CHILDREN will be safe with COVID-19 jabs, the region's leading biosecurity expert has reassured in a bid to boost vaccine confidence among parents this summer and prevent mini super-spreaders.
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Grampians Public Health Unit medical specialist Rob Grenfell said the biggest question most parents had was the need for jab protection when children did not tend to experience the same levels of severity from the deadly virus.
Dr Grenfell, who is also CSIRO's health and biosecurity director, said this was instead about focusing on the larger picture and curbing dangerous ripple effects an infected child could make.
"Children have shown and demonstrated to us over the last number of months that they are a very effective way of spreading COVID through the community and they all have elderly relatives with potentially severe ramifications from this disease," Dr Grenfell said.
"So it's a community focused way of controlling the virus and it is an essential component."
[Children] are a very effective way of spreading COVID through the community and they all have elderly relatives with potentially severe ramifications.
- Rob Grenfell, Grampians Public Health unit
Parents will be able to start making jab appointments for their children, aged five to 11, within the fortnight.
Vials with the approved, smaller Pfizer doses will arrive in Australia on January 7 and start rolling out on January 10.
The state phone booking system will open to child appointments on January 4 with online bookings to start January 14 but the latter requires the child to have their own email.
Ballarat Health Services' community vaccination hub will take walk-ins for this junior cohort from January 10.
Grampians Public Health Unit has made clear staff have been undergoing specialist training to deliver COVID-19 jabs to young children. Plans are also underway for a vaccination program with schools in the region.
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Dr Grenfell said vaccinating primary school-aged children would help to make school outbreaks and closures "a thing of the past".
He said Australian parents had the added benefit of looking to close studies on vaccine roll-outs on children overseas for jab reassurance.
"We're fortunate in Australia that other countries have been vaccinating children, particularly in the five to 11 age group, for many months now and those studies are available certainly to our expert advisory group on the safety of these vaccines and also the efficacy as to how they work," he said.
"...The safety issue on this vaccination is the same as for the rest of us. We have proven hundreds of millions of doses of this vaccines have now been given globally and we understand they are very safe and very effective at minimising severe disease."
Vaccination Special Interest Group representative Fiona Russell told The Courier earlier this month the benefits of vaccinating children outweighed the risks.
Professor Russell, of Murdoch Children's Research Institute, said the strong uptake in Pfizer jabs for children in the northern hemisphere meant allowed for a greater understanding of the vaccine by the time it was made available to Australian children. Already rare Pfizer side-effects, such as heart inflammation in teenage boys, had not emerged in children.
Meanwhile, booster uptake at the BHS jab hub remains strong with more than 730 people rolling up their sleeves daily this week.
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