Bracy COVID vaccine event canceled amid dosage confusion

A COVID-19 vaccination event for kids ages 6 months to 5 years old, scheduled for Friday at The Roth Family Jewish Community Center, was called off by State Sen. Randolph Bracy hours after he announced it at a press conference amid confusion over dosing of the vaccine.

Allied Health, according to its medical director Alex Evans, had planned on converting adult doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine into smaller doses for children — a strategy White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jha recommended against.

Child doses of Moderna are a fourth of an adult dose.

“You don’t want somebody pulling up a big bottle and trying to get the dose right,” Jha said at a press conference June 17 discussing the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to grant emergency authorization to Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for very young children. “That’s how you get dosing errors, that’s how you get into trouble and that’s not how we do this.”

He said the FDA manages dosing “very specifically and carefully to make sure that these things are done safely.”

Informed of Jha’s remarks, Bracy decided to change plans for the child-vaccination event Friday which he had announced Thursday morning to a gathering of television cameras at the Jewish Community Center in Maitland, which was to provide space for the effort.

“We’re going to instead order pre-packaged [child-size] vaccine,” he said.

If parents come with children to the Maitland complex Friday, they will be urged to wait for child doses, Bracy said.

Allied Health’s Evans said the company, which has only administered COVID-19 vaccines to adults in Central and South Florida, had chosen the conversion strategy for “expediency,” believing it could be done quickly but safely, but opted to hold off out of respect for Bracy’s concern.

“I want to make sure we protect our community,” he said in a conference call with Bracy and the Orlando Sentinel.

Evans said Allied Health would likely receive child doses in about two weeks.

Earlier in the day, Bracy told reporters he believed it was critical parents had a choice to vaccinate their children against COVID.

“We don’t know that there’s going to be a large demand for this,” he said. “We just wanted to offer the option.”

The Ocoee Democrat said he worked to bring the vaccines to the center because Florida was the only state not to pre-order the vaccines, a decision which drew criticism from medical professionals despite Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doubts about giving “a jab” to healthy kids.

The state still has no vaccination programs for kids, Bracy said.

“I personally don’t have a position on whether children should be vaccinated. What I do believe is that getting your child vaccinated should not be a political decision. It should be a parental decision,” he said. “If a parent wants to get their child vaccinated, OK. If they don’t, that’s OK, too. But I don’t believe that we should be playing politics with children’s health and take away the parent’s right to choose.”

Asked about DeSantis’ opposing view, Bracy said, “I don’t think it matters what I think or honestly what the governor thinks.”

The state Health Department in March recommended against COVID-19 vaccines for healthy kids, saying the risks of vaccinating them “may outweigh the benefits,” a view contradicted by medical groups, including the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Florida was the only U.S. state that did not pre-order COVID-19 vaccines for kids under 5 before the Food and Drug Administration authorized them June 17, at which point DeSantis’ administration allowed health care providers to place orders for the vaccines.

“All children, including children who have already had COVID-19, should get vaccinated,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on its website. “COVID-19 vaccines have undergone—and will continue to undergo— the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.”

COVID-19 vaccine dosage is based on age on the day of vaccination, not on a child’s size or weight, according to the CDC.

Unlike past vaccine rollouts, Florida has relied entirely on private companies to vaccinate its youngest children

Bracy said some of his constituents had inquired about vaccinations for their kids.

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The state previously used public sites like the Orange County Convention Center and deployed mobile vaccination units to inoculate people for free when the vaccines first became available for older adults, then younger persons, then school-age children.

The Jewish Community Center has been involved in other vaccination efforts during the pandemic. The group worked with the American Muslim Community Clinic in Longwood to vaccinate members of both organizations when the vaccines first became available.

The center also has hosted a mobile vaccination van in its parking lot.

Aaron Bernstein, director of development for Jewish Family Services of Orlando, said he was confident the child-vaccination event would be conducted safely.

“It’s just like when the state came out and said, ‘We’re providing vaccines.’ We said, ‘Great. Come do it in our office.’ We didn’t check medical certificates or expiration dates or anything like that,” he said. “We trusted the professionals were doing their jobs.”

Caroline Catherman of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

shudak@orlandosentinel.com