Maldonado, who is working with Pfizer on the pediatric vaccine trials at Stanford, also said we should reframe our ideas about the effectiveness of the vaccine. “When we started the trials back in the dark days of spring and summer 2020, we were hoping to have a vaccine that was 50 percent effective,” she said. When the initial results of the vaccine trials reported that the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were over 90 percent effective, it was seen as something of a miracle. But it also heightened our expectations.Furthermore, Maldonado emphasized that the most important thing about the vaccines is that they’re safe. Many parents have asked me why kids 5-11 don’t just get the same dose as kids 12-17, or why children 2-4 can’t get approved for the same doses that 5-year-olds are currently receiving. Maldonado said that with bigger doses, there were more side effects in pilot trials, particularly high fevers.She’s part of the team working on a three-dose trial for children under 5. It looks as if a third dose may be in the future for children 5-11 as well, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado Denver. “We’ve recognized in adults this may be more of a three-dose series anyway, so it may be in the future the third dose is going to be the recommendation,” he said. Many of the common vaccines our children get at their yearly well visits require three or more doses. over a series of years. We just don’t think about it because it’s baked into the system, and most people having children now didn’t see those vaccines developed in real time, as our parents, or perhaps grandparents, did with polio.Parents of unvaccinated preschoolers may feel particularly anxious in this moment, as masks are coming off, but O’Leary said we’re not even where we were six months ago in terms of risks, because we have a fairly high level of overall population immunity from a combination of infections and a pretty high level of vaccination — as of this writing, 76 percent of the population has at least one dose. Additionally, in much of the country, case rates are lower than they’ve been in months. Of course, Covid still poses some risks to kids, but at this moment, “it’s also in line with a lot of the other risks we as parents deal with all the time and don’t even think about.”Besides, we can’t pretend that there’s no cost to mask wearing, Carroll said. For one, there’s an actual economic cost — high quality masks are expensive — and many children find them irritating or distracting. It’s too soon to say what the educational costs are, especially for younger children, but a study from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found, “On average, early educators spent 57 minutes per day introducing and reinforcing hygiene protocols with children,” which included mask wearing and hand washing. That’s almost a full hour a day of education that could have been spent doing something else.All that said, and even though it seems reasonable to drop mask mandates, we still have to be mindful of immunocompromised children, for whom a case of Covid, or any other respiratory virus like RSV, for that matter, is much more serious. Carroll put it this way: “I don’t want to mask forever, but I have no problem carrying a mask forever.” He added that if he were in an indoor meeting with someone who was immunocompromised, he would absolutely put on a mask for their comfort.O’Leary cautions against declaring premature victory, even as many of us are happily shedding our masks in many situations. The virus has been unpredictable, and we may need to mask again some day. “Enjoy things while they’re low,” and get your kids vaccinated when they’re able to be, O’Leary said.