Children aged between six months and four years old who are deemed clinically vulnerable will be offered two doses of a Covid vaccine, public health bodies in the UK have announced.
The move, revealed by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) after approval by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), comes after the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approved for children of this age by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in December.
Children who are not clinically vulnerable are not included in the UK-wide offer.
“For the vast majority of infants and children, Covid-19 causes only mild symptoms, or sometimes no symptoms,” said Prof Wei Shen Lim, the chair of the JCVI’s Covid-19 committee.
“However, for a small group of children with pre-existing health conditions it can lead to more serious illness, and for them vaccination is the best way to increase their protection.”
According to NHS England, the vaccines will begin to be offered to those eligible in England from mid-June. The body has advised that parents should wait to be contacted before coming forward.
UKHSA added that more than 1 million children aged six months to four years in the US had received at least one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine since June.
“Data from the US showed the most common side-effects reported were similar to those seen with other vaccines given in this age group, such as irritability or crying, sleepiness and fever,” it stated.
Dr Mary Ramsay, the head of immunisation at the UKHSA, said the protection offered by the vaccines could be important to children who were at greater risk of severe illness.
“The virus is not going away, so I would encourage all parents to bring their child forward if they are eligible,” she added.
The health secretary, Steve Barclay, also noted that children were at very low risk of harm from Covid. “However, there are a very small number of children with health conditions which make them particularly vulnerable, and for those children we want to give parents the choice as to whether they wish to vaccinate their at-risk child or not,” he said.
Christina Pagel, a professor of operational research at University College London and a member of the Independent Sage group, welcomed the decision but said it should cover the whole age group and not just those with other health conditions.
“Hospitalisations with Covid are much higher in children under six than they are for children aged six to 17, with over 13,000 admissions in 2022 alone,” she said, adding that intensive care admissions for children under the age of six with Covid were higher when adjusted for population than for any age group under the age of 45.
“Six months to under-fives are the least likely to have been previously infected because they are generally born uninfected, and after six months protection from maternal antibodies has mostly waned, so six-month-old babies are facing their first exposure unprotected from either vaccination or previous infection and this risk only increases as they mix more in nurseries or other childcare,” she added.
“The paediatric vaccines work very well to protect against severe outcomes, and they have been shown to be very safe. I think we should offer all parents the choice to protect their infants, toddlers and young children through vaccination before their first Covid infection.”
Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, said the announcement would come as a relief to families with clinically vulnerable children around the UK, but said the vaccine should be included in pre-school regimens for all children in this age group.
“The paediatric dose vaccines have an excellent safety profile and are known to offer very good protection against severe Covid and, although not long-lasting or 100%, against both transmission and the incidence of long Covid,” he said.
