Government has not defined whether to vaccinate all boys: what experts say

A week ago, the Minister of Health, Carla Vizzotti, and the Legal and Technical Secretary, Vilma Ibarra, presented the DNU to unblock negotiations with Pfizer and other laboratories. It worked: Chief of Staff Santiago Cafiero announced an agreement with Moderna on Thursday.

All three stressed the need to bring “pediatric vaccines“Against the coronavirus, a very appealing expression for families with children, but perhaps confusing: it could suggest that not only children and adolescents with risk factors will be immune, but everyone in general. It’s like that?

Asked about this question, the Ministry of Health replied that “groups and populations are developing in the world” and that this “also enters into the considerations of the next steps of the vaccination plan”.

This “expansion”, in the immediate future, would be for children and adolescents with co-morbidities. Reaching a population of older children was, in this case, considered an idea “early” by the authorities.

If, after having vaccinated anyone under the age of 18 with underlying diseases against Covid, the authorities decided to extend the strategy to the rest of the minors, Argentina would join the more than 20 countries who have already vaccinated boys with Pfizer since 12 years.

Among these nations, there are several regional pairs: Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Colombia.

However, this expansion would not only involve complying with obvious steps, such as obtaining authorization from the ANMAT or having the strategy recommended by the National Vaccination Commission (CoNaIn).

It would also imply that the Ministry of Health, like any health authority must deal with an epidemic, opts for one of the two options:

A) Mitigate the greatest risk of epidemics as soon as possible, by “saving” those who may be most affected.

B) Use a longer and more expensive strategy to nip the problem in the bud. That is, to stand with the objective of stopping the circulation of the pathogen.

Horizons

Each year, the influenza vaccination program targets option “A”. It is not intended to stop the circulation of the virus but to mitigate the worst effects. The campaign against the coronavirus now pursues the same goal.

Given that children and adolescents are the least affected by Covid (although it is debatable whether this claim applies equally to those over 15 or 16 years of age), expanding vaccination to these segments would require a total change in the proposed health horizon.

explained it Ricardo Rüttimann, infectologist of the Foundation of the Center for Infectious Studies (Funcei) and member of the CoNaIn: “I had the opportunity to listen to the WHO advisers a few days ago and they recommended to me that while vaccines do not reach, boys, unless otherwise specified, they would not be in the primordial ages to vaccinate”.

In other words, “decreasing virus circulation is not the goal. The objective today is to reduce mortality and hospitalizations ”.

“With bitch we don’t: those who infect the most are elementary school children and yet we do not vaccinate them. At the level of public health we do not plan to block traffic“, he summed up.

Rüttimann, as an individual, suggested that he would not support changing the current campaign target. On the one hand, because the shortage of vaccines and the potential indication for a third dose “oblige us to focus on those most at risk”.

But, in addition, because they observe with concern a very low adherence to vaccines on the official schedule. “The priority right now is to comply with the official pediatric vaccination schedule,” he said.

Thousands or millionsIn addition to this, you will need to know more about it.

The digital cost of immunizing children and adolescents at risk or, on the contrary, all of them, is not less.

The authorities have at least three options. The first one, vaccinate the entire population under 17. Based on Indec’s projections for 2021, they are close to 12.5 million people.

Although Pfizer (and surely Moderna, Janssen and Sputnik will soon couple them, among others) already markets its doses for people over 12 years old and in China Sinopharm and Sinovac are applied from 3 years, no laboratory did it for children under that age.

But it is presumed that they will move forward and define doses suitable for children 6 months to 11 years. In fact, companies like Pfizer are already doing this.

The second option is to authorize vaccination only for, according to the terms of Angela Gentile, head of epidemiology at the children’s hospital “Ricardo Gutiérrez”, the “adolescents aged 12 to 17», With and without risk factors. They are certain 3.5 million people.

The third option (the most likely to be implemented) is to limit the Covid vaccination to boys with risk factors, in principle, those from 12 to 17 years old.

How many are they? Bugle could not specify this data. They did not provide it from the Ministry of Health or the Argentinian Pediatric Society (SAP), where they explained that they did not have these numbers or an opinion on the issue that guides these lines: which sector of the pediatric population to vaccinate against Covid.

According to Gentile, “patients with underlying disease ages 12 to 17 would be around 100,000, but it is not a document officially kept by the authorities. The same is true in the adult population: as there are many underlying diseases, it is difficult to keep records ”.

Would Gentile vaccinate all the boys? At the beginning, he recalled that “age is the greatest comorbidity, you must therefore fill in the two doses for the entire population at risk ”.

“In a second moment and short term it would include adolescents with underlying illnesses. Because? Everyone who was admitted and who became complicated or died had risk factors. There aren’t that many and it makes a lot of sense to vaccinate them, ”he said.

Finally, he said, “vaccination of the entire pediatric population would be a last step, with a strong and consistent vaccination program, with two doses in the entire target population. For that, we have to see what goals we set for ourselves. Vaccinating everyone would mean slowing down transmissibility. It is a point to be discussed ”.

AS