On Friday, the Public Health Agency of Sweden announced that it will stop recommending that healthy children between the ages of 12 and 17 receive the Covid-19 vaccine.
The new recommendation will come into force on November 1.
“The decision means that as of November 1, 2022 only children in certain vulnerable groups are recommended to get and thereby offered vaccinations against Covid-19,” the agency said.
Earlier this year, Sweden decided against recommending COVID vaccines for children aged 5-11 because the benefits did not outweigh the risks.
Soren Andersson, an official in the Swedish health agency, elaborated on the rule change to broadcaster SVT and said that “we see that the need for care as a result of COVID-19 has been low among children and young people during the pandemic.” He also noted that the need for vaccines has “decreased since the virus variant omicron began to spread.”
“In this phase of the pandemic, we do not see that there is a continued need for vaccination in this group,” Andersson said.
For people older than age 18, the Swedish health authority is still recommending three vaccine doses. Four doses are recommended for people older than age 65.
Unlike most other countries, Sweden refused to implement draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. Data and studies have shown that the highly developed Scandinavian nation may have experienced less harm from the virus and lockdowns as compared with nations that did implement those measures.
More from the news release:
The decision means that from 1 November 2022 only children in special groups with increased sensitivity to covid-19 are recommended and thus offered vaccination against covid-19. It is about individuals within groups that are judged to be more sensitive to respiratory infections in general, or have a significantly reduced immune system. These groups are defined by the Swedish Pediatric Association.
For fundamentally healthy children and young people, SARS-CoV-2, according to the Public Health Agency and representatives from the pediatric profession and the Swedish Pediatric Association, can be considered a common respiratory virus in this phase of the pandemic.
The general recommendation on vaccination against covid-19 is only removed for fundamentally healthy children in the 12-17 year age group. For those who have turned 18, the recommendation for adults applies, that you should take three doses to have basic protection against covid-19.
The Public Health Authority’s decision has been made after dialogue with representatives of relevant organisations, including the Swedish Association of Pediatricians and the National Program Area (NPO) for children and young people’s health. The state of knowledge and the epidemiology of covid-19 is continuously monitored. In the event of a possible change in the situation for children and young people in Sweden, the recommendations may change.
In nearby Denmark, authorities issued a similar rule change and won’t offer people younger age 50 more COVID-19 vaccine boosters.
“The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with COVID-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination,” the country’s health agency wrote in a Sept. 13 statement.
Denmark also explicitly dropped any pretense of stopping the spread of COVID-19 and said it will focus on protecting vulnerable individuals from developing severe symptoms.
Individuals younger than age 50, it said, “are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill” from the virus. At the same time, younger people are also “well protected against becoming severely ill” and a “very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected,” according to the authority.
The UK Health Security Agency stated around the same time that children who hadn’t turned 5 by the end of August wouldn’t be offered vaccines.
