Technologies

When will kids under 5 be eligible for the COVID vaccine?

Vaccines for youngest children are close to approval. What vaccines are available and when will they be ready?

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites.

The Food and Drug Administration will meet next week to decide whether or not to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for children age 6 months to 4 years, but government planning for the pediatric vaccine rollout is already underway.

At a Wednesday briefing, Jeff Zients, coordinator for the White House COVID-19 Response Team said, «We’ve secured enough vaccine supply for all kids in this age group — all 18 million. We have enough needles, syringes, and kits. And these are all specially formulated, are made for this age group to send alongside the vaccine.»

Updated Sunday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s «Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccination Operational Planning Guide» indicates that the agency has 10 million vaccine doses ready for dispersal, and that state and local health officials could start receiving doses as early as Feb. 21.

Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech submitted data to the FDA for authorization of their COVID-19 vaccine for children 6 months through 4 years old. While the vaccine for children under 5 is expected to be a three-dose vaccine series (it’s one-tenth the volume of Pfizer’s vaccine for people 12 and up), the FDA asked the companies to submit data on the first two doses as part of a «rolling submission» process.

In December, Pfizer announced that while two doses of the vaccine were effective in children ages 6 months to 2 years, two shots failed to promote a strong enough immune response in children ages 2 through 4 years. This prompted the company to start testing a three-dose version of the vaccine for children under 5.

Kids as young as 5 have been able to be vaccinated against COVID-19 since October 2021. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 28.1% of kids 5-11 have received at least one vaccine shot as of Jan. 18. Read on to learn everything you need to know about COVID-19 vaccines for kids under 5.

Also, learn about whether we’ll need a fourth booster shot, the latest on long COVID and the possibility of a vaccine that works against all COVID-19 variants.

When can babies and children under 5 get the vaccine?

Now that Pfizer has submitted data to the FDA, a meeting of experts that gathers to discuss safety and effectiveness data and vote on whether or not the FDA should authorize a vaccine is scheduled for Feb. 15. (The meeting is open to the public and you can tune in here or on the agency’s YouTube channel.)

If the FDA does authorize Pfizer’s vaccine for children as young as 6 months old, the CDC typically goes through the same process: An outside panel of health experts will discuss the benefits and risks of recommending the vaccine to children under 5 years old. If they vote to recommend Pfizer’s vaccine for the younger age group, the CDC’s director will likely accept the panel’s decision and the small doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for kids will become available in pediatricians’ offices or other clinics.

The CDC is expected to move quickly, assuming the FDA does authorize the first two doses of the anticipated three-dose vaccine series. If research finds a third dose is necessary for children under 5, it will be authorized and available after children have already started the vaccine series.

How is Pfizer’s child vaccine for babies and young kids different?

Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine for children 6 months through 4 years comes in two doses that are one-tenth the volume of the vaccine for people age 12 and up. A third 3-microgram dose is being researched right now and may be authorized in the near future.

The vaccine for kids 5 to 11 is one-third the dose given to everyone 12 and up, and it’s delivered in two doses. Pfizer’s vaccine for kids can also be stored for up to 10 weeks in a fridge, making it easier to administer, and the cap on the vial is orange instead of purple and gray to avoid mix-ups.

And if it helps to put your kids at ease, the needle used to administer the child’s dose of vaccine is also smaller.

For more information about Pfizer’s vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, check out this fact sheet from the FDA.

Can my child get a COVID booster?

Children as young as 12 can now get a booster dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, given at least five months after their primary vaccination series.

Most kids younger than 12 can’t get a booster, although the CDC recommends a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine for children 5 and up who are immunocompromised. They’re eligible for a third shot 28 days after their second dose.

Where can my kid get a booster shot?

Since Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is the lone vaccine approved for people under 18, it’s generally only available in doctor’s offices and public health clinics, not pharmacies and other mass vaccination sites.

Call your pediatrician or local health clinic for a recommendation on where to go. Parents may also text their ZIP code to 438829 or use this vaccine finder link to find a clinic near them that has the child vaccine available.

Do kids really need a COVID-19 vaccine?

