Giving Children the COVID-19 Vaccine

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:12 pm on 9 June 2021.

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Photo of Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Labour 3:12, 9 June 2021

Thanks very much, Joyce. As you say, we do have to wait for that JCVI advice before moving forward and there are lots of ethical and moral issues that we need to work through. It may be that we want to consider children who are clinically extremely vulnerable or children who live with extremely vulnerable people first; we need to think about how and if we want to do this. Because what we do know is that children, generally, if they contract COVID, don't suffer that much, but they can pass it on. So, we'll wait for that advice, but in the meantime, we are preparing just in case, to an extent. I think, certainly, what we would want to do, if we were to go down that route, would be to make sure that we fine tune our communications, to make sure that we give the advice and the information to parents, as much as they can, so that they can make an informed choice, of course, on behalf of their children. And I think, probably, if we're talking about the older cohort of children—16 to 18-year-olds—that's a slightly different group again, and I think, probably, we'd want them to consider making their own decisions in this space, and we would have to communicate with them in a very different way, maybe directly using social media outlets. So, there's still a lot for us to consider in this space. We've already started discussing these issues, obviously, amongst ourselves, but we can't do anything until we've had that JCVI advice.