Health Ministry to start vaccinating babies, toddlers against Covid next week
The Public Health Ministry will start administering anti-Covid vaccines to babies aged six months and all children up to four years old next Wednesday, its permanent secretary said on Thursday.
Dr Opas Karnkawinpong said Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul will chair a ceremony on Wednesday to inoculate this youngest group.
Disease Control Department (DCD) director-general Dr Tharet Krutnairawiwong said the ministry had so far administered 143 million doses of Covid vaccines to children aged five years and above as well as adults.
To cover all of the population, the ministry had decided to administer vaccines to the youngest group who have not being inoculated.
Tharet said this group would be given red-cap Pfizer vaccines suitable for kids aged six months to four years old.
The first lot of Pfizer vaccines for young kids will arrive on Friday and the Medical Sciences Department will randomly check the vaccines’ quality before they are distributed to provincial health offices, he said.
According to earlier registrations by parents, the ministry expects about 300,000 kids to be vaccinated, Tharet added.
Sopon Iamsirithaworn, director of the CDC’s General Communicable Diseases Bureau, said children from six months to four years old are the only group that has not being vaccinated against Covid so far.
During the height of the Omicron spread, kids in this group had a rate of illness and death three times higher than older children, Sopon said.
The youngest group would be administered three shots with intervals. Each would be a 0.2-millilitre dose. The first and second jabs will be given one month apart, while the third will be administered two months after the second, he said.
The ministry has been monitoring the side effects of mRNA Covid vaccines since last year and found that the chances of recipients developing myocarditis were very low, Sopon said.
He noted that in foreign countries, the rate of young kids developing myocarditis was much lower than that of older children.
Meanwhile, the chance of the kids developing Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C, was also very low as it was found in only one per million abroad, Sopon added.
