Youngest eligible Manitobans can get COVID-19 vaccine at pharmacies when feds approve it for kids

Manitoba pharmacists will be allowed to vaccinate all kids age five to 11 once they become eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, the province's health minister says.

Previously, pharmacists were limited to vaccinating people age seven and older.

They will now be allowed to give shots to five- and six-year-olds, Health Minister Audrey Gordon said at a news conference Wednesday.

"We know that COVID cases are rising in Manitoba and children make up many of those cases," Gordon said.

The change comes as a result of a policy change by the government that pharmacists called for last week, and will also allow them to give seasonal flu vaccines to kids as young as five.

More to come

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Manitoba will be ready to start vaccinating kids age five to 11 against COVID-19 within a week of approval by Health Canada and the arrival of doses for children in the province, officials say.

Health Canada is still expected to approve Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine for children in that age group near the end of November, officials from Manitoba's vaccine implementation task force said at a technical briefing Wednesday morning.

Once the province gets the low-dose vaccine for that age group, it will take about a week to ship the shots to the sites across Manitoba where they'll be administered, officials said.

Premier Heather Stefanson, Health Minister Audrey Gordon and Dr. Joss Reimer, medical lead of the province's vaccine task force, are providing more details at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

The plan for the youth vaccine rollout was informed by a recent Leger survey done for the province that suggests 75 per cent of Manitoba parents with kids age five to 11 plan to get them vaccinated, while 15 per cent aren't sure and 10 per cent will not, officials said at the technical briefing.

Leger spoke with 800 Manitobans, and 275 of them were parents of children under 12, said a slide presented at the technical briefing.

The same survey suggested parents are comfortable taking their kids anywhere to get them immunized, so the province decided to roll out the shots in eight different settings to start.