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White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday said the Food and Drug Administration could approve Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine for children under 5-years-old in the next month. “My hope is that it’s going to be within the next month or so and not much later than that, but I can’t guarantee that,” Fauci said during an interview with Blue Star Families, a nonprofit group that supports military families. Fauci said younger children will likely need three doses, because two shots did not induce an adequate immune response in 2- to 4-year-olds in Pfizer’s clinical trials. (Kimball, 1/19)

In more news about the vaccine rollout —

Nearly 4,000 people who got their COVID-19 vaccine at Kaiser Permanente’s Walnut Creek Medical Center late last year may have received a slightly smaller dose than is recommended, according to the health care provider. In a statement this week, Kaiser said it was contacting 3,900 people who received a Pfizer vaccine at the East Bay hospital between Oct. 25 and Dec. 10. Those individuals may have received between 0.01 and 0.04 milliliters less of vaccine than the recommended 0.30 milliliters. (Picon, 1/19)

A Los Angeles area charter school barred a group of unvaccinated students from attending class Tuesday and cordoned off the area where the students were with tape barriers, videos of the incident showed. New West Charter School in Los Angeles confirmed Tuesday that management had implemented a vaccine and negative-test mandate for students and that a group of unvaccinated students had staged “a sit-in” on campus and refused to leave the school. (Poff, 1/19)

Intentionally damaging vaccines would be a felony in Wisconsin under a bill with bipartisan support that the state Assembly is scheduled to approve Thursday. The measure comes in response to a pharmacist in a Milwaukee suburb spoiling more than 500 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in January 2021. He pleaded guilty to the federal charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. (1/20)

We've known for about a month now that a third shot of the vaccine is critical for protecting against infection with the omicron variant — and for keeping people out of the hospital. Now researchers in the U.K. have the first estimates for how long a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine will last. And the findings are mixed. Protection against infection is likely short-term, lasting less than six months, but protection against severe disease appears more robust, researchers with the U.K. Health Security Agency reported Friday. (Doucleff, 1/19)