Children aged between 12 and 15 will be eligible for Covid-19 vaccination and everyone 60 years or older may receive booster doses from March 16, the Union health ministry announced on Monday.
The Covid-19 vaccination campaign that had opened up in January this year for children aged 15 to 18 years will now offer the jabs to all children born in 2008, 2009 and 2010 too, the ministry said. Booster doses were till now on offer only for people above 60 who had certain underlying health disorders.
Health officials estimate there are 71 million children in the 12-15 age group.
Children aged 12-15 years are to receive Corbevax, a vaccine developed at the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in the US and manufactured by the Hyderabad-based vaccine maker Biological E.
The announcement is in line with earlier pledges by health officials that the vaccination campaign and booster doses will be expanded to younger age groups and to the elderly without co-morbidities after covering significant proportions of the currently eligible recipients.
The campaign has so far fully vaccinated around 814 million (84 per cent) adults and nearly 34 million (45 per cent) children. Over 200 million people aged 60 or above, and with co-morbidities, have received booster doses.
The health ministry had last June announced Rs 1,500 crore as an advance payment for Biological E to produce and stockpile the vaccine, which was undergoing efficacy trials after successful trials to assess safety and capacity to generate immune responses.
The decision to expand the vaccination campaign to the 12-15 years age group through Corbevax was taken “after due deliberations with scientific bodies”, the ministry said on Monday.
But two members of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI), the apex scientific body that advises the Centre on vaccines, told The Telegraph that the NTAGI had not discussed the proposal.
“It (the decision) has not been discussed yet at the NTAGI technical subcommittee or at the NTAGI,” a member of the body said.
But the plan was discussed and approved by a Covid-19 working group on vaccines last week, the two members said.
In the decision-making hierarchy, a member said, a working group decision would go to the NTAGI subcommittee and then to the NTAGI.
The health ministry did not respond to a query from this newspaper whether the NTAGI had approved the decision.
India’s drug regulatory agency had last month approved Corbevax under emergency use authorisation for the 12-18 years age group. Clinical trials on Corbevax have demonstrated that it generates a superior immune response than Covishield, produced by the Pune-based Serum Institute of India, against the ancestral Wuhan strain and the delta variant of the coronavirus.
But some public health and vaccine experts have argued that the public health utility of vaccines — whether Corbevax or others — for children, especially after the omicron-driven surge, remains unclear.
Many experts believe that India’s three Covid-19 waves — the first peaking in September 2020, the second fuelled by the delta variant in May 2021, and the third driven by omicron in January this year — have exposed almost the entire population to the virus.
“Especially now, in the post-omicron phase, there is really no scientific evidence for the public health gains of vaccinating children,” said Jayaprakash Muliyil, former head of community medicine at the Christian Medical College, Vellore.
Sanjay Rai, professor of community medicine at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, too had earlier this year questioned the decision to vaccinate children aged 12-15, saying a public health intervention has to have clear objectives — either to prevent infection or to avert severe disease.
Vaccination proponents have asserted that vaccines have been shown to avert severe disease and hospitalisation, but Rai and others have contended that the incidence of severe Covid-19 in children is so tiny that vaccines are not justified as a public health intervention.