Sudbury parents welcome children's COVID-19 vaccine

Sudbury's Ashley Gibson-Taylor says she was "absolutely thrilled" when she heard Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine for children aged five to 11 will start to arrive in Canada on Sunday.

Gibson-Taylor has two children who will soon be able to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Her oldest is nine and her youngest is seven years old.

She said her youngest child, who is neurodivergent and in a special-needs class, struggled with online learning.

"For us, it hopefully means that the kids will be able to stay in school," Gibson-Taylor said.

"I mean, cases have been rising in Ontario again, especially in the Sudbury area, and we're fearing constantly that the kids are going to be sent home again. Our oldest was actually home last week for a full week due to a close contact in the class."

She said online learning is hard enough for an adult, and even more challenging for children on the best of days.

"If I have to do an online course for work, I'm sitting at a computer for eight hours," Gibson-Taylor said. 

"It's absolutely terrible. So trying to force the kids to do that, in my opinion, is the hardest thing that a parent will have to do, is try and force the kids to do something that they wouldn't want to do themselves."

She said almost all of the parents she knows are excited about the vaccine and are ready to get their children vaccinated as soon as possible.

Pfizer-BioNTech has agreed to deliver more than 2.9 million doses of the children's vaccine to Canada by the end of next week. That is enough to provide a first dose to every eligible child.

Sean Staddon, also a parent based in Sudbury, said he is equally excited about the vaccine.

Staddon has two children on the autism spectrum. His daughter June is six years old and will be eligible for the vaccine as soon as it is available.

"She is on the autism spectrum and going to school in person is super important to us," Staddon said. "It's going to help us make sure her little brother has minimum exposure, who's also in school, but he's only four."

Staddon said online schooling was a challenge for his family. In addition to the challenges his children faced learning online, he and his wife work in essential fields — she is in health care and he is in mining — so it was difficult to take time off work to support their children as they learned online.