Children under five will receive the COVID vaccine for the first time, health officials have announced.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has recommended that children aged between six months and four years who are in a clinical risk group should be offered the vaccine.

Children who are eligible will be offered two doses of the vaccine, with a gap of eight to 12 weeks between them.

The JCVI is not currently recommending the vaccine be given to children who are not in a clinical risk group as COVID-19 causes “only mild symptoms” or none “for the vast majority” of infants and children.

NHS England has announced it will begin offering vaccinations from mid-June to those eligible, while NHS Wales has been “considering arrangements for vaccinating this group” and say there will be further information in due course.

Parents have been advised to wait to be contacted before coming forward.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) authorised the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children aged six months to four years on 6 December 2022.

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Chair of the JCVI’s COVID-19 Committee, Professor Wei Shen Lim, said: “For the vast majority of infants and children, COVID-19 causes only mild symptoms, or sometimes no symptoms.

“However, for a small group of children with pre-existing health conditions it can lead to more serious illness and, for them, vaccination is the best way to increase their protection,” he added.

England’s Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay said children are “at very low risk of harm from COVID”.

“However, there are a very small number of children with health conditions which make them particularly vulnerable, and for those children we want to give parents the choice as to whether they wish to vaccinate their at-risk child or not,” he added.

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Wales’s health minister, Eluned Morgan, said there was “ongoing uncertainty about whether or how the virus will evolve and change, how long immunity will last, and the epidemiology of infection”.

“The odds of admission to paediatric intensive care units with severe COVID-19 is more than seven times greater for infants and young children with underlying medical conditions compared to children without underlying medical conditions.”

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