A new formulation of ‘lower dose’ Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (Comirnaty) has been approved for use in children aged 5 to 11 years old with the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommending it is offered to those in a clinical risk group or who are a household contact of someone who is immunosuppressed.
The approval by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) was given “following a robust review of safety data that shows a positive benefit-risk profile for this vaccine to be used in this age group,” says the MHRA.
The formulation designed for 5-11 year olds will be given at a lower dose compared to that used in individuals aged 12 and above (10 micrograms compared with 30 micrograms). The JCVI says there should be an interval of 8 weeks between the first and second doses.
Further advice regarding COVID-19 vaccination for other 5 to 11 year olds will be issued in due course.
The JCVI says this will be based on updated estimates of the proportion of children aged 5 to 11 years who have already been infected; the level of protection afforded against COVID-19 disease due to the Omicron variant; any reports of adverse reactions and considerations from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and other government departments on the potential educational impacts of COVID-19 vaccination in those aged 5 to 11 years
Dr June Raine, MHRA Chief Executive said: “Parents and carers can be reassured that no new vaccine for children would have been approved unless the expected standards of safety, quality and effectiveness have been met.
“We have concluded that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective for 5 to 11-year olds, with no new safety concerns identified. We have carefully considered all the available data and reached the decision that there is robust evidence to support a positive benefit risk for children in this age group.
“Our detailed review of all side-effect reports to date has found that the overwhelming majority relate to mild symptoms, such as a sore arm or a flu-like illness. We have in place a comprehensive safety surveillance strategy for monitoring the safety of all UK-approved COVID-19 vaccines and this includes children aged 5 to 11 years old.”
In all instances, the offer of vaccination must be accompanied by appropriate information to enable children, and those with parental responsibility, to provide informed consent prior to vaccination.
The JCVI has also recommended a booster be offered to young people aged 16 to 17 years; children and young people aged 12 to 15 who are in a clinical risk group or who are a household contact of someone who is immunosuppressed and children and young people aged 12 to 15 years who are severely immunosuppressed and who have had a third primary dose.
Professor Wei Shen Lim, Chair of COVID-19 immunisation, JCVI, said: “The majority of children aged 5 to 11 are at very low risk of serious illness due to COVID-19. However, some 5 to 11 year olds have underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk, and we advise these children to be vaccinated in the first instance.
“For children and young people who have completed a primary course of vaccination, a booster dose will provide added protection against the Omicron variant.”
Interesting that the mortality rate for under 10’s from Covid is so low it doesn’t even feature statistically and gets recorded as 0.0%.
COVID-19 was initially milder in young children than in adults but the delta variant has led to an increase in the number and severity of pediatric cases. Parents and caregivers should understand that children infected with the coronavirus can develop complications requiring hospitalization, and can transmit the virus to others.
The Delta variant is no longer dominant; the milder Omicron version has largely replaced it.
Quite right Thanetian Blind. Children just do not need this intervention with no long term safety data. The MHRA can not be trusted to give objective advice. It has big pharma directors on its board and protects their profits at the expense of British lives (judging by unprecedented serious adverse reactions/deaths recorded in official stats. for the current experimental gene-therapy jabs). This is the very last thing that vulnerable children need. It’s strange that some hate Boris (or Starmer) and yet trust them, or a very limited few so called public health officials, with medical advice, while other top medical experts are censored.
Doesn’t matter-they need to maximise their jab profits. As we finally saw yesterday & as some of us have been saying here the evidence is overwhelmingly that Omicron is mild, low in deaths & people needing to go into hospital & the last several weeks have been nothing but a blind panic again & a way for Boris to distract from his parties behaviour with another get jabbed campaign.
There was talk at the beginning that vaccines stopped it spreading, but as that seems to no longer be the case it is probably just a waste of time, effort and money to roll it out to all children.
My brother’s 7 year-old grandson caught it last week, and when I was told, my response was “Good, it will do him good in the long term”.
“People who are fully vaccinated against covid-19 are far less likely to infect others, despite the arrival of the delta variant, several studies show. The findings refute the idea, which has become common in some circles, that vaccines no longer do much to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.” [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-likely-are-you-to-spread-covid-19-if-youre-vaccinated/].
