Doha: Chair of the National Health Strategic Group on Covid-19 and Head of Infectious Diseases at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) Dr Abdullatif Al Khal encouraged parents to vaccinate their children and gave three reasons for them to do so.
Dr Khal was talking to QBS radio about the coronavirus situation in the country when the interviewer asked about the impact of Pfizer vaccination drive among the 5-11-year-old kids.
In his conversation, Dr Khal said that there are some parents who believe that instead of getting vaccinated they should just let the children get naturally infected and then recover and be done with it. "There are many parents who believe this, but we still see many children being hospitalised with Covid and there are tens of children every day for whom Omicron is not a mild infection."
He added that the second reason is also that there is no confirmation on how long the protection from natural infections lasts, "also if Omicron will give protection against Delta or not. We don't know that yet."
Dr Khal further added that no one is sure of the long-term consequences of Covid infection in children. "Six months or a year from now or even longer we don't know what is the effect that a child infected with Covid might have. But we do know that vaccines are safe, effective and that they have been tried in older children, millions and millions of older children the world over have taken the vaccine. There was a small percent of teenagers who develop myocarditis or pericarditis while the majority had only mild symptoms. We know that myocarditis or pericarditis with the actual infection is actually higher than with vaccine," said Dr Khal.
Meanwhile, during the interview, he also added that there is a chance that only unvaccinated will need to do the home antigen test for schools. "After the second week unvaccinated might only need to do the test and there will be an announcement soon as the Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Education will take a decision based on the indicators."
He further added that in addition vaccination is important as small children are an important vehicle for transmission of the virus in the community and they are prone to the virus. "Also, as they don’t keep necessary social distance while playing or visiting, they can transmit to family or to grandparents," Dr Khal said.
