The health authorities now recommend this measure, already at work in other countries, in the name of the fight against the propagation of the disease.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
After years of debate, French children could be vaccinated en masse against flu. The High Authority for Health (HAS) recommended, Thursday, February 9, “that vaccination against seasonal flu be integrated into the vaccination calendar to be offered each year to children without comorbidity aged 2 to 17 years, without making it compulsory” .
Concretely, this would mean that, from 2 years old, all minors could be vaccinated against flu each year, as is already the case for people over the age of 65. The opinion of the HAS is theoretically only advisory, but the Ministry of Health tends to systematically follow its positions. This therefore opens the way to a massive vaccination campaign for children at the end of 2023.
Even if it is not a question of making the vaccine compulsory for children, such an evolution would mark a significant change of foot. Until now, in fact, the influenza vaccination first targeted people at high risk of complications. This is particularly the case for the elderly, but also patients with diseases such as asthma or certain cardiac pathologies, including children. But most of the latter, that is to say those without “comorbidity”, were not concerned, the idea being that a healthy child has little interest in being vaccinated, in view of the Low risks of complications in this age group.
Nevertheless, a debate has settled for several years on the collective interest of such vaccination. Several countries, such as the United Kingdom and Spain, have already made this choice, in the idea that children constitute an important pool of transmission of the virus, especially with older loved ones. For the past two years, these debates also have found a special resonance with the fairly close question of anti-Cavid vaccination. This was finally extended to most children, not only in France, but in other countries like the United States.
the risk that such vaccination is poorly accepted by parents Available
In the case of the flu, it is the collective interest that the HAS highlights: “the objective is (…) to limit the diffusion and the impact of the flu on the population”, note -Is she. However, she takes care to emphasize that individual benefit is not non -existent for children. After examining several large -scale recent studies, including journals that compile preexisting work, it concludes as well as existing vaccines are effective and well tolerated in over 2 years.
To support the individual interest of the vaccine in the youngest, the HAS insists in particular on the fact that those under 15 counted for many in hospitalizations linked to flu during the last epidemics. This significant proportion of hospitalized children is however largely due to the fact that the oldest are largely vaccinated, and therefore less inclined to complications, rather than a particularly high dangerousness of current viruses in the youngest.
Finally, a point particularly attracts the attention of the health authorities: the risk that such vaccination is poorly accepted by the parents. This concern is part of a context where Covid’s pandemic has made certain vaccinosceptic speeches more visible. This concern explains in particular that the HAS does not recommend the vaccine below 2 years. Not only does she judge that the data is missing on the effectiveness for these toddlers, but it also recognizes that such a measure “raises) of acceptability questions”.
In this capacity, if the authority recommends all available antigrippal vaccines, it advises rather to use a nasal spray vaccine, developed by the Astrazeneca laboratory and currently little present in the vaccination campaigns. Again, rather than a better efficiency, it is a question of favoring a gesture less tense than a bite. “This simpler mode of administration – spraying in the nose – should indeed be better accepted by children and their parents”, judges the has.