Is the COVID-19 vaccine safe for children?
Yes, US regulatory authorities licensed Pfizer’s vaccine for young children after millions of children between the ages of 12 and 17 safely received the injection, the only one available for children in the country.
More than 5 million children between the ages of 5 and 11 have received a first dose since November, and the government’s safety oversight team has not found any unexpected problems.
This age group receives reduced doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech formula, one-third of the amount used to vaccinate children 12 years and older. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the vaccination following a study showing that pediatric doses were 91% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19. Children between 5 and 11 years old showed as strong virus-fighting antibody responses as adolescents and young adults who received standard doses, with similar or fewer bothersome reactions such as arm pain, fever or malaise.
The FDA evaluated the safety of pediatric doses in 3,100 vaccinated minors. Regulatory authorities deemed this data sufficient given the vast amount of information available on the hundreds of millions of largest doses administered to adults and adolescents worldwide.
Very unusually, teens and young adults who received the Pfizer vaccine or a similar one from Moderna experienced a serious side effect, inflammation of the heart, or what doctors call myocarditis. It occurred mainly in male children and adolescents, usually after the second dose. They tended to recover quickly, and after intense scrutiny, US health authorities concluded that the benefits of the vaccine outweighed that small risk.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated a handful of reports of heart inflammation, mostly mild and brief, among children 5 to 11 years since vaccination began in that age group.
To put risk in context, COVID-19 also causes heart inflammation, often more severe, said Dr. Mattew Oster, a pediatric cardiologist at Emory University. Sometimes it also occurs in children who develop a multisystemic inflammatory syndrome after a coronavirus infection.
Before the pandemic, doctors routinely diagnosed heart inflammations caused by viral or bacterial infections or by medications, again in children or adolescent boys in most cases. One theory is that testosterone and puberty play a role, Oster noted. It’s one of the reasons many expect the risks associated with the vaccine to be lower in younger children who receive lower doses.
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