We've spent a lot of time talking about the pandemic, we've spent time talking about matters of our mental and physical health and spiritual health. Certainly, we've spent a lot of time talking about concerns during the global pandemic and Covid-19.

The Biden administration has been telling states, it's time to start planning for kids under 12 to be vaccinated. We're waiting for the approval of that Pfizer vaccine for kids under 12. So I thought it'd be a good time to bring in an expert. Jill Foster is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and a pediatric infectious diseases physician with M Health Fairview.

Every Wednesday morning at 8:30 CST, Jill Riley connects with experts and local personalities for some real talk about keeping our minds and bodies healthy — from staying safe in the music scene, to exercising during a pandemic, to voting and civic engagement. Looking for more resources and support? Visit our friends at Call to Mind, MPR's initiative to foster new conversations about mental health. Subscribe to Wellness Wednesday as a podcast on Spotify, Apple, RSS, Radio Public, Stitcher, or Amazon Music.

Jill Riley: When will the Pfizer vaccine be approved for kids under kids under 12? What's the rollout going to look like? I think a lot of parents are just waiting for the time that their unvaccinated kid can get the Covid-19 vaccine. What are some of the concerns that that you've heard from parents during this time?

Jill Foster: The biggest concern I'm hearing from parents is that they're really still viewing this as an experimental vaccine, rather than something that has been now used on millions and millions of people. I think that that's a reasonable confusion. At this point, I think we're very comfortable that the vaccine works, but there's still a lot of little details that we kind of need to work out, and I think that that gives people some uneasiness.

There are a number of vaccines that children receive. My son is five years old. Plenty of them have gone into...what, we're still doing legs at this point. So we haven't quite moved to the arm yet. How does this compare with the rollout of other vaccines? I think of something like the vaccine for chicken pox. When I was a kid, there was no vaccine for chicken pox. For my son, yes, there is. Vaccines have been rolling out for for many years to protect people against infectious diseases. Why is this time it's so different? Is it just this fear of it feeling experimental? Is it misinformation? What do you think is the real burning point here?

It's funny that you brought up the chicken pox vaccine because I was just starting my career when it came out, and there was a lot of resistance to it. There were a lot of people [who would have] chicken pox parties — feeling that it was almost like a rite of passage of childhood. As a physician, I saw the children that were getting really severe chicken pox. You know, immunocompromised kids are just kids without any other problem. So we saw how serious [it can] get — but, you know, the average person didn't know someone who died from chicken pox.

Multiple studies have shown that people are much more likely to view the vaccine is a necessity when they know somebody who had severe Covid or who has died of Covid. There's a lot of people out there saying [that] kids don't get severe Covid — which is not true.

What are some of the risks for for children under 12, that haven't been vaccinated? Because it does seem that some kids get a case of the sniffles. Some kids have no symptoms, but there are there are serious cases.

The other problem with Covid is that just when we think we've got it all figured out, then we realize we don't really know anything. We all got to a place where, "Okay, I can do this again," where my math is what I can get away with, and then well, no, no, I can't anymore. Not because somebody changed the rules, but because things changed.

Covid in the beginning, yes, there were kids getting seriously ill, but it was a small number. And it was kind of an unusual circumstance. That all changed with Delta. We're seeing children with the same severity of illness as adults have had with it. Not in as many numbers, but we have a number of children hospitalized right now with Covid.

Like I mentioned, we're in this waiting period for the approval of the Pfizer vaccine for kids under 12. I don't know a lot about the process. It probably feels experimental, because it seems like it's taking a long time to get approved for kids. Maybe that's something that makes parents a little bit nervous, but everything has to go through a process. What is that process?

So, the process. A couple of things. One is: we always do things in adults first, assuming that it's an illness that affects adults. Also the adults were the ones in the beginning [who] were getting most seriously ill. So everything was done [for] adults; we feel really comfortable with adults right now. And then kids might need a different dose. And indeed, children will be getting a lower dose [than] adults get, the majority of kids. You also want to see if there's some some weird, unexpected things that pop up in kids that you didn't see in adults. You want to be really careful about it.

So we've been doing trials. You know, it's a race. You want to get the vaccine in kids' arms, certainly. But at the same time, you want to make sure that you're crossing your Ts and dotting your Is. So far, we're pretty confident that nothing is popping up, that's surprising us.

