From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is the Daily.

Today, when the US completes its campaign to immunize every eligible American against COVID-19,

about a quarter of the population will remain unvaccinated.

My colleague, Science reporter, Appurva Mundavili, on what exactly happens to kids?

It's Friday, February 19.

Appurva, if you are an adult in the United States, you are starting to see the end of the pandemic on the horizon for yourself, right?

A clear timeline has emerged the summer of 2021. You're probably going to get vaccinated.

But if you are a parent, I feel like there are some burning questions that complicate that timeline about your kids.

And so that's what we want to talk with you about today.

We've all been really excited that we have these vaccines, and the focus has been so much on who gets sick and getting to them first.

And of course, that's been all your people, frontline workers, that we've sort of forgotten to talk openly about the fact that kids need to be vaccinated.

I think even I, as a parent, didn't spend that much time thinking about it.

But kids make up about 24% of the US population, almost one in four.

So even if almost every adult gets vaccinated, that's still a huge percent of the population that will not have any protection.

Right, a quarter of the American population will be not vaccinated at the point at which we all kind of regard vaccinations as having been completed.

But remind us why kids are not being vaccinated.

Kids are not being vaccinated because we haven't tested these vaccines in kids.

We don't know that they are safe or that they're effective in kids.

We've mainly tested these vaccines and adults, and we know it works in them.

And there's a pretty good likelihood that they'll work in kids, but we can't be sure until we've actually done the trials.

And the reason we haven't done those trials yet is because kids just don't get sick at nearly the same rates as adults do.

For the most part, COVID is very mild in kids.

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