Is it mandatory to vaccinate children against Covid-19?

April 26, 2022 13:16 GMT+7

Ms. Nguyen Lan Anh (Hanoi) said that her 10-year-old child, who is in grade 4, has not yet contracted Covid-19 but she still has not registered her child to be vaccinated. After seeing that she did not register her child, the teacher called to ask why the child did not have Covid-19 and the family did not vaccinate. Lan Anh said it was the family’s choice.

However, when her daughter came home from school, she told her mother to ask if any of her friends had not yet had Covid-19 and stood up. When I stood up, she asked me if I had the Covid-19 vaccine. Confused, I answered yes. In the evening, the teacher texted her mother and daughter asking if she wanted to vaccinate her child at school or at the hospital.

Lan Anh insisted that her family did not inject. Are you worried about whether children are required to be vaccinated against Covid-19?

In this regard, Dr. Pham Quang Thai – Head of the Northern Region Expanded Immunization Office, National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, said that vaccination against Covid-19 for children is not mandatory in this situation. In the current situation, the registration of injections by family.

Illustrated photo.

However, Dr. Thai said his view is that every child needs a vaccine to be protected against Covid-19. Scientific evidence shows that vaccines not only protect children from serious illness and death, but also reduce the risk of post-Covid-19 infection when unfortunately infected.

Children with underlying medical conditions, poor health conditions such as obesity or congenital diseases, need to be vaccinated and should be given priority. Only children with an allergic/anaphylactic condition to the previous dose or vaccine component are contraindicated to this vaccine.

In addition, children with advanced diseases or acute illnesses should postpone vaccination and seek specialist care, only when the acute condition is gone and the underlying disease is diagnosed as stable. Criteria for getting vaccinated against Covid-19.

Also according to Thai, the vaccine against Covid-19 for children uses mRNA or messenger RNA technology. This is a technology that was developed many years ago to create drugs to treat cancer and other dangerous diseases.

‘In fact, this technology has been used and clinically proven for safety and effectiveness and has only recently been applied to a vaccine against Covid-19. When put into the production of vaccines, there were also quite a few questions related to the safety of this vaccine.

Up to now, this vaccine has had hundreds of millions of doses used in the world as well as after-sales supervision of pharmaceutical companies, the vaccine has proven to be safer and more effective than traditional technologies. before. So there is nothing to worry about when vaccines are used to inject children, “said Dr. Thai.

With 2 vaccines Pfizer and Moderna vaccine used in this vaccination, the effect will certainly not be completely the same because the content and technology of the two companies are not completely the same.

Accordingly, the health agency arranged Pfizer vaccine for the younger group of children and Moderna for the older group of children to ensure safety, effectiveness as well as reduce waste in the vaccination campaign.

Effective monitoring and vaccination safety are continuously being carried out throughout the campaign to ensure that Vietnamese children are protected with the highest level of protection.

K.Chi