Canada Approves Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine for Kids 5-11

Health Canada approved, on Friday, the use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.

Filomena Tassi, Canada’s minister of public services and procurement, said the first order is expected to begin arriving on Sunday, adding that the government was working with Pfizer on a second order.

In a news conference, Dr. Supriya Sharma, chief medical adviser at Health Canada, affirmed that this is very good news for adults and children alike.

“It provides another tool to protect Canadians and, to the relief of many parents, will help bring back a degree of normality to children’s lives, allowing them to more safely do the things that they have missed during the last 20 months," Sharma added.

Some provinces, including Ontario and Saskatchewan, have already announced plans to start scheduling appointments for young children as soon as the doses arrive.

Pfizer is the first coronavirus vaccine to be approved in Canada for children ages 5 to 11 as the agency responsible for drug authorization in the country based its approval on a clinical trial comprising 4,600 children, according to Dr. Sharma. In this regard, 3,100 children are set to receive two doses of the vaccine spaced three weeks apart.

Meantime, around 75 percent of all citizens, or more than 28.5 million people, are fully vaccinated. More than 16,800 coronavirus cases have been reported in the country in the past seven days, according to national public health data.