The Ministry of Public Health is meeting with pediatric and medical societies on Monday, 8 November 2021 to determine whether to go ahead with recommendations to vaccinate children 5 to 11 years with the Sinovac vaccine. Chinese vaccines Sinovac and Sinopharm have been approved for children starting at 3 years of age.
The Dominican government meeting on Monday, 8 November coincides with the US government announcement that it will begin to vaccinate children of that age with a weakened dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
The Dominican government says that it does not have stocks of the recently approved Pfizer children’s vaccine and a new procurement procedure would be necessary. Instead, the Ministry of Public Health does have sufficient stocks of Sinovac vaccine to vaccinate all children in the Dominican Republic.
Chile authorized as of 6 September and Colombia as of 1 November that children under 12 be vaccinated with the Sinovac jab that had been used on hundreds of thousands of Chinese children.
The meeting with pediatric and other medical societies will take place at a time when the Ministry of Public Health reports that there records show more than 41,079 children under 20 years of age have been infected with Covid, as reported in Listin Diario. The Ministry of Public Health explains that the younger population is more vulnerable to the more recent variants in circulation.
Since July 2021, the Ministry of Public Health has been using the Pfizer vaccines to innoculate children 12 to 17 years old.
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Listin Diario
8 November 2021