COVID-19 vaccine appointments for Ontario children aged 5-11 to open Tuesday

Appointments for COVID-19 vaccinations for children aged five to 11 in Ontario will open Tuesday, the province said Monday.

Spots will be available as of 8 a.m. ET. Appointments can be booked through the COVID-19 vaccination portal and contact centre; directly through public health units using their own booking system; and with participating pharmacies, which people can find by visiting Ontario’s website and using the pharmacy locator. The vaccine will also be available through select primary care providers.

About one million children across Ontario qualify. To book an appointment, children must be turning five years old by the end of 2021, and born in 2016. The province is following NACI’s advice and spacing doses out by eight weeks.

“We should be able to start getting shots into little arms by about Thursday this week,” Health Minster Christine Elliott said at a Monday morning news conference.

About a third of Ontario’s COVID-19 cases are now being found in school-aged children, she said.

“I think that speaks to the need of getting children vaccinated.”

Canada received its first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines for children on Sunday evening, with a shipment landing in Hamilton, Ont.

The federal government and the pharmaceutical giant have agreed on an accelerated delivery of more than 2.9 million doses, scheduled to arrive by the end of the week. The delivery comes just a few days after Health Canada authorized the vaccine for pediatric use.

Ontario is expected to receive 1,076,000 doses of the pediatric Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine from the federal government, which will then be immediately distributed to public health units, pharmacies and primary care settings across the province.

As of Nov. 19, nearly 85 per cent of youth aged 12 to 17 have received a first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and more than 80 per cent have received a second dose, the province says.

CBC