NATALIE BARR:
Aussie kids as young as five will be receiving COVID jabs from next month, with the Therapeutic Goods Administration provisionally approving Pfizer for under-12s.
MICHAEL USHER:
Professor John Skerritt from the TGA joins us now. Good morning, John. So what are the next steps towards getting children vaccinated?
JOHN SKERRITT:
Morning. So the next step is ATAGI, which is a group of vaccination experts, working out, for example, what spacing we should use between the doses and that advice to government is expected in the next few days. So after that, then there's the logistics of either setting up state and territory systems, and also general practise, and working out the logistics of getting kids vaccinated, in particular before many of them go back to school.
NATALIE BARR:
Professor, if most of the country is vaccinated and little kids barely get any symptoms from COVID-19, explain to us why they should get this vaccine.
JOHN SKERRITT:
Well, you're right that the kids don't get as many symptoms but some of them still get quite sick and end up in hospital. And so, firstly, it's for the ability of kids to continue their education, to play with their friends, to do sports, to do all the sorts of things that kids want to do both over the holidays and during term times. Secondly, the number of kids- it's only about one in 3000, but for those it's very serious, they get this multisystem post infection inflammatory syndrome, it's a bit of a mouthful. But for the kids it's quite nasty. Even when they recover from COVID-19, they get this rash, they can have gut and neurological and heart issues and those kids can take months to recover. And finally, especially if people are not vaccinated, kids can transmit. So some studies in New South Wales, admittedly before we have the current vaccination rate, showed that two thirds of infections of kids were actually trans- two thirds of infected kids transmitted to the family. So there's a lot of reasons why it's a good idea to vaccinate kids.
MICHAEL USHER:
John, I guess a lot of parents are going to be asking a couple of key questions? The dose size, is that going to be decided on age? And which vaccine?
JOHN SKERRITT:
So the dose has already been decided. It's exactly the same vaccine but it's one third the dose. And that's common with a lot of medicines and vaccines that little kids don't need as much. And lowering the dose to a third means that some of the, we call it reactogenicity, the immediate side-effects are reduced for those kids Now to make it clear, it is a different formulation of the same vaccine and it's an orange cap.
NATALIE BARR:
Right. And so what about the other thing, I think a lot of parents will be asking for, is the side effects? What are they and what rate, what are the chances of their kids getting a side effect?
JOHN SKERRITT:
Well, in the clinical trial, where a couple of thousand kids were done, and then another couple of thousand were looked at for a longer period of time for safety, the side effects were similar to those in adults. So some, maybe half or so, for 24 hours may have had a bit of a temperature, may have has a sore arm, may have felt lethargic, but they passed. Now, there is this rare cardiac side-effect, especially for boys about 18 to 25, it seems to affect up to one in 10,000. It does seem to affect people post-puberty more than pre-puberty but, of course, we're still gathering the data on the younger people. But at least for the work we've done with teenagers, first of all, it's a very rare side-effect. Secondly, it tends to resolve in a few days for the vast majority. And thirdly, it seems to be in older teenagers which is why there's this suspicion that it's related to puberty. So we've been vaccinating a lot of people over 12 and when this rare event does occur, it's more in the 16, 17, 18-year-olds, rather than 12, 13, 14-year-olds.
MICHAEL USHER:
That's very interesting.
NATALIE BARR:
Yeah. Excellent. Okay. We'll be asking lots more questions in the coming few weeks but thanks for clearing up a lot for us.
JOHN SKERRITT:
Thank you.
NATALIE BARR:
Thanks.
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