What experts predict the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine will do for national vaccination rates
CBC
More than two million Canadian kids aged five to 11 are now eligible to get Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 pediatric vaccine — and with that comes an opportunity to get closer to reducing transmission of COVID-19 in the country.
But what will the rollout of vaccines for this age group do for national vaccination rates?
As one of the last remaining portions of the population to get vaccinated, kids aged five to 11 will play an important role, health experts say.
"Every additional person that gets vaccinated is a step in the right direction," said Dr. Tehseen Ladha, a pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Doctors and mathematicians say it's too soon to tell what the uptake in this age group will look like, as many immunization programs for kids started just days ago. Use of the pediatric vaccine was approved by Health Canada last Friday, with first doses arriving in the country on Sunday night.
"What we can do is look at the vaccination uptake in 12 to 17 year olds as sort of a proxy for how children and parents are thinking about vaccine," said Caroline Colijn, a mathematics professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and the Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health.
"Canada-wide, I think it's about 87 per cent of 12 to 17 year-olds had at least a first dose. So if we imagine that five to 11 [year olds] would be around that same number, then that does boost the overall Canadian vaccination rate to closer to 85 per cent."
WATCH | Medical expert answers questions about 1st COVID-19 vaccine approved for those aged 5-11:
The goalposts for achieving herd immunity — the point at which enough of a population is immune to a virus that it cannot continue to viably spread — have shifted during the past 19 months.
Earlier in the pandemic, the threshold suggested by some was about 70 per cent. But more recently, health experts say that threshold should be higher because of the highly contagious delta variant.
"With the original COVID strain, if we were at 80 or 85 per cent, we would probably have very, very low transmission and not have to worry," said Ladha.
"But the fact that we're here now with delta, which is so much more transmissible, means that we need a herd immunity of closer to 90 per cent, 95 per cent."
Canada isn't near those percentages yet. As of Thursday, 79.2 per cent of the eligible population aged five and up were fully vaccinated, according to CBC's vaccine tracker.
Some doctors also note it could take time for some parents to be ready to have their children vaccinated.
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