Chile has announced the extension of its vaccine program against Covid-19 and the administration of the Coronavac vaccine to children from the age of 3 in the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, the Institute of Public Health (ISP) has announced.
Since September, the ISP has approved the administration of the same vaccine to children aged 6 to 15 years. The PfizerBioNtech vaccine is preferred for the age group of 16 to 18 years.
The approval of the ISP is given after studies conducted by Sinovac in China, which “showed that the vaccine had the highest number of side effects in children aged 12 to 17 years, and that no serious side effects occurred in the age group 3- “This is extremely important,” said Herberto Garcia, the institute’s director.
Chile is thus in line with other countries in the region, such as Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela, which have approved the vaccination of children from the age of three. Cuba and Nicaragua reduced this age to 2 years.
The European regulatory authority, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), today approved the administration of PfizerBioNtech vaccine to children 5 to 11 years of age against Covid-19, the first vaccine approved in Europe for this age group.
Outside the European continent, the Pfizer vaccine has already been approved for children aged 5 to 11 in some countries, such as the USA, Israel and Canada.
Chile is one of the countries with the highest vaccination coverage in the world: almost 16 of its 19 million inhabitants have received a full vaccination schedule (83.6%) and more than 42 million doses have been given, mainly Sinovac vaccines (24 million), Pfizer / BioNtech (13 million) and Astrazeneca (4 million).
According to official data, as of March 2020, 1,751,769 cases have been identified and 38,218 deaths have been recorded.
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