According to a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, children made up 25% of reported COVID-19 cases for the week ending Feb. 3. (The AAP says the definition of «child» varies by the states reporting.) While pediatric cases were lower than in January, child COVID-19 were «double the peak level of the delta surge in 2021,» the AAP reported.

While it’s true children are much less likely to get severely sick from the virus than adults, some children have died or been hospitalized with the virus. An infection, even a mild case, requires quarantining and potentially sending classmates out of the classroom and back to remote learning. And kids can experience dangerous complications from COVID-19, including long COVID and MIS-C.

There are also racial disparities in the severity of how sick children get from COVID-19: Kids ages 5 to 11 who are Black, Native American or Hispanic are three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white children, according to an FDA advisory panel presentation. Of that group, about 1 in 3 will require admission to an intensive care unit.

Are booster shots safe for children?

In a statement following its authorization of booster doses for kids 12 to 15, the FDA said it reviewed real-world data from more than 6,300 children in Israel, ages 12 to 15, who received a booster shot at least five months after their second dose of Pfizer.

No additional safety concerns were reported to date in those individuals, according to the FDA.

«These additional data enabled the FDA to reassess the benefits and risks of the use of a booster in the younger adolescent population in the setting of the current surge in COVID-19 cases,» the agency said. «The data shows there are no new safety concerns following a booster in this population.»

What are the side effects? Is the COVID vaccine safe for kids?

Vaccine side effects in kids ages 5 to 11 are mostly mild and similar to those adults may experience, according to the CDC, including soreness at the injection site, fever, muscle soreness, nausea and fatigue. In a Dec. 13 report from the agency, the CDC reviewed reports from safety monitoring systems on more than 8 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine given to kids ages 5 to 11, confirming that children’s immune systems respond well to the vaccine with common mild side effects, and that serious adverse events are rarely reported.

Inflammation of the heart muscle, known as myocarditis, and of the muscle’s outer lining, called pericarditis, are rare and typically mild side effects linked to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, mostly in adolescent males and young men ages 12 to 29. (Myocarditis can also occur after infection with COVID-19.)

In one study, the CDC said that 54 recipients out of a million males ages 12 to 17 experienced myocarditis following the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine. In contrast, kids ages 5 to 11 who catch COVID-19 have a higher risk of multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, a potentially serious complication involving inflammation of the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes or other organs.

«The bottom line is that getting COVID is much riskier to the heart than anything in this vaccine, no matter what age or sex you are,» Dr. Matthew Oster, a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, told the CDC in November as reported by ABC News.

Do I need to give consent for my young child to get vaccinated?

Yes, parents generally need to consent to their children receiving medical care, including Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. This is especially true for younger children.

However, depending on which state you live in, there may be a legal precedent for teens and other kids to request the vaccine without parental permission: Tennessee’s vaccine director, Michelle Fiscus, was fired in August allegedly in part for sending out a memo detailing Tennessee’s «mature minor doctrine,» which explains how minors may seek medical care without the consent of their parents.

If my child has a serious health condition, can they get a third shot?

The CDC recommended a third dose for children as young as 5 who are «moderately to severely» immunocompromised, 28 days after their second shot. This guidance for immunocompromised children (including kids who’ve had an organ transplant or are taking medications that suppress the immune system) is in line with guidance for adults whose bodies don’t mount a good immune response to the COVID-19 vaccines.

My child has allergies. Can they get the vaccine?

Yes, though you might be asked to stick around the waiting room so health care providers can monitor them for (extremely rare) allergic reactions that can occur after any vaccination.

«If the child has a history of anaphylaxis or other severe allergies, then the observation time after the injection may be 30 minutes instead of 15,» said Dr. Anne Liu, an infectious disease specialist with Stanford Hospital and Clinics and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Children who have been prescribed an EpiPen for any reason should bring it to their vaccine appointment, Liu added.

As with adults, children with an allergy to an ingredient in Pfizer’s COVID-19 shouldn’t take it. You can find a list of ingredients in Pfizer’s vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11 on the FDA’s fact sheet.

Can my child get the COVID-19 shot at the same time as other vaccines?

According to the CDC, your child may get other vaccines when they go in for their COVID shot without waiting 14 days between appointments. Flu shots can be given to children ages 6 months and older.

