For many, many months now, 7-year-old Alain Bell has been keeping a very ambitious list of the things he wants to do after he gets his COVID-19 shot: travel (to Disneyworld or Australia, ideally); play more competitive basketball; go to “any restaurants that have french fries, which are my favorite food,” he told me over the phone.
These are very good kid goals, and they are, at last, in sight. On Tuesday evening, about as early as anyone in the general public could, Alain nabbed his first dose of Pfizer’s newly cleared pediatric COVID-19 vaccine. The needle delivered “a little poke,” he said, but also a huge injection of excitement and relief. Since his father, a critical-care physician, was vaccinated last December (the first time I interviewed Alain), “I’ve been impatient,” Alain said. “I really wanted to get mine.” Now he is finally on his way to joining the adults. When he heard on Tuesday that his shot was imminent, he let out a scream of joy, at “a pitch I have never heard him use before,” his mother, Kristen, told me.
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