Don’t Wait to Get Your Kid Vaccinated
Karen Ocwieja delivered her twin sons last June, just weeks before Delta broke across the American Northeast. For months, she and her husband sheltered the boys, who’d been born premature, limiting their exposures to friends, family, and other kids, hoping to guard them from COVID’s worst. But all four of them still ended up catching the virus this January—the boys’ first bona fide illness. Then, in May, the twins tested positive again. Born with Ocwieja’s antibodies from pregnancy and now churning out their own, they likely will never know a world without COVID.
Still, Ocwieja, a virologist and pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, hopes that the next time her kids encounter the bug, they’ll be far better prepared. The FDA is slated to finally authorize two vaccines for kids under 5 later this month, a milestone she has been waiting for ever since she got her first COVID shots, while carrying her sons. “It’s not going to be a free ticket to no more COVID,” she told me. But it will bring the twins one step closer to a life with fewer quarantines, more family gatherings, more playdates, more travel, and far more protection from the virus—all part of “the childhood we really want them to have.”
Ocwieja knows that her excitement puts her in a minority. An conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that less than a fifth of parents of kids under 5 are eager to vaccinate them right
