As far as I could tell from the news stories, parents of school-age children across Canada were thrilled and delighted to finally be able to have their wee ones vaccinated against the covid virus as of yesterday.
As luck would have it, yesterday also marked the release of the World Health Organization’s Interim Statement on COVID-19 Vaccination for Children and Adolescents. The document weighs the various pros and cons associated with child vaccination and points out that globally, the sum total of deaths in under - 25s amounts to .5% of all covid deaths.
It also points out that the vaccines would be far more useful if, instead of being used on a low-risk group in rich countries, they were applied to high-risk groups in poor countries. The following paragraph comes from the conclusion.
As a matter of global equity, as long as many parts of the world are facing extreme vaccine shortages, countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage in their high-risk populations should prioritize global sharing of COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX facility before proceeding to vaccination of children and adolescents who are at low risk for severe disease.
Here in one of the richest of the rich countries, once we realized Moderna had higher risk factors than Pfizer, we quickly donated our 10 million dose stock-pile of Moderna vaccines to COVAX, and, our consciences assuaged, went full speed ahead with the roll-out of Pfizer’s children’s vaccine!
While that falls short of the spirit of the WHO recommendation, who cares?!
The thinking in Ottawa seems to be, feminist foreign policy aside, those poor countries should be grateful for whatever we give them, so too bad for their at-risk women and children.
That's how we roll here in the cradle of the world's first "feminist foreign policy."
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