Today?s Parent recently spoke with infectious disease physician Janine McCready about the COVID vaccine for kids under 12. We tackled side effects, fertility fears, and whether your 4-year-old can get the vaccine before their fifth birthday. Here?s a condensed version of that interview.  
Before we get into discussing the vaccine, can you tell me a bit about what you do and how you?ve been involved in the pandemic response"
I’m an infectious disease physician at Michael Garron Hospital in East Toronto. Since the pandemic began in March of 2020 I’ve been really immersed in everything COVID. It started with our work in the hospitals, but we very quickly saw that this was a disease that was spreading in our communities so it was super important to do outreach to the communities and get testing done.  When schools went back in last year, I had the opportunity to be involved with supporting our schools and have been working very closely with all our schools in East Toronto to make testing easier and making sure that they have what they need to ideally keep the kids in school.
The last two years have been so difficult for kids. On a medical level, we’ve seen parents come in and are very sick, and some of them are single parents. There’s no one at home to take care of their kids, and their kids have all had COVID as well. So those have been very challenging situations, and in some situations, we’ve seen parents and certainly grandparents pass ...