Written by Staff Writer
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Covid-19 is a vaccine that’s supposed to prevent 500,000 deaths a year.
First made more than a decade ago, it was only given to children in Brazil last year.
But now, in line with new WHO guidelines, the vaccine has been rolled out to all children under 12 and is being evaluated in India, Indonesia, and Hong Kong.
Throughout a decade of studies, many parents in nations including Colombia, Mexico, Vietnam, Kenya, and the Philippines expressed resistance to having to vaccinate their children, says Luciano Soares, director of The Institute for Vaccine Safety, Prevention and Evaluation (IISRE) in Brazil.
Having the vaccine has a “massive impact on the lives of children,” says Soares. “They are no longer naive to getting the vaccine and neither do they get by with lots of denial or more and more fear.”
Making more vaccines available to different ages could increase the target population to about 3 billion people, he says.
Why?
To achieve this goal, scientists have to get rid of the data protection systems that keep people from knowing how well or how poorly their vaccine work, says Soares.
“We can no longer do the study on the arms that are covered by protective data standards,” he says. “It’s really a big change for the international vaccine industry to have to test their vaccines not just to the degree they think they should, but as the data on the used strain at the child’s age might change significantly during the life course, or the vaccine may change or be modified during the production process, and the data protection standard might not adapt to new and different circumstances.”