Australia will start vaccinating against it covid-19 to children ages 5 to 11 from Jan. 10, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced today.
"This is good news for millions of families across the country who want their children to have the opportunity to be vaccinated," Morrison said in a statement.
After reviewing the data from Canada, the Australian Vaccine Regulatory Authority recommended that there be an interval of eight weeks between the two doses of the vaccine given to children, which can be reduced to three weeks if an outbreak occurs.
Children aged 5 to 11 will initially be given the Pfizer vaccine, while the regulator will also consider the Moderna vaccine, which is expected to be decided in the coming weeks.
The decision to vaccinate children was made at a time when Australian authorities are trying to speed up the delivery of a booster vaccine against covid-19. The country already has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with almost 90% of its population over the age of 16 fully immunized. At the same time, about 70% of adolescents aged 12 to 15 have also been fully vaccinated.
Australian authorities are urging citizens to take a third, boosting vaccine as they worry about a new variant of the coronavirus strain, Omicron, which appears to be more contagious at a time when the daily number of cases is rising steadily. covid-19 in Sydney, Australia's second largest city.
New South Wales, with Sydney as its capital, reports 516 new cases covid-19 today, the highest daily number of infections in two months.
Most cases are due to the Delta strain, but the number of infections has also increased due to the Omicron strain, which was first identified in Australia about two weeks ago. About 50 cases have been reported in the country, most of them in Sydney.
A total of approximately 225.000 cases have been reported in Australia covid-19 and 2.084 deaths.