Coronavac, a vaccine against Covid-19 developed by the pharmaceutical company Sinovac in partnership with the Butantan Institute, was approved for use in children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 years by the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) this Thursday (20) , and should start to be applied this Saturday (22).
In an interview with CNN, the infectious disease physician at the EmÃlio Ribas Institute and member of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases (SBI) Rosana Richtmann explained that the Immune response to the vaccine in children is faster and more efficient than in adults and the elderly, according to what has been demonstrated in studies and in the immunization carried out in Chile, which already uses the vaccine in children and adolescents.
“Even with Coronavac, about two weeks after the first dose, children already have an excellent immune response,” he said, noting that in the elderly, protection is satisfactorily effective only two weeks after the second dose.
Coronavac, however, is not recommended by Anvisa for immunosuppressed children. Richmann stated that the This restriction was applied not for safety reasons, but because there is not enough data to guarantee that this immunizer causes a satisfactory immune response in these children.
“We do not have specific information about immunosuppressed children, but [a restrição] It’s not in terms of safety,” he said, explaining that Coronavac has a technology that causes a slightly lower immune response than those vaccines that use messenger RNA, and children with immune difficulties need a greater amount of antibodies to respond well. to vaccination.
Reference: CNN Brasil
