The World Health Organization (WHO), in the latest document containing recommendations on the management of the coronavirus pandemic, has reduced the utility of vaccines to healthy children and adolescents. The WHO Panel has revised the roadmap on the “affordability of COVID-19 vaccination for people at low risk, i.e. healthy children and adolescents”, specifying that “the public health impact of vaccination of those individuals is far below the established benefits of traditional essential vaccines for children, such as rotavirus, measles, and pneumococcus conjugate vaccines.” The WHO’s change of course takes place almost two years after the first appeals and studies that expressed considerable skepticism towards vaccination of healthy children and adolescents.
In the document published on March 28, WHO established three priority ranges for vaccination against Covid-19: high, medium and low. The inclusion of individuals in the three groups takes place on the basis of various factors, including the risk of serious illness and death in the event of contracting the virus, the performance of the vaccine (effectiveness and convenience) and “the acceptance of administration by of the relevant community”. The low priority group includes healthy children and adolescents, therefore not suffering from particular diseases (such as diabetes) or immunosuppressed. For these subjects, WHO invites countries that intend to continue with the anti-Covid vaccination a think about the cost-benefit ratio of the latter. This is the last piece of health care that adds to the many judicial documents documented on the pages of The Independent and somehow reopen the debate on pandemic management by the authorities.
Last summer a study published in the scientific journal The Lancet and carried out by scientists from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and the Italian Ministry of Health had revealed that the effectiveness of the vaccine against Covid on children in the 5-11 age group was much lower than previously thought. Out of almost 3 million children observed, of which 1.1 million vaccinated and 1.7 million unvaccinated, the study had indicated less than 30% coverage for infection and 41.1% just against the development of severe forms of the disease. In July 2022, the director general of the Danish Health Authority, Søren Brostrøm, publicly apologized for giving children a vaccine that “has not produced great results in terms of epidemic control”.
[di Salvatore Toscano]