Lexington Medical Center began administering COVID-19 vaccinations to children ages 5 to 11 on Nov. 4.

A press release from the hospital notes the move comes as “the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control have approved the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine” for kids that age.

“The dosage for the 5 to 11 age group is one-third of the adult dose,” the release explains. “Two vaccine doses will be given, spaced 21 days apart. Children will be considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the second dose. Lexington Medical Center’s vaccination clinic has received 3,000 doses of the pediatric vaccine so far.”

The children are being administered the vaccine at the hospital’s vaccination clinic, located at Brookland Baptist Church in West Columbia. No appointments are necessary. For more information, go to LexMed.com/ Covid.

The release adds that Lexington Medical has administered “more than 110,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.”

“The hospital is thankful for all the support it has received from the community during the pandemic as it works to keep our community healthy and safe,” the release stated.

To get more context on the reasons to get children vaccinated against COVID-19 and the safety of doing so, the Chronicle spoke with Dr. Scott Curry, a specialist in infectious diseases at MUSC Health. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Chronicle: How important is it for children 5 to 11 to get vaccinated?

Dr. Scott Curry: Incredibly important. Because I want to get out of the pandemic someday and achieve something closer to normal and this is a high priority for the whole effort to get there, to get our schoolaged children vaccinated, for sure.

Why is it so important?

For their own health, for one. We have a children’s hospital full of COVID patients in our recent wave and I expect that we’ll resume as we get to our coming winter wave. So, really for the benefit of the kids themselves, but in the in the interest of not pure selfishness, families are going to be impacted by kids who bring COVID home, in particular. Vaccine breakthroughs happen from some source or other and children are really good at dispersing COVID that’s occurring in the community and bringing it back home. So, even if you got every person in the house who’s 12 and up vaccinated, all it takes is one 7-year-old bringing it home from school to kind of start the whole process over.

And for those families who have immunocompromised individuals, it’s a particular threat to them because of those few people that are getting severely ill and hospitalized, they count high among those. And so the ability to get your kids vaccinated for those individuals is really important.

How safe is the vaccine available to kids 5 to 11?

So safe that the FDA has given them the authorization to go ahead and I expect that Moderna will join Pfizer in the fairly near future as an option for that same age group. These vaccines go through the same, if not more rigorous, testing in this age group than the adult vaccine has gone through. The dose has been changed to adapt it for the smaller body size of children. And there has been a lot of attention to the absolute need for a margin of safety because you don’t want to get a vaccine that makes people sick in the short or the long term.

And those are all things that the FDA has demanded of all the vaccine manufacturers is that they demonstrate that their vaccines are safe.

The things to expect in kids who get the vaccine are the same things we’ve been telling people to expect for adults, which is that almost everybody gets a sore arm with one of the doses. A very few number of kids will get fevers and will feel lousy for a day or two after the second dose. And that’s about it. The risk of the more serious things that the media has really amplified are very, very rare and consist of a heart inflammation condition that has basically gone away with ibuprofen and things like that. Whereas the risk of having a child get actual COVID is not only the risk of getting sick and hospitalized, which is rare, but the risk of MISC, which is an inflammatory condition from the natural infection, which is way more than you’ll get from anything the vaccine will deliver to a child.

With the holidays and family gatherings coming up, how important is it for parents not to wait to get their children vaccinated?

It is extraordinarily important. In fact, I’ve had a lot of people ask me who have 11-year-old children, “What’s more important, getting it done now or waiting until I can get them the adult version of Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccine?” And I’ve told them in every single case, do it now. The best vaccine is the one you can take today. And that’s going to be important as we get toward the winter season when transmission’s going to pick up again. People are going to wish that they had had their vaccination as soon as they could have gotten it.