A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel gave green light to kid-size doses of Pfizer’s shots for 5- to 11-year-olds on Tuesday. With this step, the Us moved a step closer to expanding COVID-19 vaccinations for millions of more children.

 The panel voted unanimously, with one abstention, that the vaccine’s benefits in preventing COVID-19 in that age group outweigh any potential risks — including a heart-related side effect that’s been very rare in teens and young adults despite their use of a much higher shot dose, the Associated Press reported.

While children are at lower risk of severe COVID-19 than older people, ultimately many panelists decided it’s important to give parents the choice to protect their youngsters — especially those at high risk of illness or who live in places where other precautions, like masks in schools, aren’t being used.

The virus is “not going away. We have to find a way to live with it and I think the vaccines give us a way to do that,” said FDA adviser Jeannette Lee of the University of Arkansas.

“I do think it’s a relatively close call. It’s really going to be a question of what the prevailing conditions are but we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it,” said adviser Dr. Eric Rubin of Harvard University, according to the Associated Press.

The FDA can overturn the panel’s recommendation and is expected to make its own decision in a few days.

If the FDA does go ahead with the authorisation of the kid-size doses, it will be up to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to decide whether to recommend the shots and which youngsters should get them when they sit for it next week.

Full-strength shots made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech already are recommended for everyone 12 and older but pediatricians and many parents are clamoring for protection for younger children. The extra-contagious delta variant has caused an alarming rise in pediatric infections — and families are frustrated with school quarantines and having to say no to sleepovers and other rites of childhood to keep the virus at bay.

(With AP inputs)