings make it more difficult to convince some parents to immunize their children.
Luciana Borio is a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration.
She said that the best protection for children is to have had at least two shots before the fall or winter season.
Even with the Omicron variant, the vaccines are still preventing disease and death. James Campbell is a physician at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases.
Every single one of his sick children was unvaccinated, according to Dr. Campbell.
The studies suggest that the problem is not the vaccine but the dose.
In the trials in adults in 2020, vaccine manufacturers made best guesses at the right dose and opted for short intervals between the shots to protect people as quickly as possible during the initial surge.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were quickly authorized for use after they proved to be safe and powerfully protective in clinical trials. The trials in children were complicated by the arrival of the Delta and Omicron variant, and the vaccine appeared to be less protective in young children.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the only one authorized for children. The vaccines made by Moderna and Johnson are only for adults.
The same dose was given to adolescents in the Pfizer trials. Children aged 5 to 11 received 10 micrograms, and those 6 months to 5 years old received just three.
The doses may not have roused an adequate response. According to The New York Times, federal officials who have seen the data told them that higher doses produced too many infections in children.
When you can't give a high enough dose to protect children against the Omicron variant, what should you do? The problem that scientists and federal officials are wrestling with is that.
Pfizer and BioNTech are testing a third dose in children under the age of 12 to see if it can deliver the level of protection that two doses could not. The Moderna vaccine is still being evaluated by the F.D.A. The agency rejected the application for authorization of the vaccine.
There are other Covid vaccines that may work well in children. Federal health officials should consider all of these options and test if a longer interval between doses would improve the immune response.
The importance of protecting that population makes it seem that vaccines for children are taking longer than they should.
The Omicron surge and disappointing findings have complicated policy decisions for local health officials.
The District of Columbia set a March 1 deadline for students to be fully vaccined, and Louisiana and California will require school children to be immunized by fall of 2022, in response to Florida's recommendations.
If the F.D.A. grants the vaccine full approval, other states will likely follow suit.
For a lot of them, that's going to be important for requiring vaccines as a mandate.
Many families with children who have medical vulnerabilities would be reassured by a school vaccine mandate.
Heather Keever's family has a lot of diseases, including high blood pressure and heart disease. Ms. Keever, a consultant in suburban Chicago, said that they were not qualified for accommodations at work or school because they were not technically immunocompromised.
She said that some of us can take the mask off until the rates fall much further. I still do.
Some scientists said they would wear masks until the numbers dropped because of the risk of infections.
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who studies long Covid, said that he would be hesitant to ask a child below 5 to remove masks indoors because they have not yet been vaccined.
Families are coming to very different conclusions because of the conflicting results on the effectiveness of vaccines and the benefits of masks.
A management consultant in Delaware has two daughters who split their time with her and their father.
The vaccine protects against severe illness, but if your kids are still getting infections, this is a huge disruption to family lives. I'm most likely going to remain masked for the foreseeable future.
She has been ready to give up masks for a long time. She said she was okay with if her children were able to see faces.
I'm not convinced that wearing a mask would reduce the risk of getting Covid, especially not the type of masks I see most kids wearing.
Many parents are unsure of what to do. Ms. Gonzalez wears masks to protect her niece and nephew who have congenital heart defects and lung capacity issues.
We don't know what we're going to do if the mask requirement is dropped.
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