Vaccination of children aged 12-15 begins in Georgia

According to the decision of the Georgian Immunization Council, children aged 12-15 years old will be able to get jabbed against Covid-19 with the Pfizer vaccine.

According to Deputy Minister of Health of Georgia Tamar Gabunia, parental consent will be required for the vaccination of children.

“Children aged 12-15 can go to vaccination centers and get a vaccine there”, Gabunia said.

The Deputy Minister also spoke about the so-called booster doses. According to her, 6 months after the last dose of the vaccine, all people over 18 years old can be vaccinated with a booster dose of any vaccine.

Gabunia also noted that those who have been vaccinated with Sinopharm or Sinovac can still receive a Sinopharm or Sinovac booster dose, or choose the Pfizer vaccine instead.

As for the AstraZeneca vaccine, 6 months after the last vaccination, they can additionally receive a booster dose of Pfizer.

According to Tamar Gabunia, people over 60 years old who have been vaccinated with Sinovac and Sinopharm are allowed, as an exception, to be re-vaccinated 3 months after the last vaccination.

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Vaccination against coronavirus in Georgia began on March 15. Vaccination is mainly carried out with the use of four vaccines – the German-American Pfizer, the British AstraZeneca and the Chinese Sinopharm (Beijing), and Sinovak.

Unlike AstraZeneca and Pfizer, Chinese-made vaccines have a shelf life of two to three years, says Amiran Gamkrelidze, head of the National Center for Disease Control.

A few days ago, he announced that up to 17,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had expired.

The country’s goal was to vaccinate 60% of the population by the end of the year. Recently, however, the country’s vaccination campaign rate has dropped significantly.

If at the end of August more than 20,000 people were vaccinated per day, recently an average of 3,000 doses of vaccine have been administered every day. On November 1, only 3,369 people were vaccinated.

As of November 8, 2,005,229 vaccinations were made in Georgia. Of these, 1,049,193 people (36.9% of the adult population) were vaccinated with one dose. Only 33.4% of the adult population (952,831 people) is fully vaccinated with two doses.

On November 8, 2,191 new cases of coronavirus infection were registered in Georgia, 72 people died.