The UK’s medicines regulator on Tuesday gave the greenlight for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, also known as Comirnaty, to be used on children in Britain aged between 6 months and 4 years old.
The vaccine has previously been approved in Northern Ireland for the same age group.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) authorisation doesn’t mean the low-dose vaccine will be automatically included in the the government’s COVID-19 vaccination programme, because the responsibility of making recommendations falls on a different body—the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
It appears unlikely the JCVI will recommend the product to be used on healthy babies and toddlers as the committee has not extended a one-off recommendation to jab children aged between 5 and 11….