“Vaccinating 12-17 year olds remains the safer choice for this age group and will reduce school breaks and transmission to others,” said Mendel Singer, vice chairman of education at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland and Co- Author of the medRxiv study.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, agreed that side effects of the vaccine are preferable to the devastating effects of COVID-19.
“You have to put it into perspective. At first, it appears that only one in 20,000 recipients who are in the highest risk group will develop myocarditis after two injections,” he said.
“Myocarditis never sounds good. You can say mild myocarditis all you want, but it will also scare people because the inflammation of the heart muscle is always viewed as a concern. But it seems to be self-limiting, in short” – survived, non-fatal and not associated with coronary artery abnormalities, “Offit said.
A recent study of 1,600 college athletes who had COVID-19 found that around one in 43 had myocarditis, he said. “So you basically have one in 20,000 phenomena at the peak of the vaccine and one in 43 phenomena with the disease.”
If symptoms of myocarditis develop, parents should take their child to the doctor and they can be referred to hospital for observation, Offit said.
To parents worried about their child’s vaccination, Offit said: “You just know that the disease is widespread, that this (delta) variant is particularly highly contagious.”
He added that some believe that over the next few years you will have two options – get vaccinated or get infected naturally. “Vaccination is a safer choice because natural infection also causes a much higher rate of myocarditis,” he said.
Offit emphasized that the disease was worse than the vaccine. “It’s always true,” he said.
The report was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on July 30th.
More information
For more information on the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, contact the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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