Your questions, answered "I would like to ask if it is safe to get my 12-year-old son vaccinated, because I'm afraid of the side effects to the heart." — Anonymous in California It is natural to worry about your children, but yes, the coronavirus vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration are considered safe and, in fact, are recommended for children 12 and older — especially now that the highly contagious delta variant is the dominant strain in the United States. We're assuming that the adverse reaction you're writing about is myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. It's true that there have been 674 confirmed cases of myocarditis and or pericarditis (an inflammation of the outer lining of the heart) in young people who have been inoculated, most of which have occurred in teenage boys and young men after the second shot in the messenger RNA series. But the vast majority fully recovered on their own. U.S. medical investigators are currently reviewing the cases to understand whether there is a relationship with the vaccines. For the sake of answering this question, let's assume all of them are associated and put this it into perspective: Given that millions of people have been vaccinated in the United States, Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the incidence of developing myocarditis is about one in 20,000 to one in 50,000. That means in a stadium of 100,000 people who have taken the vaccine, anywhere from two to five of them might develop the condition, he explained. There is evidence to suggest that the risk of developing myocarditis from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is much higher. A cohort study published in JAMA Cardiology looked at nearly 1,600 college athletes who underwent extensive cardiovascular testing after having covid-19 and found that 2.3 percent — or roughly one in 40 — had myocarditis. Now for covid-19: Although the disease does not usually cause serious illness in children, data shows that about 4 million children in the United States have been diagnosed since the pandemic started, resulting in tens of thousands of hospitalizations and at least 300 deaths. In addition, more than 4,000 children have suffered a rare but serious condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), which is associated with covid-19 — and can also cause inflammation of the heart, and other organs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "There are no risk-free choices; there are just choices that take different risks," Offit said. "The goal of a parent is to make the choice that puts the child at lesser risk. And the vaccine puts the child at a lesser risk than not vaccinating the child, knowing that the delta variant is highly contagious." | 
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