-as procurement of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines gets underway

WITH the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to soon become available in Guyana, Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony, is urging all parents to ensure that their children are fully immunised against the coronavirus (COVID-19) and the variants of the disease.
Dr. Anthony, during his daily COVID-19 update on Thursday, said that the two vaccines will soon arrive in the country and his ministry will be working closely with the Ministry of Education to ensure that school-aged children receive their jabs.
“We expect that very shortly we will get those vaccines. We will be working very closely with the Ministry of Education to ensure that we roll this out to children in schools,” Dr Anthony said, adding: “It is a choice, but we would hope that parents understand that for children to return to school, they should be in a safe environment and we should encourage them to make sure that their children get the vaccine.”

A research from a 2000-plus sample size in 2020 had shown that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 100 per cent effective in children ages 12 through 15.
In late 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed emergency use of the vaccine from age 16. This year, the vaccine was given to children in the US from ages 12 to 15.
Moderna vaccine was shown to be around 95 percent effective in clinical trials in preventing symptomatic illness in adults.
In March, Moderna started clinical trials of its vaccine in children ages 6 months to 11-years-old and it has since proven to be effective and safe for children.
“These vaccines are quite safe. The literature on Pfizer and Moderna is out there for everybody to scrutinise. Millions of doses have been used across the world and the results were deemed quite good,” the health minister assured. Dr. Anthony, during his plea to parents, highlighted that with the rapid spreading and presence of variants in some neighbouring countries, persons must think of the severity of the effects the virus can have on their children.

“The other thing that one would have to understand is the new delta variant that is causing a lot of infections in the United States, those infections are occurring more in the unvaccinated populations and if children remain unvaccinated, unfortunately they can become infected and when they get infected is not a mild form of the disease in children but we are getting a more severe form of the disease.” He added that in order to stay ahead of the disease and the variants, the younger population must be immunised and protected from contracting them.
“If we are going to stay ahead of the Delta variant then one of the things that we will have to do urgently is to protect our children from this disease.”
“The Delta variant is in circulation in 142 countries and just yesterday we saw an announcement from the Government of Trinidad and Tobago, that they have identified two cases of Delta. As I have said before we have to operate as if all the different variants are here and take the measures accordingly,” he added.
Additionally, the minister noted that the Ministry of Health is expecting a batch of Sputnik V second doses by next week for the country’s adult population.