Manitoba preps for age 5-11 vaccine rollout

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This article was published 20/10/2021 (1481 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Children ages five to 11 could receive the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as late November, as Manitoba’s vaccine task force fine-tunes its plan to deliver shots in anticipation of Health Canada approval.

Task force medical lead Dr. Joss Reimer said Wednesday her team is preparing to offer doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to that age range at the end of November.

On Monday, the pharmaceutical giant made a submission to Health Canada and requested the federal drug regulator approve its COVID-19 vaccine, known now as Comirnaty, for use in children aged five to 11.

“This is a really important development for Manitobans, because achieving high vaccination rates in both adults and children is key to controlling the spread of the virus, ending the crisis phase of the pandemic in Manitoba and protecting the mental health of children by keeping schools open and ensuring that kids can participate in all of their normal activities,” Reimer said.

Reimer said Health Canada has provided estimates on its timeline for authorization, which would require at least two weeks to perform an independent and scientific review of the data in Pfizer-BioNTech’s submission.

“We’re planning for being ready by the end of November, but again that’s a bit of an estimate,” she said. “There’s no way for us to know how long Health Canada will take to complete their approval.”

Once the vaccine is approved for use, it will be available at a number of local venues, including pharmacies, physicians’ offices and existing provincial public health clinics, in addition to school-based clinics.

“Because we don’t for sure it will be approved — and we certainly don’t know when — we haven’t been able to finalize any plans for a school-based program,” Reimer noted.

She said Pfizer-BioNTech has signalled a large supply of the pediatric doses will be available “fairly quickly” should approval occur. (Pediatric doses are one-third the size of the shot provided to people 12 or older.)

“We also don’t know exactly how long it will take to get doses from Pfizer, nor exactly how many we’re going to get,” Reimer said. “We only know that they’ve been quite optimistic that it will be a large number.”

According to the province, there are an estimated 125,207 children in Manitoba between five and 11 years old.

While severe outcomes due to COVID-19 occur with less frequency in children, there have been cases in Manitoba where children have required critical care due to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, Reimer said.

Children are currently making up a large proportion of new COVID-19 cases and an “increasingly larger proportion in this wave compared to previous waves,” Reimer said.

“We’re certainly optimistic that as we can open up eligibility to this group… (it) will have a major impact on the number of cases in Manitobans going forward.”

Reimer expects uptake of the vaccine among children aged five to 11 to be consistent with immunization levels among youths 12 to 17; as of Wednesday, 74 per cent of Manitobans in that age group were fully vaccinated.

However, she said vaccine hesitancy could pose a greater barrier to immunization in younger children when compared to other age groups. The task force may offer town halls in collaboration with Doctors Manitoba to reach out to parents and guardians to answer questions ahead of time.

She said a pediatric advisory committee is also involved in planning for the rollout and eager to connect with families and provide information necessary to make an informed decision.

While Reimer has not yet been able to review data from Pfizer-BioNTech’s submission to Health Canada, she said the pharmaceutical company found no unexpected safety signals in its study and a strong immune response.

However, Reimer said she expects to see an increased risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) following vaccination, in line with what’s been observed in older children.

“And we take that very seriously, which is why we’re cautious about what we recommend,” she said. “But we have also been reassured at what happens with the cases of myocarditis… everywhere that’s been monitoring this, have been seeing that the myocarditis cases are very mild.”

As of Oct. 8, the Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada have received 913 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis, which is inflammation of the lining around the heart, following vaccination.

In most cases, Reimer said people experiencing myocarditis following vaccination are treated with anti-inflammatory drugs and see their symptoms resolve completely.

At this time, chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said his office is not planning to introduce vaccination requirements for children aged five to 11, if and when a vaccine is approved for use.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca