Only the filling quantity is different, not the active ingredient: Children have already been vaccinated with a reduced adult dose. The demand is high: since the official approval on November 25, every third first vaccination has been given to children under 12. The regional differences are also large: from twelve percent vaccinated children in Lower Austria to under five in Carinthia.
A total of 88,440 children under the age of twelve are vaccinated against the coronavirus in Austria, which corresponds to 8.6 percent of children in this age group (as of Monday). On November 25th, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) officially gave the green light to vaccinate five to eleven year olds with the vaccine from Biontech / Pfizer. Since then, every third first vaccination has been given to a child (70,498 out of 213,891).
This means that an average of nine percent of children under the age of twelve have received at least one first dose in all of Austria. However, only 14,215 children under twelve have a valid vaccination certificate – everyone else has to get the second vaccination.
The differences between the federal states are large, but essentially follow the gradient known among adults. In the east of Austria, more than a tenth of children under the age of twelve are vaccinated. It is twelve percent in Lower Austria, eleven percent in Vienna and ten percent in Burgenland. At the other end of the scale, Carinthia is five percent behind Upper Austria, Styria and Vorarlberg with six percent. In Salzburg, seven percent of children are vaccinated at least once, while Tyrol, at nine percent, is in the Austrian average.
Since the official approval of the vaccination for five to twelve year olds, almost a third of the first vaccinations have been given to children under the age of twelve. Without this lagging effect, the decline in first-time vaccinations would have been even more pronounced recently. After a brief increase in daily first vaccinations to 19,000, the seven-day average has dropped significantly. Most recently, only 8,800 people were vaccinated for the first time each day. In total, almost 73 percent of the population in Austria have been vaccinated at least once, and 69 percent have had their vaccination completed for the time being, so they have a valid vaccination certificate.
The vaccination of children under five years of age is still only possible “off label”. The figures published by the Ministry of Health do not reveal how many vaccinations this age group received. The youngest age group in the publicly available vaccination data is those under 12 years of age (0-11 years).
Source: Nachrichten
