The United States urges all people 12 years and older to get COVID-19 boosters immediately when eligible to help fight the highly contagious omicron mutant that is raging in the country.

All Americans 16 and older have been encouraged to take boosters, but on Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved additional injections of Pfizer injections for teenagers between 12 and 15 years old (12 to 15 years old) and strengthened Recommendation 16 Vaccinations for young and 17-year-old adolescents, too.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement Wednesday evening: “It is vital to protect our children and young people from COVID-19 infection and the complications of serious illness.”

“This booster dose will provide optimized protection against COVID-19 and Omicron variants. I encourage all parents to keep their children informed of CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendations,” she said.

Vaccines can still provide strong protection against serious diseases from any type of COVID-19 (including omicron)-experts say this is their most important benefit. But the latest mutants can bypass the protective layer of the vaccine and cause a lighter infection. Studies have shown that booster doses can at least temporarily raise antiviral antibodies to the level that is most likely to avoid symptomatic infections, even from omicron.

Earlier Wednesday, independent scientific advisers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were arguing whether they should choose boosters for young teenagers, who are often not as sick as adults due to COVID-19, or recommend it more strongly.

Dr. Sarah Long, a consultant at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at Drexel University, warns that providing youths with temporary infection prevention boosters is like playing a mole game. But she said the extra injections are worthwhile to help fight off the omicron mutant and protect children from missed schools and other problems that even very mild COVID-19 cases can bring.

More importantly, if a mildly infected child spreads it to more vulnerable parents or grandparents and then they die, the impact is “absolutely devastating,” said Dr. Camille Cotton, a team member at Massachusetts General Hospital .

“Let’s solve this problem,” agreed Dr. Jamie Loehr of Cayuga Family Medicine in Ithaca, New York.

The vaccine produced by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech is the only choice for children of any age in the United States. The CDC says that approximately 13.5 million children between the ages of 12 and 17 – slightly more than half of this age group – have received two Pfizer injections. Boosters were opened to 16- and 17-year-olds last month.

Wednesday’s decision means that approximately 5 million young teenagers who received their last injection in the spring are eligible for immediate boosters. The new US guidelines state that anyone who has received two Pfizer vaccinations and is eligible for the booster vaccine can get the vaccine five months after the last injection, instead of the six months previously recommended.

However, a committee member, Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot of Vanderbilt University, is concerned that such strong recommendations for youth boosters will distract attention from children who are not vaccinated at all. force.

The consultants saw that US data clearly showed that the rate of symptomatic COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations among unvaccinated adolescents was 7 to 11 times that of vaccinated adolescents.

Although it is true that children suffer from COVID-19 less disease than adults, in the omicron wave, the rate of hospitalization of children is rising-most of them are not vaccinated.

In the public comment section of the Wednesday meeting, Dr. Julie Boom of Texas Children’s Hospital stated that the strengthening recommendations for young teenagers “have not come fast enough.”

The main safety issue for teenagers is a rare side effect called myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart, which is mainly seen in young men and teenage boys vaccinated by Pfizer or Moderna. The vast majority of cases are mild – far less than the heart inflammation that COVID-19 may cause – and they seem to peak in older teenagers aged 16 and 17.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that the booster dose is as safe for younger adolescents as older adolescents based on data from 6,300 Israeli children between the ages of 12 and 15 who received Pfizer boosters five months after the second injection. Israeli officials said on Wednesday that after giving more than 40,000 boosters, they saw two cases of mild myocarditis in this age group.

Earlier this week, Dr. Peter Marks, the head of FDA vaccines, stated that 10,000 men and boys between the ages of 16 and 30 will experience this side effect after the second injection. But he said the risk of the third dose appeared to be reduced by about a third, possibly because the time before the booster was longer than the time between the first two injections.