Children should be given the coronavirus vaccine not just to protect them but also to increase population immunity and help prevent the spread and mutation of the virus, a leading paediatrician has said.

“Although COVID, in the main, does not affect children as badly as the elderly, there have been some children who have been quite sick with COVID,” consultant paediatrician Simon Attard Montalto, who heads the Department of Paediatrics within the University of Malta, explained.

“Also, we have no guarantee that future variants may, indeed, target children more than adults,” he added.

So far in Malta, about five children have been hospitalised with serious post-COVID complications. All have recovered, he said.

A small number, less than five, have had moderate adverse events after being vaccinated and all have been resolved.

Attard Montalto said that unless children are also immunised, at least 20 to 25 per cent of the population would be unprotected.

If one then accounted for non-immunised adults, who could not or would not take the vaccine, the level of immune people would never top 60 to 65 per cent.

“This level of population ‘protection’ will be woefully inadequate to stem the pandemic, the virus will continue to circulate and new variants will invariably continue to emerge, which is exactly what has and is happening [with the Omicron variant and others before it].

“Eventually, a variant may mutate such that it is not only more transmissible but also more aggressive and, in the worst-case scenario, also resistant to current vaccines.

“That will move the time clock of the pandemic back to March 2020 – square one,” he said.

Countering vaccine fears

Despite the science behind all this, some parents are worried about giving the vaccine to their children because it has not been around for long and they fear unknown long-term side effects.

Countering these fears, he said that while it was true that the COVID vaccines had been fast-tracked – because a huge amount of national and international resources were diverted into their development – there had been no compromise in terms of standards and safety. This is known for those vaccines where data is published, which include all those available in Malta, he said.

“The side effect profiles are comparable or slightly more than other vaccines but still far less than effects from the actual illness.”

As for long-term effects, this concern applied to all other vaccines, he said.

“I think the greatest long-term concern is waning immunity, hence, the possible requirement for multiple boosters and not long-term adverse events.”