The more you post, Peter, the more it looks as though you have little understanding of the issues.
Says someone who believes we shouldn’t have eased lockdown in the summer when hospitals were under less strain…
The hospitals were under less strain *because* of lockdown. As soon as lockdown was ended, infections began to climb again.
They are now the highest in Europe, and higher than they have ever been in the UK.
We can only hope and pray that some indications that Omicron is less sever prove to be true, otherwise we’re well and truly stuffed.
So we should’ve waited until the colder weather to ease lockdowns? OK…..
Andrew, we’ll only be well and truly stuffed if we continue to listen to shameless propaganda and skewed stats, while the mainstream continues to censor the hundreds of thousands of top doctors, scientists and lawyers calling this all out. And big pharma and its shareholders continues to make billions from interventions with no long term safety data.
Infections are irrelevant Andrew-it is the number of deaths & hospitalisations. Deaths have been falling-not increasing. As we have seen in South Africa the doubling of infections went from every 2 days down to 9 days, numbers of hospitalisations are now falling rapidly.
Most people with it having nothing more than cold/winter bug symptoms that don’t require them to have to go into hospital.
Why are you panicking like the government/media do? They came out with a load of rubbish about how many would die last year & it didn’t happen, earlier this year & it didn’t happen. Now they are throwing around six thousand deaths per day from a new strain that is far milder than that one-which never even got to 2,000 deaths per day at it’s January peak. Wake up.
Peter many people enjoy lockdowns and extra rules. Its a weird thing, but it’s how some of the worst dictatorships have thrived in history
So why have isreal and Gibraltar had to take lockdowns despite being near 100% vaccinated Andrew. Stop reading from the script you are told to believe
Because vaccination doesn’t “cure” you of CV; it suppresses the symptoms, so you’re not ill.
Vaccination helps stop the spread of the disease, but doesn’t stop it completely.
Not everyone who is vaccinated has a good response.
So, if the disease is still circulating, more and more are getting infected, taken ill and, sadly, some die.
When the virus spreads, there’s opportunity for it to mutate – possibly to something far worse.
One thing that does prevent spread of the pandemic is “lockdown” of one sort or another. There’s plenty of evidence from around the world to show that “lockdown” type measures are effective in stemming the spread of CV.
No one (other than you and one or two others) tells me what to read. I read widely, and think critically.
I’m happy to answer any other questions you have. I’m all for enlightenment, rather than obfuscation.
Andrew: Public Health Scotland’s latest report (22 Dec) shows the majority being hospitalised, and also dying) from covid19, were treble jabbed. Unjabbed were only 27 percent of hospitalisations. This is also mirrored across England. Not very safe or effective. A good many medical experts are now number crunching official stats and calling out the propaganda. The only winners are the big pharma shareholders: . The eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders alone have made a combined $10.3 billion so far.
Highly unlikely a strain will mutate into something horrendous-let us not forget viruses do not want to kill their host, they want them to survive so they can.
So your answer every time a new strain comes along is to lock everything down-putting people out of business, destroying mental health, leading to domestic & child abuse becoming worse, people’s mental health tumbling, more millions of cancelled operations & people not even getting diagnosed-leading to people dying years, even decades ahead of their time? For something that kills a tiny fraction of people & the average age of death is over 83? You want to stop spreading a cold?
You vaccinate the vulnerable that are the ones who overwhelmingly get sick or die, the rest live with it & you build a natural immunity-clearly Omicron being so mild should be spreading throughout us to build that up, instead everybody is being implored to get more jabs-insanity.
Government looking at four jabs, Blair telling people they need four jabs. Yet we heard yesterday that two jabs provides excellent risk reduction.
People need to wake up to what this is primarily about-control by fear, eroding people’s rights & conditioning them to where they just accept every government edict in future, along with making record profits for the drug companies-no doubt many politicians have a lot of shares in these companies.
Most people injured in car crashes were wearing seatbelts.
It doesn’t follow that wearing seatbelts is useless, or dangerous: it’s simply that almost everyone in a car (other than a few nutters) wears seatbelts.
And so it is with CV.
Most of the population has been double jabbed, and many boosted,too. It follows that most people in hospital with CV have been vaccinated.
