Singapore — Some parents commenting on an article about Covid vaccines being administered to five- to-11-year-olds in Israel expressed uncertainty or even outright refusal for their own children getting the jabs.
A Reuters report published in The Straits Times said that Israel had begun its rollout of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 shots to children on Nov 22 (Monday), in the hopes of outpacing a recent uptick in Covid cases.
The report pointed out that while most children infected with Covid are asymptotic, the infection still carries the risk of severe disease, with the health ministry of Israel saying that one in 3,500 infected children later developing multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a potentially fatal condition.
The Pfizer vaccine administered to children, which received emergency use from the US Food and Drug Administration on Oct 29, was found to be 90.7 per cent effective in preventing COVID-19 in children aged 5 to 11, and no serious side effects were detected.
Children in this age group are given a pediatric dose of the vaccine, which is one-third the amount given to individuals over 12. Two doses are administered within an eight-week interval.
Elsewhere in the world, including China, Hong Kong, Chile and Argentina, Sinovac and Sinopharm have been approved to vaccinate children as young as 3 or even three years old.
However, some commenters on The Straits Times’ Facebook page, which published a link to the Reuters report on Tuesday morning (Nov 23), did not approve of the jabs for children.
One netizen wrote that more vaccine options should be made available.
In Singapore, it was announced by Health Minister Ong Ye Kung last week that clinical trials for Covid vaccines for children will begin soon.
Recruitment for the study, which will be conducted by the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, were held last week and lasted only a few days before the 150 slots were filled.
Its goal is to study the efficacy and safety of the Pfizer vaccine among children in Singapore.
“Vaccinating children is not the same as vaccinating adults. So we’re looking at a whole broad range of logistical issues that can come up,” said Dr Yung Chee Fu, an infectious diseases consultant at the hospital’s paediatrics department.
He said the trial is key to protecting young children, who may be among the most vulnerable to the infection at present.
”They are actually at the highest risk to get what we call an inflammatory response post COVID, which can be quite severe. And we’ve had a number of cases,” he added. /TISG
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