Newswise — New Brunswick, NJ — Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics recently launched a website that presents multilingual resources about COVID-19 vaccines in children and young adults.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Center for Disease Control, more than 14.6 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic and more than 1,000 have died of related complications, such as Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C).
Resources are available in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hindi and Korean, the top six languages spoken in New Jersey. Links to information on relevant topics related to COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines were compiled from verified sources, and have been reviewed by pediatric faculty experts. Two additional languages will be added to the site – Arabic and Gujarati.
Children with underlying conditions are more likely to experience severe effects of COVID-19, but even healthy children can be severely affected, and children can spread COVID-19 to others. Safe and effective vaccines are available for children 6 months and older and boosters for children 5 years and above.
“As a pediatric rheumatologist, a pediatrician, a colleague and a mother, I feel that it is vital to be involved in such an endeavor. This website will promote the importance of vaccination and make a huge difference in decreasing death due to the illness,” says Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School’s Professor of Pediatrics, L. Nandini Moorthy, MD, MS, FAAP. “The website provides important, accurate information in a culturally sensitive manner in order to ensure that parents and caregivers are able to make informed decisions about a child’s care.”
Dr. Moorthy worked with a team of pediatricians and communication faculty at Rutgers to develop the site in an effort to address many of the common questions and concerns of parents and caregivers.
The site can be accessed at https://go.rutgers.edu/kidscovidinfo.
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