Yeah, you hear about some people who had some side effects after getting their vaccine — you know, not feeling well, maybe for 24 hours — and some people got their shot, and they're feeling perfectly fine the next day, so it's almost hard to know who's going to be affected and who's going to have any sort of reaction? What do we expect, for kids to experience some kind of side effects from from the vaccine?

So far, nothing is showing up. One of the things that did show up in the adolescents was myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart, and that's caused people a lot of concern. It's only been a very, very few cases, and it's fewer cases than would [have] if you just allowed children to get Covid because that's also one of the side effects of getting Covid.

But it's hard because, you know, there's the, "I'll take my chances with a virus, maybe I'm only gonna, you know, one in a million chance of getting the virus," versus, "I'm going to go do something that might cause harm." And, you know, that psychologically is hard to get by. We heard a lot from teenage boys who were like, "I'm not gonna do that. That's gonna hurt my heart," because it was predominantly teenage boys that got [myocarditis], because they weren't seeing the numbers. They weren't seeing that they actually had a much bigger chance of getting it from Covid than they did from the actual shot.

What are some of the other questions? I've I've read that parents are concerned that their kids could be infertile at a future time.

That was something that was put out there...you know, there's so much stuff that's out there in the internet that just spreads like wildfire. So there was one person who kind of came up with something theoretical that might cross-react. It was like a whole chain of four or five "mights" that was maybe a little bit similar to something that might cause a problem. And then that took off like crazy.

One thing we do know is that being pregnant and getting Covid is very bad for the mother and the infant. And it's so much worse than any possibility of something that might maybe happen [from taking the vaccine]. But you know, there's also lots of mechanisms in place to look for these [unintended side effects] long term.

I'm not going to say absolutely not, there might be some long term problems, but there's really close monitoring of people and multiple places that people can report when they have something that comes up that seems a little weird. That was how we found out about the myocarditis: people reporting in and saying, hey, I'm all of a sudden seeing myocarditis when I wasn't seeing it last year.

Yeah, and that's a word that I didn't even know before.

You know, before, we didn't have Facebook and other social media, and if you had a rumor, and you had somebody that had kind of a crackpot theory and something, it didn't spread. I mean, you know, it's scary to think about your kid's future fertility. And so you see something like that, and then you, you send it to one friend like, "What do you think about this?" And pretty soon, you've got a million people who read that article.

To tell you the truth, I didn't even know that there was any pushback against a chicken pox vaccination back in the day. My dad would tell me about the measles parties. My dad's of the generation that got the polio vaccine, and he told me, there were just some times where you had a kid in your school, and then that kid did not come back. You know, I think my dad's generation seeing that firsthand. You know he was wanting to be first in line to get the vaccination.

Oh, yeah, I remember going to the firehouse and getting the sugar cube with the polio vaccine. We're kind of victims of our own success. We have been so good at eradicating so many...you know, who knows anybody who got diphtheria or even tetanus? You go to places where there is not vaccination or different health conditions, and you see those illnesses, because the children are too poor to be immunized. There's not mechanisms to do mass vaccination campaigns, and I don't think people realize how lucky we are sure.

So that Pfizer vaccine: when do we expect that that would be approved? I mean, are we talking about within the next few weeks, the next month, Christmas holidays?

The timeline is, is it's really expected that the two important meetings — the meetings by the FDA, and then the CDC meeting that follows — are going to happen in the first two weeks of November. That's why the government is saying, "Get ready," because it's one of these things that people need to have the supply in, they need to expand their hours, because we want to try to get as many kids immunized, especially before the Thanksgiving holiday, as possible. Depending on the timeline, we might even be able to get the second dose — but even with the first dose, we're going to be able to protect children a little better as we move into Thanksgiving. I think that by Christmas, we should be able to have all those five to 11-year-olds with some good immunity.

Wellness Wednesday is hosted by Jill Riley, and produced by Christy Taylor and Jay Gabler. Our theme music is a portion of the song "F.B. One Number 2" by Christian Bjoerklund under the Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 International License. This week's photo is by Kmoridani (CC BY-NC 2.0). The image was altered: it was cropped, filtered to greyscale, and supplemented with a logo.