What is the dose? What are the side effects? When will it be available in BC?
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On Thursday, Health Canada approved the first COVID-19 vaccine for infants and preschool children.
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The federal agency found Moderna’s mRNA vaccine to be safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 in children six months to five years of age following an independent review.
What is the dose? What are the side effects? When will it be available in BC? Here’s what you need to know about the new injection.
Q: What is the vaccine?
Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine is the first licensed COVID-19 vaccine in Canada for children six months to five years.
The vaccine will be administered as a two-dose primary series. At 25 micrograms, it’s a quarter of the approved size for adults (100 mcg) and half the approved dose for children ages 6 to 11 (50 mcg).
On Thursday, the National Immunization Advisory Committee gave the green light for provinces to offer the vaccine, recommending that the vaccine “may” be offered to children in this age group. It recommends an interval of eight weeks between vaccinations for most children and a third dose and an interval of four to eight weeks for children with immunocompromised health conditions.
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Q: How effective is this vaccine?
Health Canada said the results of the Moderna vaccine trials showed that the immune response in young children was equivalent to the immune response of 18- to 25-year-olds to the adult formulation.
The trial was conducted when Omicron was the dominant strain and found that the vaccine was 50.6% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection in children younger than 23 months and 36.8% effective in children from two to five years.
Q: What are the side effects?
Health Canada said no safety issues were identified in the study. The most common reactions were similar to those reported with other pediatric vaccines, including soreness at the site, drowsiness, and loss of appetite. Less commonly, some children had a mild to moderate fever, swelling at the injection site, nausea, tender lymph nodes under the arm, headaches, and muscle aches.
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Health Canada said there were uncertainties about the vaccine because it is new and long-term data is not yet available. For example, there is little data on the risk of very rare reactions such as myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart tissue, although no cases emerged in the trials.
Q: Can my child get it at the same time as his other childhood immunizations?
NACI recommends that the vaccine be given two weeks before or after another vaccine to help identify if a potential side effect is due to the COVID-19 vaccine or the other vaccine.
Q: What is the risk of my child getting COVID-19 or being hospitalized from the virus?
As of March 2022 in BC, there have been more than 12,800 children ages four and under who have contracted COVID. Nearly 70 percent contracted the virus during the 2021/2022 school year, according to the BC Disease Control Data Center.
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Most children who get COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases, but some experience more severe illness or develop long-term symptoms. Hospitalization and ICU admission for children have increased across Canada since the highly contagious Omicron became the dominant variant.
The average monthly rate of hospitalization due to COVID for children aged six months to 4 years jumped from 1.4 per 100,000 in 2020 and 2021 to 15.9 per 100,000 in the first three months of 2022, NACI said.
BC has recorded two deaths among children aged four and under; 299 have been hospitalized with COVID-19.
Q: Can I get vaccinated in BC?
The vaccine is not yet available in BC
Health Canada has indicated that there is a “sufficient supply” of vaccines that will be shipped to the provinces “very soon”.
You can enroll children in the province Get Vaccinated website to be notified when they can make an appointment.
— with Canadian Press archives
