COVID-19 vaccines for kids: What Canadian parents should know
Global News
Is the COVID-19 vaccine safe for kids? How do I get my child vaccinated? Here are answers to these and other questions about the vaccine.
Health Canada approved the COVID-19 vaccine for children aged five to 11 years old on Friday, and provinces have already begun booking appointments.
“This is very good news for adults and children alike,” said Dr. Supriya Sharma, a senior medical advisor with Health Canada, at a press conference Nov. 19.
“It provides another tool to protect Canadians, and to the relief of many parents, will help bring back a degree of normality to children’s lives, allowing them to more safely do the things that they have missed during the last 20 months.”
Here are some answers to questions parents might have about the shots.
Children and youth are less likely to get seriously ill from COVID-19, Health Canada says. But they can still get sick or have the virus without symptoms, spread it to others, and experience long-term effects if they get infected. Children are also susceptible to a rare but serious complication called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), where various organs like the kidneys, heart and lungs can become inflamed.
Children with underlying medical conditions might be at higher risk of complications from COVID-19, Health Canada says. Although it’s very rare, some children have died after contracting COVID-19 in Canada over the course of the pandemic.
“We’ve done studies across Canada that have shown that there have been a few hundred kids hospitalized for either acute COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome of children, which is a dysregulated immune response that produces a highly inflammatory state,” said Dr. Jesse Papenburg, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Montreal Children’s Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre.
Studies have shown that half of kids who end up in the hospital due to COVID-19 had no underlying conditions that predisposed them to severe infection, he added.
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