WHO continues to rank Covid as “international public health emergency”
At a point when uptake of Covid-vaccines in the under 60s in Portugal has tailed off markedly, European regulators have today authorised their use for babies and children under the age of 5.
EMA (European Medicines Agency) is recommending the use in children from the ages of six months to five years old of Comirnaty (Pfizer) and Spikevax (Moderna).
Both vaccines are still under emergency use authorisation.
Breaking the news just after 6pm today, Expresso has not explained why EMA has come to this decision (bearing in mind children and young people are found to suffer so rarely from serious consequences of contracting Covid-19, and the fact that all ‘restrictions’ have essentially been dropped across most of the world). It is possibly linked with the World Health Organisation decision to maintain the pandemic as an “international public health emergency”.
Says the organisation today: “There is still the risk of new variants aggravating the continued impact on health, particularly considering winter is approaching in the northern hemisphere, and there is still the need for a coordinated international response to face the inequalities in access to tools that save lives”.
