Opinion: RSV vaccine approval should be a top priority for the FDA
Regulators are considering two highly effective RSV vaccines. What's the holdup?
The calamity of March 2020 arrived two years later for pediatric units. In the fall of 2022, a tidal wave of respiratory viral illnesses sent children to emergency rooms in droves when enterovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and influenza peaked in close succession, bombarding young children who had remained mostly unexposed to these viruses during the most acute years of the Covid pandemic.
The result was scores of infants and toddlers in need of hospitalization, greatly exceeding the capacities of our nation’s hospitals. A significant burden was placed on an already beleaguered pediatric workforce of nurses, respiratory therapists, and clinicians, and sick children were left waiting in hallways or were transported across state lines for beds. Even after the RSV and flu viral surges subsided, capacity issues have continued in pediatric hospitals, due to the ongoing pediatric behavioral health crisis, a financially driven 20% contraction of pediatric beds across the nation in the last decade, and other viral outbreaks in children, such as norovirus, whose 2023 positivity rates are already surpassing 2022’s.
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