Vaccination Commission endorses vaccine against covid-19 for children from 6 months to 4 years

Children between 6 months and 4 years old will soon be able to get vaccinated against covid-19 in Costa Rica. The National Commission for Vaccination and Epidemiology (CNVE), the entity in charge of ruling on the guidelines for the different inoculation campaigns, gave the green light to this measure and communicated it this Friday afternoon.

This decision comes a week after the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the emergency use authorization for biologics from Pfizer and Moderna for these ages.

With this endorsement, the National Emergency Commission (CNE), the agency in charge of contracts, you can now negotiate the doses of the vaccines.

Vaccination management will be assessed in the next session of the CNVE, depending on the vaccines that will be available in an appropriate formulation for administration in this age group.

The application will depend on the stock and its arrival in the country. The Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) will have the logistics and will communicate it.

“The logistics of applying these pediatric vaccines for this group will be communicated prior to the availability of the doses in national territory,” Health said in a press release.

By a provision of the CNVE taken last November, vaccination against covid-19 will be mandatory for all minors in Costa Rica.

How many minors could be covered if this vaccination is implemented? According to the information reported by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), there is a projection of 360,248 children between 0 and 4 years old. It should be noted that only those older than six months would be vaccinated.

“The migrant population is not counted either, so the final number of children to be vaccinated may be different from that projected by INEC, since it may vary depending on whether all the children are in the country or whether they have arrived in the national territory. ”, indicated the Ministry of Health before a previous consultation.

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There are two products for this population: Pfizer’s with the BioNTech company and Moderna’s. Costa Rica has a contract with Pfizer for the biologicals of the other populations.

The vaccine against covid-19 Pfizer y BioNTech consists of three doses. The first two would be applied 21 days apart from each other, the third at least two months after the second.

They will receive three microgram doses in each of the injections. This is less than a third of what children aged 5 to 11 receive (who get 10 micrograms) and a tenth of what is injected into adolescents and adults (who get 30 micrograms).

Initially, this biological would be of two doses, but later analyzes showed that a third was necessary to achieve the necessary response in the immune system.

The biological of Modernon the other hand, is two doses of 25 micrograms each, a quarter of what an adult receives. These doses are placed with a difference of four weeks between each other. The FDA indicated that these two doses did give high protection to minors, but that it is possible that, as has happened with adolescents and adults, an additional dose may be required later.

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