Experts are advising parents not to worry about myocarditis and pericarditis, the rare side effects of the Pfizer covid19 vaccine in children, and to get them vaccinated.
Myocarditis is the inflamation of the heart, while pericarditis is the inflamation of the lining or sac in which the heart beats.
Pfizer is the only WHO-approved vaccine for people 12 years old and older, and the roll out of the vaccination programme for children 12-18 began on August 18.
Dr Peter Chin Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said the risk of anyone taking the vaccine and getting myocarditis or pericarditis was about 12 in one million, and about one or two in one million with children.
“I think people have a hard time understanding what risk is. If you compare it to the risk of other activities – the risk of drowning at Maracas, getting struck by lighting in the Queen’s Park Savannah – it’s rarer than many of the common things people think about. It’s so rare (getting the diseases through vaccination) I’ll be shocked if any of the 150,000 people TT vaccinates get anything given the numbers.”
He said, in general, inflamation in the body was a good thing because it meant the immune system was responding to the vaccine.
“When the immune system makes something to recognise a foreign invader, it’s like a lock and a key. So some of your cells in the body might look like a foreign invader and might trick the immune cells to go there. When the immune cells go there, it starts to get a little angry and annoyed – that’s inflamation. But, it figures out this isn’t really the real deal so it kinda goes away.”
He said getting myocarditis or pericarditis associated with mRNA vaccines, including Pfizer and Moderna, was similar and stressed that the cases were mild and people recovered in a about a week.
[caption id="attachment_908734" align="alignnone" width="768"] Infectious disease specialist Dr Peter Chin Hong at the University of California, San Francisco in May 2020. Photo courtesy Dr Peter Chin Hong -[/caption]
He added that the risk of getting myocarditis and pericarditis from covid19 was much higher. Also children could get the inflammatory diseases for different reasons including infections, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.
He said two good reasons to get a child vaccinated were first to protect the child, and second, to protect the family.
“You just don’t know which of the kids who get covid is going to get severely sick or MIS-C (multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children). We just can’t predict who’s going to get it.”
Also, while, in general, children’s immune systems are stronger than adults and they may not get a severe case of covid19, they are also sources of transmission of the virus and could get adults in the home sick. And even if the cases were not severe, the whole family would have to isolate, disrupting school and work.
At the Health Ministry’s virtual press conference on August 16, Dr Joanne Paul, head of the Paediatric Emergency Department, Eri
