Health Ministry has reconfigured the Chanjo System in preparation for the rollout of the Pfizer vaccine to teenagers aged 15 to 18 years.
On Sunday, the ministry announced the vaccine had received approval by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board after data review found it safe to be used among children aged 12 years and above.
The issuance of the vaccine is supposed to start on Tuesday. Initially, the system could accommodate Kenyans aged 18 years of age and above.
“As we want to start preparing to administer Pfizer to teenagers the Chanjo system has been upgraded so you will be able to know which vaccination post is offering Pfizer, that functionality will get into use within this coming week,” Vaccines deployment taskforce chair Willis Akhwale said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that everyone ages five and older get a Covid-19 vaccine to help protect against the disease.
Even though children are at a lower risk of becoming severely ill with Covid-19 compared with adults, vaccinating them helps protect the whole family and slow the spread of the virus in the community.
Data from the Pfizer vaccine studies show that the vaccine is safe and effective for people as young as 5 years old.
Other vaccine manufacturers are also studying their vaccines in younger age groups but have not yet received authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration.
“We are doing this because even though they (15 to 18 years) don’t get serious Covid-19 disease, they are people who are able to spread this disease more,” Ag Health DG Patrick Amoth said.
“So if we can be able to go to high schools and colleges then we will be able to ensure that a significant proportion of the 30 million are well covered and fully protected and ensure that our economy continues to run uninterrupted,” Amoth added.
US is already vaccinating children aged five to 11 years with the Pfizer vaccine with others such as the UK, Denmark, and France vaccinating those aged at least 12 years.
The FDA advisory panel voted in favour of approval to introduce the vaccine among people aged above five years on October 26.
This was on the basis of clinical-trial data showing that the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine is about 91 per cent effective at preventing symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection in five to 11-year olds.
“It is only for the Pfizer vaccine, we are not administering other vaccines to the 15-year-olds. It is important to note that only certain vaccines have been authorized by both the WHO as well as our own PPB for use in certain areas,” Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said.
According to Akhwale, Kenya is expecting four million doses of Pfizer, 1.6 million doses of Johnson and Johnson in the first week of December, three million doses of AstraZeneca and Sinopharm vaccines early next year.
The government targets to vaccinate at least 10 million people by end of December and at least 27 million by March next year.
So far, 10.7 million doses have been received in the country with at least 6.3 million having been administered. The proportion of the adult population fully vaccinated stands at 8.8 per cent.