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.

Technologies

We’re All Flailing With AI: I Tried Art That Pokes Back at the Chaos

A handful of moments at SXSW had me wondering: How much of AI is me playing a game and how much is it a game playing me?

Smack dab in the middle of this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, there was a huge dirt hole in the ground, blocks wide, where there used to be a convention center. The festival’s events continued around it in hotels, but the building’s absence was like a lurking symbol. Of chaos, of disruption. Of the world in 2026, dealing with AI and everything else.

I have no idea what the rest of 2026 will bring, but the vibe I felt at a vibe-filled show made me question how AI can work with our lives, our art and our existence. Instead of fighting it, the conference awkwardly embraced it and challenged it. I saw pockets of work all over the place and wondered about it. Conversations. And how to escape it.

Everyone’s trying to handle a world that’s suddenly way too overloaded with AI, generating documents, images, deepfakes and music, injecting assistant agents into our operating systems, even launching entire unleashed and interconnected agent systems all talking to each other on their own social networks. Job-threatening, constantly shifting, training on our data and aiming for our faces. Do we run from it, try to destroy it, or use art to question and challenge it?

SXSW gave me a lot of the latter, in different slices.

In my panel I was in at SXSW with Meow Wolf’s Vince Kadlubek and Niantic Spatial’s Dennis Hwang about their experiments overlaying tech into art in physical installations, Kadlubek discussed how AI’s infinite slop creative tool becomes uninteresting over time, while intentional art counteracts that. And that’s exactly how I felt moving through intentionally-made experiences that turned my thoughts about AI inside out, all in different ways.

AI seeping into our gaming chats, for better and worse

In a VR headset in a hotel ballroom, I chatted with cartoon fantasy characters in a whimsical game called Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking, made by game studio Arvore. I could make any request or beg as much as I wanted from my cage, where I was held prisoner for offending the King and kept dangling over a monster’s mouth for execution. Could I plead my case to them? The cartoonish VR characters responded, but via generative AI improvising off a script from a writing team, using Claude.

The chats were fun, ridiculous. I made myself an irresponsible magician and leaned into improv with the characters who approached me. None of them disappointed, which is a surprise for dialogue that’s somewhat AI-generated. Most interactions felt frazzled and absurd, but it worked for the style and the humor of it all. There was a bit of a delay for responses to kick in, though, standard-issue for a lot of AI conversations.

This was the best use of AI I saw. But what could it mean for future games, like RPGs? It’s an unsettling thought if you’re a writer…or, exciting. Indie games could end up finding ways to branch out responsive dialogue in ways that still feel custom-written and crafted. I don’t know.

On the less successful end was Love Bird, an interactive game show experience directed by Cameron Kostopoulos. I was wowed by the initial onboarding, where the «producers» called me on my phone to interview me. The producer was actually an AI chatbot with a surprisingly rapid response time. I convinced the AI to be a participant, and then was led into a room where I spoke via Xbox controller and headset microphone with a PC game on a monitor, where I was competing with others while carnivorous bird-people threatened to eat us. I’m not sure why, exactly. And I don’t know how it all ended, because my chats with the host and participants fell into broken loops that made us have to quit out early.

Love Bird was fast-paced and responsive, but also too chaotic and weird, even for someone like me who likes weird. It didn’t feel like it was really paying attention to me, and I didn’t feel like I had space to process. Maybe that’s by chaotic design, but after emerging, it just made me want to feel less AI-spammed and have games that didn’t flood me with as much conversation as this one did. I needed a quiet space. My favorite immersive experiences are often the quiet ones, not the chatty ones.

AI as a personal transformational lens

In one room, I stood at a podium and read a portion of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s acceptance speech from November as, before me, video clips of crowds cheering played on a large video monitor, seemingly reacting to me. A few minutes later, I heard my voice delivering more of Mamdani’s speech, AI-generated in my voice, to film clips of inspirational moments of support. I saw my own face layered into the background of some of these clips, too.

