President Joe Biden’s administration is planning a large-scale rollout of COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 5, officials announced Wednesday.

The administration has secured enough doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to vaccinate all of the country’s 28 million children between 5 and 11 and is prepared to ship the doses across the country to facilitate vaccination efforts, the White House said.

Doses will be made available at doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and schools, among other sites. The Children’s Hospital Association has agreed to set up sites at over 100 children’s hospital systems.

“Over the past several weeks, we’ve been working closely with governors, pediatricians, pharmacies, community health centers, rural health centers, and other vaccine providers to prepare for this moment. Together, we’re completing the operational planning to ensure vaccinations for kids ages 5 through 11 are available, easy, and convenient,” Jeffrey Zients, the White House COVID-19 response team coordinator, told reporters in a virtual briefing.

The preparation comes despite neither the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deciding on vaccinating children so young, raising the risk of a repeat situation of the administration’s earlier announcement on COVID-19 vaccine boosters.

In August, top administration officials said they’d decided everybody should get a booster on Sept. 20, regardless of age or underlying conditions. But the FDA ended up only authorizing boosters of the two most widely-used vaccines, one from Pfizer and another from Moderna, for certain populations after its advisory panel rejected boosters for the general population due to a lack of proof they were needed.

The same panel is scheduled to meet next week on Pfizer’s application to authorize its vaccine for children between 5 and 11. The panel makes recommendations to the FDA, which then chooses whether to adopt the recommendations. The agency typically takes them up with little or no revision.

If the FDA authorized boosters for younger kids, the CDC’s advisory panel would meet on the matter in early November, followed by a similar deliberation by the CDC. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s head, recently overruled the panel on giving boosters to certain people, despite the majority of members voting against it.

Wednesday’s announcement showed an administration that’s “circumventing the normal FDA processes…again,” Zachary Brennan, a reporter with the industry publication Endpoint News, wrote in a social media post.

Others disagreed, including Jason Schwartz, associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.

Schwartz said there were “important differences” between the current planning and the booster announcement, including no set date being stated and “no specific talk about dose timing, etc., and other premature details announced then pre-FDA.”

Zients was asked about the similarities between the situations. He said the decision on authorization rests with the FDA and CDC but “at the same time, we want to be ready.”

Children as young as 12 can currently get Pfizer’s vaccine. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are only available in the United States to those 18 or older.

Nearly 1.5 million children between 12 and 17 are considered fully vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19 as of Oct. 19, according to CDC data.

Fully vaccinated means a person has received two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or the single-shot Johnson & Johnson jab.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Child vaccination is a controversial issue because children are at low risk of contracting severe cases of COVID-19—many cases are believed to be asymptomatic—and are at elevated risk of suffering heart inflammation from COVID-19 vaccines, especially the ones built on messenger RNA technology.

“We’re talking about risks that are very low on both sides of the equation with a great amount of uncertainty around both. So it’s a very challenging choice to make. And I think it should be something left to the doctor and the parents talking about what’s in the best interest of the child,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.