Children aged between five and 11 years with compromised immunity will be administered the Covid vaccine, according to health officials.

The Covax facility, the United Nations-backed international vaccine-sharing scheme, has agreed to provide 100,000 doses of the children’s vaccine, and supply will start in the last week of June, according to officials at the Ministry of Health and Population.

“These 100,000 doses are part of the 2.5 million doses, which Covax had agreed to supply to Nepal in 2024,” said Dr Abhiyan Gautam, chief of the Immunisation Section at the Family Welfare Division under the Department of Health Services. “Children between five and 11 having underlying conditions—cancer, HIV, and others will be administered the vaccine.”

Last month, Nepal confirmed the spread of the Covid sub-lineages KP.1, KP.2, KP.3, and KP.4 in the country. All the sub-variants are offshoots of the Omicron variant, which is considered responsible for the surge in new Covid cases in the last few months.

Hospitals in Kathmandu had reported a surge in serious cases of Covid infection in April. Doctors attending the infected patients had said that elderly people and those with underlying conditions were getting severe.

The Covax facility supplied millions of doses of various brands of the coronavirus vaccine, which were used to inoculate the majority of the country's population.

Officials said that Nepal will receive 1.6 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech monovalent vaccine by the end of this month, including the children’s vaccine, from Covax. The rest of the doses of the monovalent vaccine to be received later will be administered to the adult population in all provinces of the country. The monovalent or single component is designed for the Omicron variant XBB.1.5 of SARS-CoV-2.

Earlier, the facility used to supply Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent vaccine doses that included a component of the original virus strain as well as a part of the Omicron variant to provide broad protection against Covid.

The vaccine is called a bivalent Covid shot as it contains two components: the original virus strain and Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants.

Over 12,000 people died, and hundreds of thousands were infected in the first, second and third waves of the Covid pandemic.