Hong Kong will begin offering the COVID-19 vaccine to children as young as 3 years old beginning Tuesday amid a surge in cases, according to officials.
The Sunday night announcement comes just days after a 4-year-old girl in the semiautonomous city died after testing positive for the virus, according to USA Today, and just before the city reported a record 2,071 new COVID-19 cases Monday. That number is expected to more than double by Tuesday, with another 4,500 people testing positive preliminarily.
“The onslaught of the fifth wave of the epidemic has dealt a heavy blow to Hong Kong and overwhelmed the city’s capacity of handling,” Carrie Lam, the head of the administration in the city, said in a Sunday night statement reported by Reuters. “The situation is highly undesirable, and the government feels worried and sorry about it,” she said.
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Hong Kong authorities have imposed lockdowns on residential buildings in the city, which consist of banning public dining after 6 p.m. and only allowing vaccinated people to visit shopping malls and supermarkets, according to the Associated Press. Places of worship, hair salons, and other businesses have been ordered to close, and schools have extended a suspension of in-class teaching to March 6.
A total of 11,929,819 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in Hong Kong as of Monday, the city’s COVID-19 website reads. Around 83.5% of those in the city who are at least 12 years have received their first vaccine dose, while 74.3% have received a second shot, the site’s dashboard says.
Vaccination among the city’s population of children ages 5-11 is nowhere near the levels of the older demographics. The dashboard shows only 7.8% of children 5-11 have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, with no second doses reported administered.
In late October 2021, China began a campaign some called “little inoculated warriors” to encourage vaccination against COVID-19 among the country’s children, the New York Times reported. During the first two weeks of the campaign, government data said 84 million boys and girls between the ages of 3 and 11, roughly half of the eligible population, received the first of two COVID-19 shots.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency authorization for children ages 5-15 years old and full approval for use in people ages 16 years and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The FDA postponed a discussion to consider authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5 on Friday. The delay came after the companies said they wanted to wait until additional clinical trial data on a third dose became available.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci said Jan. 26 that children 2-4 years old will need three shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. He added that he did not think “we can predict when we will see an [emergency use authorization] with that because the company is still putting the data before the FDA.”
