Push for kids to receive the Pfizer Covid-19 jab

Children could have the opportunity of being vaccinated against Covid-19 within months after ­Pfizer applied for approval of its jab for 12 to 15-year-olds.

Vials of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. Picture: Getty Images

Children could have the opportunity of being vaccinated against Covid-19 within months after ­Pfizer applied for approval of its jab for 12 to 15-year-olds.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration is assessing the application which, if approved, means Australia would follow the US, Singapore and Israel in vaccinating the younger age group, ­depending on advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the TGA was working as quickly as possible to assess the Pfizer application. New Zealand has already approved the Pfizer vaccine for use in teenagers.

“The TGA is currently assessing an application from Pfizer,” Mr Hunt said. “While they work at the fastest possible pace, they work to the fastest possible safe pace.

“Once they have completed all of their safety assessments, then they’ll make their decision. I ­respectfully won’t pre-empt that. But that’s the only application of which I’m aware at this stage for children.

“The TGA will run to the point of working through all of their safety assessments, all of the efficacy assessments, and then making their independent findings.”

Health experts said it was vital that Australia had the means to vaccinate children, who are more susceptible to infection from the Delta variant.

Infectious diseases physician Michelle Ananda-Rajah said the lack of a plan to vaccinate young teenagers was “proving to be a real blind spot” in Australia’s vaccination strategy.

“I think that it is a blind spot in pandemic control and we can’t ­afford to neglect it,” Dr Ananda-Rajah said. “We’ve seen from other jurisdictions that there have been large outbreaks in schools amongst children. And we know from the statistics that between seven and 10 per cent of children who are infected develop long Covid. We’ve also seen that one in 5000 kids develops this multi-­system inflammatory syndrome.”

Dr Ananda-Rajah questioned why there had been no public discussion by the federal government of the importance of vaccinating children who are aged between 12 and 15 years.

“It hasn’t even been floated,” she said. “We are well and truly an outlier. I think parents and teachers need to have some certainty.”

Andrew Miller, a spokesman for the Australian Medical Association in Western Australia, also called for an urgent plan to vaccinate children.

“We mustn’t let teenagers and children become the victims of the government’s incompetence at rolling out vaccination in a timely manner, thereby compounding their error in not having a diverse range of vaccines available in the first place,” Dr Miller said.

“Australians, I suspect, will not take kindly to the idea that their children are in some ways dis­advantaged when it comes to the vaccine rollout.

“We know that to have any prospect of protecting younger children, we want to protect them through herd immunity, so we need 80 per cent of population 12 years and older vaccinated.”

Dr Miller said it was also vital that the vaccination coverage targets that would be set by the federal government during its four-stage plan to reopen the country included younger children as well as teenagers.

“There’s no biological reason to expect that the vaccines won’t be safe in younger children,” Dr Miller said.

“We need to include all children in the targets.

“If that means that we have to delay our reopening to the rest of the world then that is exactly what we will have to do, because we cannot use our children to just trade them away in some sort of economic deal with the devil that will allow us to go to Bali while our children are suffering from long Covid.”