The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorizing Pfizer (PFE)’s COVID-19 vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds on Friday is welcome news for millions of parents across the country.

Roughly 28 million children are now eligible for vaccination, according to the New York Times.

“If you look at a lot of the data, you’ll see that younger people, teenagers, small children, they’ve been responsible for a lot of the transmission of coronavirus,” Dr. Adrian Burrowes, a family medicine physician and CEO of CFP Physicians Group, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “And while a lot of people will argue that children tend to do fairly well when they are infected, they are the center point, a lot of the time, for the adult infections.”

Children accounted for 25.1% of reported COVID-19 cases for the week ending Oct. 21, with 118,000 new child cases during that time. Overall, nearly 6.3 million children have contracted COVID-19 since the pandemic began.

“A lot of children go to school,” Burrowes said. “In my state, Florida, they’re fighting the mask mandate, so a lot of the kids may not be wearing masks, infecting the teacher who may be at higher risk, and putting that household, the teacher’s household, and the teacher’s life in jeopardy. Having the ability to vaccinate 5-year-olds and up will be critical in helping us to resolve this pandemic.”

A safe and effective vaccine

Currently, only those ages 12 and up are eligible to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In the U.S., 57.8% of the eligible population are fully vaccinated, while 66.5% have received at least one dose.

“These vaccines have been given to billions of people around the world and hundreds of millions of people in the United States,” Dr. Ben Weston, medical director at Milwaukee’s COVID-19 Emergency Operations Center, recently said on Yahoo Finance Live. “We know that these are safe vaccines. We know they’re effective.”

The Pfizer vaccine is reportedly 90.7% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in the 5- to 11-year-old age group. For some parents who may be concerned about whether or not the shot is safe for their kids, Weston quelled those concerns.

“Specific to that 5- to 11-year-old age group, the studies have been done,” Weston said. “The experiments have been done. This isn’t experimental anymore. We saw an effective vaccine, and we saw a safe vaccine. There are going to be some side effects. There are going to be some sore arms. There are going to be some headaches, some body aches, some low-grade fevers.”

“But we didn’t see any serious adverse effects,” he continued. “So I think parents can be comfortable getting this vaccine for their children to protect them, protect their families, and protect their community.”