BRASÍLIA (Reuters) – Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga said on Friday that vaccination against Covid-19 in children is not consensual, and highlighted that the ministry wants to discuss the matter in depth, one day after the National Agency of Sanitary Surveillance (Anvisa) to have authorized the application of the Pfizer vaccine in the public from 5 to 11 years old.
Even with Anvisa’s approval, it is up to the federal government to purchase pediatric vaccines against Covid and decide on their inclusion in the National Immunization Program (PNI). According to Queiroga, this issue will be analyzed by the technical area and the minister is the last instance of the ministry.
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“The analysis of the ministry, we are also going to give you a timetable, for Brazilian society, all the ‘steps’, all the steps”, he said.
“We want to discuss this issue in depth, because this is not a consensual issue. There are those who defend, there are those who enthusiastically defend, there are those who are against it, so we have to discuss it,” he added, in an interview at the ministry’s door.
Queiroga also stated that he will hear from other bodies, such as the National Council of Justice (CNJ), so that decisions are taken “in a solid manner and society can trust the health authorities.”
The signal given by Queiroga is that an eventual acquisition, if it occurs, will be for the next year.
On Thursday night, President Jair Bolsonaro said he had asked for the names of the members of Anvisa who approved the indication of the vaccine against Covid-19 by Pfizer for children so that they would be disclosed.
The president, who questions the effectiveness of immunization agents, says that he has not yet been vaccinated against Covid and criticizes the mandatory nature of immunization and the so-called vaccine passport.
“I unofficially asked for the names of the people who approved the vaccine for children from 5 years of age onwards,” the president said in the traditional live broadcast on social media on Thursdays.
After the approval of the pediatric vaccine from Pfizer, the director-president of Anvisa, Antonio Barra Torres, criticized what he called the growing “antivacine violence” and the attacks that the organ has been suffering. Torres highlighted that the pandemic is not over, but is working to prevent scenes of hospital overcrowding in the country, as has been happening in Europe due to the Ômicron variant.
The president of the National Council of Health Secretaries (Conass), Carlos Lula, expressed support for Anvisa’s decision and highlighted that the immunizing agent has already been approved for this age group by the European agency EMA and the North American agency FDA, among several other countries .
“It is important to highlight the warning from the World Health Organization (WHO), which points out that the public between 05 and 14 years is the most affected by the new wave of Covid-19 in Europe and, despite the lower risk compared to other age groups , no other vaccine-preventable disease caused as many deaths in children and adolescents in Brazil in 2021 as Covid-19. The pandemic is not over yet and the complete vaccination of the entire Brazilian population is urgent”, he said, in a statement.
