COVID-19 vaccine
COVID-19 vaccineReuters

The FDA is expected to take an important step forward against COVID-19 this week, lowering the minimum age for vaccination to twelve years. Should this change be approved, all high school students, and even some still in middle school, could be safely inoculated.

More than 104 million Americans have already been vaccinated against COVID-19; although it is a promising start, the vaccination campaign is slowing. Many hope that expanding eligibility will cause vaccination clinics to fill up again; some locales have even begun to offer incentives for vaccination.

Health authorities stress that even though a vaccinated individual will not become ill, they can still transmit the virus, and so proper masking and sanitization remain of paramount importance.

With fewer takers in the United States and air travel on the rise, plans are underway to shift excess vaccines to less affluent countries. The first priority for both the United States and the world vaccination trendsetter Israel is India, where hundreds of thousands of new cases are recorded daily and deaths happen so fast that ambulances barely have time to unload one deceased before picking up another. The United States is planning to impose a travel ban on India until the situation improves, but nevertheless intends to send significant supplies of vaccines to help bring it under control.