The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices said that they recorded a higher than expected number of reports of heart inflammation among people aged 16-24 after receiving the mRNA vaccines but the benefits of vaccination still clearly outweighed the risks.
On June 23, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s safety committee revealed there was a “likely association” between the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis (the medical term for heart inflammation) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue that surrounds the heart) in some young adults.
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To stress how rare the complication is, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) – the US health body that accepts reports of adverse events after vaccination – had received 1226 preliminary reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after about 300 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines up to June 11.
In the US the confirmed cases have mostly been seen in male adolescents and young adults and occur more often after the second dose than the first, an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports.
CDC data showed that after 3,625,574 second doses administered to men aged 18-24 there were 233 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis.
After 5,237,262 doses administered to women in this age group 27 cases were seen.
Vinay Prasad, a haematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, told The BMJ:
There is a clear and large safety signal in young men and a clear but small signal in young women as well.
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