What’s important to look at is the total number in hospital now compared with last year.
Do keep asking your questions. I’m happy to help.
I think my response would have been “I hope he hasn’t got it badly and that he’ll be better soon and have no complications.”
He doesn’t really need to get “better”, as he has almost no symptoms.
Honestly letting Omicron spread would be the best thing for us-& the nearest we could get to a natural herd immunity with an very mild strain of Covid. But of course there is too much money involved & too much fear control over the population for that to be allowed to happen.
To be fair, England is pretty much bucking the trend at the moment and keeping things relatively normal (I feel sorry for clubbers elsewhere who can’t celebrate New Year’s Eve in their favourite venues). Of course, if Labour were in change we’d have been in lockdown weeks ago.
Yes, it is very sad to see Scotland, Wales & Ireland taking such draconian measures-despite deaths being so low.
Peter I don’t know if you watch ITV Meridian news at 6pm, but last night they reported that 90% of people in hospital due to the virus have NOT been vaccinated! I go back to the idea that as these people are stupid for not getting vaccinated, they should be made to pay for their medical treatment, because if they had been they would have been unlikely to need hospital treatment.
Dumpton: We’re in agreement! I’m NOT an anti-vaxxer, I just don’t see the benefit of vaccinating healthy children (not that there are currently any plans to do so in this country).
Problem is Dumpton we have no idea what age those non-vaccinated in hospital are, or what their comorbidities are. Somehow I doubt many of them are fit young people, but more likely older people with existing respiratory issues, the obese, people with Down’s etc.
Your quoting the 90% is also problematic-it comes from one medic in a hospital in London-who estimates without any documented proof or corroboration (as we have heard previously from ITV’s propaganda doctor Hilary Jones-which turned out to be incorrect) that between 80-90% of cases are the unjabbed. Even if that were true London has the highest levels of non-vaccinated in the country & many of the most likely not to get jabbed living in cramped, multiple occupancy dwellings etc, so it isn’t a mammoth surprise.
People do pay for their hospital treatment-it is called the NHS, everybody pays into it & everybody gets treatment. As I have said with somebody else who thinks this should be the case in the never ending us vs them government/tabloid media nonsense, then you would also need to charge those whose smoking, alcohol or drug issues land them in hospital & those whose lack of care require treatment-cutting themselves with chainsaws, knives, falling off poorly secured ladders etc. Either is is NHS healthcare for all or private healthcare for all.
The reality is a lot of the people in hospital with Covid end up there every winter due to underlying health problems-either self inflicted, or those unlucky in the lottery of life anyway. A lot of the elderly end up there due to poorly heated homes due to poverty.
Let’s hope children being born now are taught what a disgrace people like you were dumpton. Allowed the media to manipulate and to turn your mind against your own people rather than the leaders who lied, lied and lied to you
My child has epilepsy which leaves them at increased risk of complications if they were to catch Corona. As you can imagine her life is complicated enough already with seizures, other symptoms, meds and hospital visits without adding an extra illness or vulnerability on top. It’s likely they’ll be invited now to have this low dose vaccine. I’m pro vaccine myself so can’t see any reason not to go for it. I’ll let my child make their own decision though as she’s old enough to give consent herself once she’s considered all the facts.
Finally. For many of us with children with complex needs we have been shielding all this time. Common sense that is offered to those that are clinically vulnerable…no matter what age. The clinically vulnerable children have been forgotten which is why so many have ended up in hospital. Luckily I’m fortunate enough to have kept my little one safe and this is light at the end of the tunnel for our family.
Yes, never really understood why some of the most vulnerable in society-the ones supposed to be protected have been left to fend for themselves, while perfectly healthy young people who either don’t know they have it, or get mild cold like symptoms were instructed to line up.
I’m with you “not impressed”. If my child had been 2 years older they would have had the vaccine 6 months ago as a child with a neurological disorder. I thank my lucky stars that they’ve dodged Corona so far despite there being an outbreak in their class. So I’m guessing they’ve already had it without symptoms and have some immunity anyway. It’s hard having a child with complex needs as they have been forgotten about but it’s nice to be reminded we’re not alone.