COVID-19 vaccines should be prioritized for poor before kids, WHO says – National | Globalnews.ca

As children and adolescents are at lower risk of severe COVID-19 disease, countries should prioritize adults and sharing vaccine doses with the COVAX program to bring supplies to poorer countries, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday.

Some rare cases of heart inflammation called myocarditis have been reported in younger men who received vaccines based on mRNA technoloy – Pfizer BioNtech and Moderna – but these were generally mild and responded to treatment, it said.

Although that risk had not been fully determined, it was less than the risk of myocarditis linked to SARS-CoV-2 infection, it said.

Read more:
COVID-19 vaccines for kids: What Canadian parents should know

The WHO’s interim guidance was issued as more regulatory agencies authorize certain vaccines for use in children, including the United States, China, European Union, India and Israel, and most recently Canada last week.

Story continues below advertisement

“As children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults, unless they are in a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers,” the WHO said. Children can experience “long COVID-19” with prolonged symptoms but this was still under investigation, it said.


Click to play video: 'COVID-19: Provinces across Canada to start vaccinating kids aged 5-11'







COVID-19: Provinces across Canada to start vaccinating kids aged 5-11


COVID-19: Provinces across Canada to start vaccinating kids aged 5-11

 

Several risk factors for severe COVID-19 in children have been reported including older age, obesity and pre-existing conditions including type 2 diabetes, asthma and heart disease, it added.

Maintaining education for all school-aged children should be an important priority during the pandemic, although transmission mitigation measures might be needed in schools, the WHO said.

Given vaccine supply constraints, immunization programs should focus on protecting groups at high risk of hospitalization and death, the WHO said.

Story continues below advertisement

“As many parts of the world face extreme vaccine shortages, countries with high coverage in at-risk populations should prioritize global sharing of COVID-19 vaccines before vaccinating children, adolescents,” it said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Jon Boyle and Alex Richardson)

View link »





For all the latest health News Click Here 

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! TechAI is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.