[ad_1]
Young children who get the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine often have mild side effects, but serious reactions are rare, according to a recent government analysis on vaccine safety in children ages 5 to 11. The data come from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a large vaccine safety surveillance system maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and v-safe, the CDC’s smartphone-based reporting system specifically for COVID-19 vaccine reactions.
“After over 8 million COVID-19 vaccinations in this age group, we found that side effects reported to v-safe were generally very mild and included things like injection site pain, and fatigue and headache, and were mostly reported the day after vaccination,” says Anne Hause, the lead author of the CDC’s research. The report, released on on Dec. 31, 2021, included data gathered between Nov. 3 and Dec. 19.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Of the reactions reported to VAERS, 97.6% were for non-serious side effects, and 2.4% were for serious reactions. Only 11 verified cases of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, were reported, and all children had recovered or were recovering. Two deaths were reported to VAERS; both children were in “fragile health” before vaccination and had multiple chronic medical conditions, and the data do not suggest a causal link between death and vaccination, the report says. V-safe data revealed that though reactions to the shots were common, the vast majority were mild. Only 1% of parents sought medical care for their child in the week after vaccination.
More from TIME
Because the latest report included information from two different surveillance systems—VAERS and v-safe—the results are particularly comprehensive. The two systems collect data differently. Any patient (or in the case of a child, their parent) can report an adverse reaction to any vaccination to VAERS. That ease of…
[ad_2]
Source : time
