canada has vaccinated more than 725,000 kids under 12 so far. will it be enough to stop another covid wave?

more than 725,000 five- to 11-year-olds across canada have received their first dose of a covid-19 vaccine, with tens of thousands more appointments booked, a heartening start, say those leading vaccination efforts, just two weeks into the rollout of shots for some of the country’s youngest kids.the enthusiasm varies across the provinces, the differences following some of the same patterns initially seen with adults, with 34 per cent of eligible children vaccinated in quebec as of thursday, versus 19 per cent in alberta.it’s also too soon to know whether demand will hold and reach or exceed the “aspirational” goals of some provinces of having at least half of eligible children vaccinated by the new year.in the u.s., daily doses of pfizer’s shots given to five- to 11-year-olds have slowed after a first short burst of high demand, “a drop that preceded the thanksgiving holiday and has continued since,” the kaiser family foundation reported this week, suggesting eager parents have already come forward. as of dec. 5, nearly 4.8 million of the 28 million eligible kids in the u.s. had received at least one dose of the two-dose pfizer regimen. fewer than half of american children are expected to be fully vaccinated in the coming months, reuters reported friday.canada is home to roughly 2.9 million children ages five to 11, the very age group now seeing the highest covid-19 infection rates in the country, though hospitalizations remain low. the campaign to vaccinate kids, along with third doses for adults, has taken on new weight amid a fresh delta-driven winter wave forecast and the looming omicron variant — a “cruel reminder,” federal health minister jean-yves duclos said friday, of the virus’s ability to quickly change the global epidemiology picture.“we may need to change gears, adjust our plans or change our behaviour to meet the needs of the moment,” said duclos, who warned those considering travelling that the situation abroad is “both risky and unstable” as omicron makes its presence more widely known.scientists still don’t fully understand how the heavily mutated variant behaves, though it’s thought at least two times more transmissible than delta and able to slip around some immunity from vaccines and past infections. even without omicron, daily new cases are increasing, rising in ontario and quebec to numbers not seen since may, and new federal modelling suggests that, if omicron becomes the dominant strain, daily case counts in canada could soar, from 3,300 currently, to about 26,000 by mid-january.if delta holds dominant, daily cases could be as low as 2,900 if transmission is reduced by 15 per cent, or as high as 15,000, if transmission increases 15 per cent.this time last year canada was experiencing double the number of daily cases, and more than double the number of people with covid in hospitals, federal officials noted friday. and while the situation is changing, vaccines, and upping vaccine coverage, continue to provide an edge over the virus.still polls going into health canada’s late november approval of the pfizer-biontech shot for the under 12’s suggested only half of canadian parents planned to immediately have their kids immunized; 23 per cent said they would never give their kids a single shot, while the remainder said they preferred to wait and see how other kids do, or were simply unsure.mahyar etminan is a drug safety researcher and professor in the faculty of medicine at the university of british columbia. his seven-year-old just became eligible for vaccination. “i’m just waiting to get more data on the safety issues before i vaccinate her.” he’s also “sort of thinking along the same lines” for his 12-year-old.“i’m very pro-vaccine and i believe that children eventually have to be vaccinated,” said etminan, who is also an epidemiologist. “but i think one reason that parents may be concerned is that we don’t really have the safety record that we have for adults, especially for outcomes like myocarditis (the heart inflammation that, in rare cases, has shown up in older adolescents and young adults) in this demographic, simply because it’s just so new.”he said the messaging around childhood covid shots hasn’t been as granular as it should be. “we heard that a lot of kids need to be vaccinated, it’s efficacious, it’s very safe, but i don’t hear anything beyond that to say, ‘we understand your concerns.’” while the trial used to approve the pfizer vaccine for kids involved 3,109 children who were immunized, any rare, or very rare events that occurred at a frequency less often than one in 1,000 wouldn’t be detected in a sample that size.data on myocarditis, or heart inflammation, for five- to 11-year-olds is still unavailable, “and this information is necessary for parents to be able to make informed decisions on vaccinating their children,” he said. “in areas where (covid) cases are small, i do understand where parents are coming from. they’re just waiting to get a bit more safety data as to how this vaccine behaves in this age.”

scott halperin, director of the canadian centre for vaccinology and a dalhousie university scientist, gets the hesitancy. hesitancy has grown as we started to “age de-escalate” with the shots, he said. “there was a bit more hesitancy as you got younger and younger and younger.”but young kids remain the only large, unvaccinated group.fewer than one per cent of children infected with sars-cov-2 are hospitalized, but some children have developed a rare post-covid complication known as mis-c — multi-system inflammatory syndrome — that can cause inflammation of the heart and other organs. in canada, there have been 19 covid-related deaths in children 19 and under, and nearly 2,000 hospitalizations.while rare cases of myocarditis have been seen in 12- to 19-year-olds, evidence suggests children are six to 10 times more likely to be get myocarditis if infected with sars-cov-2. and myocarditis unrelated to vaccination is generally less common in five- to 11-year-olds, so the risk of the vaccine triggering myocarditis in the under 12’s may be even lower than it is in older adolescents, halperin and colleagues wrote in a commentary and review for canada’s covid-19 immunity task force.when vaccines for adults were quickly brought to market, people worried about shortcuts, and while there were shortcuts, they were administrative ones, not safety ones, halperin said.“for children, the vaccine has gotten full authorization; it’s not an emergency authorization. it was given full regulatory approval for children.”in the u.s., millions of children have been vaccinated against covid. “people are saying, ‘how do we know what’s going to happen in 10 years?’ we don’t. but adverse events after vaccination pretty much occur in that first six to eight weeks,” halperin said. there’s never been a case of a vaccine suddenly producing a problem five or 10 years out, he said.“it’s not to say we won’t continue to monitor and look for things, but in our past experience with any other vaccine, that just doesn’t happen.”some parents fear the shots will render their child infertile. “this is just one that never dies,” dr. paul offit, a vaccine expert at children’s hospital philadelphia, said on a recent episode of the american medical association’s covid-19 update. “it was based on a false notion. and you try the best you can … (but) it’s really hard to un-scare people. once you scare them, it’s hard to unring the bell.”the pfizer shots for elementary school kids have already sparked campaigns by those opposed to vaccination. protesters who followed and shouted at parents outside a prince george, b.c., children’s vaccination clinic had to be escorted away by rcmp. “we don’t need any batman or other cartoon superheroes to promote experimental genetic mrna therapy injections,” a toronto father protesting school-based vaccination clinics for five- to 11-year-olds recently told york regional council.phillip anthony isn’t aware of any protesters outside the pediatric vaccine clinics he’s helping organize. “overwhelmingly there is a lot of positivity that comes from these clinics,” said anthony, manager of the east toronto mobile vaccine strategy at michael garron hospital.“we have great uptake so far. i think a lot of parents and a lot of children have embraced the vaccine this early in the campaign.”while the local magazine reported that vaccine uptake rates among the five- to 11-year-old’s are lowest in neighbourhoods experiencing some of the highest rates of covid, the same was initially true with the adult vaccines, anthony said.“there are neighbourhoods that just need a little bit more time,” he said.“it’s still very early days in the campaign. we’re just getting warmed up.”– with additional reporting by the canadian press• email: skirkey@postmedia.com | twitter: sharon_kirkey

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