Your questions, answered "Since my immunocompromised kids are still too young to be vaccinated, what drugs have actually been approved to treat covid in patients under 5? Or are families with young children being abandoned on that front, too?" — Tierra in Michigan Unfortunately, treatment options for young children, even those with weakened immune systems, are extremely limited. The only early covid-19 treatment available to kids under 12 right now is remdesivir. This antiviral drug appears to prevent severe illness from omicron in high-risk patients when administered in the first week of infection. The problem is, remdesivir is harder to administer than the antiviral pills being rolled out now because it involves multiple infusions and monitoring in a hospital or clinic for several days. It's also expensive. The FDA only recently expanded the drug's emergency use authorization to include kids under 12, and little data exists on its use in this age group, so doctors may be reluctant to prescribe it unless there's a clear need. The National Institutes of Health notes on its covid-19 treatment website: "Remdesivir has not been evaluated in clinical trials that include children, and there have been no results from systematic evaluations of pharmacokinetics, efficacy, or toxicity in younger children, although studies are ongoing (see ClinicalTrials.gov). However, based on adult data, the potential benefits of remdesivir are likely to be greater for hospitalized children with COVID-19 who are at higher risk of progression due to older age (i.e., aged ≥16 years) or medical conditions than for those without these risk factors." Beyond remdesivir, other treatments are generally reserved for adults or kids over 12 and weighing at least 40 kilograms, or about 88 pounds. Again, these treatments have not been studied thoroughly in young children, so there's little to no data on how effective they'll be or whether they'll cause any adverse reactions or unpleasant side effects. It's worth remembering that the virus is typically much milder in children than it is in adults. NIH notes that most children with mild or moderate disease recover with supportive care alone. Health regulators take this into account when they review treatments and tend not to authorize drugs for youngsters unless the benefits vastly outweigh the risks. But parents have been through hell the past two years, and nobody can blame you for feeling like you've been abandoned. Regulators' decision earlier this month to delay authorization of the vaccine for kids under 5 was a gut-punch. If these children could get the robust protections provided by the vaccines, we wouldn't have to fret as much about the lack of treatment options. For now, our best bet is to use all the tools we do have at our disposal to shield these youngsters until they can get the shots. Health experts at Johns Hopkins University recommend keeping kids at least six feet from people outside their household. Check your child's daycare or preschool, if they're open, for what health precautions they're taking, including whether their staff is fully vaccinated. Mask up in the presence of young kids outside your household and have others do the same for you. Avoid unvaccinated people and practice good hand hygiene. It's unfair that parents and young children have to deal with this burden while the rest of the nation drops precautions and rushes to return to some version of normal. But the effort is worthwhile — few more months of vigilance will go a long way in protecting these little ones. | 
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