The Great Dictator, directed by Gabo Arora, is a museum-style participatory exploration of the power of rhetoric, provocatively named for the Charlie Chaplin satire about Adolf Hitler. The three speeches you can choose from — Mamdani’s, President Ronald Reagan’s on taking down the Berlin Wall, and Malcolm X’s The Ballot or the Bullet speech — are all picked to represent powerful moments in history, and the exhibit is about embodying history and feeling the power of speech and rhetoric in a personal way — and relating to it from a new, personal, and maybe more empathetic angle. The voice AI was generated by ElevenLabs, and the video clips at the end were hand edited, but with AI overlays of my face handled by Runway. What surprised me was how much I ended up being in historical documents. Is this a deepfake? Is it embodiment? Is it both?

Another art experience embedded me into the work: Spectacular, by Jonathan Yeo. Yeo is an artist from London whose portrait work includes King Charles III, President George W. Bush and designer Jony Ive of Apple renown and has played with tech in many of his installations. This gallery at SXSW, replicated from an exhibit that was in Paris before, used Snap Spectacles AR glasses to melt the real portraits with augmented effects and voice narration from Yeo. And, later on, the portraits began overlaying my own face, transformed in art styles that matched Yeo’s using generative AI trained on his work. At the end, I got a printout of my portrait, «signed» by Yeo himself.

I spoke with Yeo in Austin after experiencing his work. He admitted that AI is a provocation here, but that he wants to own the process that AI is trying to take from our own data everywhere. And he’s trying to apply AI and AR in ways that feel intentional and subtle as ways to help play with and bring the art to life, in museums and elsewhere. But again, like with The Great Dictator, I wondered: How much will «permanent» documents of art and history begin to melt over time with AI? What will be kept intact, and who will enforce the line?

AI as broken manipulator

Wearing a pair of Meta Oakley smart glasses, I stood in a room full of objects on shelves as a voice directed me to open a drawer, find a dollar bill there and put it in a shredder filled with bill fragments. I did it. The AI remarked with pleasant surprise at how compliant I was. From there, I «competed» tasks to prove my value as human labor, graded by an AI that saw my actions through the glasses camera and showed my stats on a TV screen, along with a deepfaked dancing version of myself.

Body Proxy, by Tender Claws, applies Meta’s glasses camera feed into its own art AI app on a phone to explore how AI could make us proxies for physical labor. It’s weird and satirical like some of their other VR work (the game Virtual Virtual Reality, among others), but also pushes at a much bigger question: How much is AI breaking us or manipulating us? How much are we willing to be manipulated?

Escape The Internet (Part One), an interactive game I played in a movie theater at the Alamo Drafthouse, turned similar ideas of manipulation into a social experiment. Created by Lucas Rizzotto, another VR/AR provocateur artist, it involved no headsets or glasses. Instead, everyone in the theater used their own phones to connect to a private server that «ran» the game and gave us little personal avatars, feeding us surveys to collect our personal tendencies and then having us play social voting games to see how we’d polarize on decisions like, for instance, who to kill: one person who shared our political views, or five who didn’t?

It’s all absurd and funny and guided by Rizzotto’s in-person guidance at the front of the theater, and along the way, I thought about how social platforms manipulate us with algorithms. Here, in this room together, we’re encouraged to find each other, recognize each other and love each other. The experience has branching paths and can be replayed, and could re-emerge in future conferences and events. But, again, I asked myself: How much of AI is a game that’s playing me, instead of me playing it?

Design for AI is still unfinished (or nonexistent)

In some of the panels I sat in on, and in conversations I had, I got a creeping sense that AI is moving too fast for artists or ethicists — or anyone else, really — to stop and properly process. One panel exploring The Future Design Language of Robots, with Olivia Vagelos of the Design for Feelings Studio, and Savannah Kunovsky, managing director of Ideo’s emerging technology division, tapped into the assumptions we make about robots. I teamed up with someone next to me to try to dream up ideas to break my assumptions and think freshly about what robots could be.

Kunovsky and Vagelos both agreed that designing for AI presents similar challenges right now, particularly because the tech is moving too fast for design to properly attend to it. But sadly, my attempt to record what they said as a quote was sabotaged by my AI-enabled Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which activated as the microphone when I tried recording a voice memo from the panel on my phone, muting the audio completely because of noise cancellation. Wearables are still broken, too.

