The High Authority for Health (HAS) recommends vaccination against Covid-19 for children aged 5 to 11 at risk. This concerns at least “360,000 children” who have “a higher risk of getting a severe form”, according to the pediatrician Daniel Floret, vice-president of the technical commission of the vaccinations of the HAS this Tuesday on franceinfo.
franceinfo: Why do you recommend vaccination for children aged 5 to 11 at risk?
Daniel Floret: These are children who are carriers of chronic diseases including heart disease, heart defects, severe lung disease, severe forms of asthma that require continued treatment, liver disease, kidney disease, and of course children who are being treated. for cancer, leukemia. A whole series of chronic diseases for which we know that these children have a higher risk of developing a severe form and almost all of the children who died from Covid-19 were carriers of this type of pathology. There aren’t many, a dozen, but there are all the same. That makes a little more than 360,000 children who have the pathologies identified, but there are probably others because there are rare diseases that do not appear in the studies. Doctors, on an ad hoc basis, can also offer this vaccination to children who have rare pathologies that are not on the list but for which there is also a risk. It is also recommended for children close to immunocompromised people because they have very limited protection, they respond very poorly to vaccines, so vaccinating those around them is one way to protect them. Children around them are also children, especially school-aged children who currently have a fairly high risk of getting an infection with Covid-19.
Which vaccine do you recommend?
So far, only the Pfizer vaccine has obtained marketing authorization in this age group with a dosage that is three times lower than the dosage used in adults. Vaccines contain 10 micrograms of antigens while the vaccine that is used in adults contains 30 micrograms.
The European Medicines Agency more widely recommends vaccination for all children. Why not you ?
It is well known that children usually have mild forms of the disease so the individual benefit of vaccination is not as obvious as in adults or in children with risk factors. In addition, the decline in terms of tolerance of vaccination of young children is very limited since, in clinical trials, there are still not many children. We will soon have the data of the American experience since Americans will have vaccinated several million children, so if there are particular tolerance problems, it will appear in clinical trials. And then, there are ethical problems, problems of acceptability which indeed deserve that we hear the stakeholders before making these recommendations.