March 25 (UPI) -- Pfizer and BioNTech announced Thursday the start of testing their COVID-19 vaccine on children.
The U.S.-based pharmaceutical corporation partnering with the German biotechnology company BioNTech made the announcement on Twitter.
"We together with @BioNTech-Group, are proud to announce the start of a global study to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of our #COVID19 vaccine in healthy children," Pfizer tweeted.
A link in the tweet to more details on the study from the Pfizer website showed that the study will enroll approximately 4,644 children ages 6 months to 11 years in the United States and Europe.
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The trial's first participants, a pair of twin girls, age 9, were administered the vaccine at Duke University in North Carolina on Wednesday, The New York Times reported.
According to the Pfizer website, results from the study will be available in the second half of 2021, and the company hopes to receive authorization for vaccination of younger kids by early 2022.
Dr. Emily Erbelding, a National Institutes of Health infectious diseases physician told The Times that "herd immunity may be hard to achieve without children being vaccinated," since an estimated 80% of the population need to be vaccinated for such immunity where the virus runs out of people to infect.
Fewer children than adults have been infected with the coronavirus, and most children who do become infected have mild or no symptoms, according to the CDC. But they can spread it to others, and some children can get severely ill, require hospitalization or ventilators, and in rare cases die from the virus.
More than 3 million children have been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began, and at least 268 children have died, according to an American Academy of Pediatrics report earlier this month.
"If you look at the number of pediatric deaths reported in the last year, it actually exceeds that for influenza in any influenza season that we generally see," Dr. Emmanuel Walter, chief medical officer of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, told ABC News regarding child mortality from the coronavirus.
Moderna announced last week new clinical trials for its COVID-19 vaccine on children.