Another panel, called Generative Ghosts: AI Afterlives and the Future of Memory, led in part by two Google DeepMind researchers, discussed many fascinating angles on how we can responsibly handle archiving our lives via AI as memories in the future, and who controls that ability. The panel had no specific answers but plenty of questions. And, as my own attempt at recording it was also erased by my activated smart glasses, it gave me an additional level of absurd friction which made me wonder: Will these archived memories eventually be lost, too, from big tech companies that sunset services or introduce noncompatible formats, memory-holing the memories?

AI is threatening, but often not successful in fulfilling its promises (or threats). Self-driving Waymo cars flooded Austin during SXSW, with my Uber app often pushing them on me instead of human drivers. I gave in and took a few for amusement, but they usually took longer to get where I was going. And, one unfortunate evening, my Waymo took a weird roundabout route that ended up dropping me off a half mile from my destination on the wrong side of the highway.

My favorite SXSW memory was making an old-fashioned collage out of magazine clippings with friends at an art gallery over wine, something that involved no tech at all. We worked our magic with intuition, scissors, old magazines and good conversation. Was it perfect? No. But it cost a lot less than generative AI. Which also makes me wonder if all these AI tools being offered to enhance or supplant creativity are necessary, or whether we’ll just rediscover that we had more tools than we realized all along.

Technologies

Samsung’s Galaxy A37, A57 New Pricing Tests the Limits of a Plastic Phone

While market conditions are raising the cost of these Galaxy A phones, Samsung’s hopes fast charging speeds, improved water resistance and camera features will provide value for price-conscious buyers.

Samsung’s announcement of the new $450 Galaxy A37 and $550 Galaxy A57 today brings good news and bad news for value-conscious customers looking for a cheaper phone.

Much like we’ve seen on the flagship-level Galaxy S26, both phones are priced higher than the A36 and A56 they are replacing — in this case by $50 — though storage options for both phones still start at 128GB. However, both phones did get a design improvement that features IP68 water resistance and will feature the newly updated Circle to Search, with enhancements like Find the Look for identifying outfits.

Starting with the $450 Galaxy A37, this phone has a 6.7-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It runs on Samsung’s Exynos 1480 processor and has a 45-watt wired charging speed, which Samsung says will recharge its 5,000-mAh battery from 0% to 65% in 30 minutes.

The phone is made from plastic and comes in four colors: charcoal, gray-green, white and — my favorite — lavender. (Note: Samsung adds the word «Awesome» in front of all of these color names, but I’m going to save us from this.) The A37 also comes in a 256GB model that costs $540.

The A37’s cameras include a 50-megapixel wide, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 5-megapixel macro on the back, along with a 12-megapixel selfie camera on the front. The A37 gets a sampling of Galaxy AI features, including object eraser for editing photos, language translation and an upgraded Bixby assistant.

The $550 Galaxy A57 moves up from plastic to a metal body but only comes in navy. It also has a 6.7-inch display, but weighs in at 179 grams, which is markedly lighter than the A56’s 198g. During my hands-on time, it was noticeably light, especially for a phone with the larger display size.

The phone runs on Samsung’s Exynos 1680 processor. It also gets a few more AI photo editing tools like Best Face for fixing group photos where someone is blinking.

The cameras on the A57 include a 50-megapixel wide, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel macro on the back and, like the A37, includes a 12-megapixel selfie camera. A step-up 256GB model costs $610, but it’s worth noting that this price is really close to the $650 Galaxy S25 FE, which includes all of the Galaxy AI features along with a telephoto camera.

I’m bummed but not surprised to see the increased cost of the A37 and A57 versus last year’s models, which a Samsung representative said is attributable to current market conditions when I asked about the ongoing RAM shortage.

During my hands-on time, though, I did find both phones to look quite nice, with the lavender model likely providing plenty of competition to the $499 Google Pixel 10A’s colors. Both phones will go on sale on April 9.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for March 25 #752

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 25, No. 752.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, but it might make you hungry. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Intermission mission.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Movie candy.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

ROBE, BORE, WEEDS, WEED, RENT, RIND, CORN, SCAN, SPAN, SPANS, SAND, CANE, CANT, CROSS, COIN

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers: