‘I don’t want to miss out on high school’: As more Alaska teens get COVID-19 vaccines, many look forward to a return to normalcy

On Wednesday, a new group of Alaskans officially became eligible for a dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine — and 15-year-old Grady Cutchins received his shot the first evening he was eligible.

“I’m not that great with needles, but it didn’t hurt,” Cutchins said during a special youth-led public information call. He and other teens helped organize the call this week to share information about the vaccine with his peers, whose families might still be deciding whether they should get a shot.

The needle “was small enough that I didn’t actually feel it until afterwards, when it started getting sore,” he said.

Alaska youths 12 and and older became eligible this week for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine — a development that health officials have called an important step toward protecting children from the virus and slowing transmission communitywide. Previously, only those 16 and older in Alaska had been eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccination.

Officials said they currently have enough vaccine available in the state for all 40,000 newly eligible youths to get a shot, but they aren’t sure what the uptake will be. So far, over half of eligible Alaskans have gotten at least one dose of vaccine.

Cutchins is a ninth grader at Service High School in Anchorage, where he participates in a special biomedical program that prepares students for careers in health care. He’s been learning remotely for the past year, which he says hasn’t always been ideal.

“I’ve just been having that kind of awkward, online thing,” he said. “I’ve done pretty much nothing in terms of the hands-on part, so I’m really excited to do that next year.”

Cutchins decided to be on the youth panel held Thursday evening — alongside the state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Anne Zink, and other teens recruited by the state health department and the Alaska Teen Media Institute — because he thought it was important for his peers to get accurate information about the COVID-19 vaccines from people they listen to. His father is Coleman Cutchins, a pharmacist with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

Grady Cutchins said that while he respected others’ reasons for not getting vaccinated, “I really just want everybody to be informed on what actually is happening with the vaccines.”

He said some of his friends’ parents won’t let them get the vaccine because they think that it causes infertility.

“And that’s just completely not true,” he said. “I just want everybody to be completely informed on what the vaccine is, what’s in it and how it will affect you.”

A recent survey conducted by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services found that the sources Alaskans trust the most when deciding whether to get vaccinated were their friends and family — and Cutchins said he thought that applied to young people, too.

“A lot of (young) people generally don’t want to listen to physicians that are 50 years old talking for 45 minutes, or parents talking,” he said. “They want to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know Grady, he’s my friend. I’m going to watch to see what he’s gonna do, and what he’s gonna say that’s dumb.’ ”

On the call, the teens answered questions about how the vaccines work, what kind of safety reviews they underwent, common side effects and why they decided to get vaccinated.

One panelist — Lulu from Bethel — said she received her first shot Thursday morning, and encouraged others to do the same.

“It was just a quick little prick,” she said. “And my arm’s just, like, a little bit sore. I still definitely recommend it because we all want to get back to normal.”

Cutchins said that the hardest part of the last year has been not getting to spend time with most of his friends — he’s only been regularly seeing two of them in person.

“It’s just going to be kind of weird to go back and see what everybody’s like now,” he said. “It does feel like I’ve been missing out on the social part. I’m really excited to get back into that.”

Another teen on the Thursday evening panel was 17-year-old Abby Laufer, an 11th grader at West High School. She got her second dose of Pfizer vaccine about a month ago and also wanted to be part of the youth call to help spread the word about the vaccine.

“I’m just really excited for more kids to be getting the vaccine, and for high school to be returning to normal,” she said in an interview. “I think it’s been proven that teens listen to other teens better than anyone else. And I think I’m excited, you know, for us all to get our normal high school experiences back.”

Laufer returned to in-person classes this spring after a year of remote learning and said it felt strange at first — but good.

“It was really weird,” she said. “The first day I went back, my first period, I was like, just so nervous. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, since I was really little. I am usually a person that talks a lot in class. But right when I went back, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, how do I talk to people? How do I interact?’ ”

Things now are starting to feel normal again, she said — especially since she was able to get vaccinated.

“Me and all my friends are vaccinated, which is great because we can all hang out now more,” she said. “I feel like I’m protecting the people around me, and I feel protected. And it’s just given me the opportunity to be more social again, which I love.”

Since becoming fully vaccinated, Laufer has visited her grandparents and traveled for a college interview. She’s looking forward to having her senior year in-person.

“I’m still kind of processing the things that I’ve lost,” she said. “These are my last few years here. I don’t want to miss out on high school.”

At the Geneva Woods Birth Center in Anchorage, two sisters, Lucy and Josephine Wheat, got their first doses of vaccine on Thursday, a day after they became eligible.

Josephine Wheat, 13, said that the first few months of the pandemic weren’t so bad, but it became harder to be away from her friends.

“I definitely grew a lot as a person, but it’s so awesome to be able to hang out with people again,” she said.

Lucy Wheat, who is 15, said she’s looking forward to traveling to Costa Rica this summer with her family and attending school in-person in the fall after spending nearly her whole sophomore year learning from home.

“It’s been really hard,” she said. “I’m really excited for next year. I hope that it’ll be back to more normal, but I don’t know. It’s been stressful but I’m glad it’s almost over,” she said.

Statewide, parents and others can visit covidvax.alaska.gov or call 907-646-3322 to sign up for a vaccine appointment; new appointments are added regularly. The phone line is staffed from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekends.

Only Pfizer’s vaccine is approved for children as young as 12. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are approved only for those 18 and older.

Daily News multimedia journalist Loren Holmes contributed reporting.