CDC Advisory Committee Determines COVID-19 Vaccine Safe for Younger People

Source: Santa Barbara County Public Health Department

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met [Wednesday], June 23, to discuss the latest data on reports of mild cases of inflammation of the heart muscle and surrounding tissue following COVID-19 vaccination among younger people.  The ACIP provides advice and guidance to the Director of the CDC regarding use of vaccines for control of vaccine-preventable diseases within the United States population. Conclusion of yesterday’s meeting was that the vaccines are safe and effective, and prevent COVID-19 illness.

“As a health care professional and parent, I understand and support the interest that many have in the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, especially among younger people,” said Van Do-Reynoso, Director, Santa Barbara County Public Health Department.  “I strongly encourage everyone age 12 and older who are eligible, to get vaccinated as the benefits far outweigh evidence of adverse effects.”

Dr. Henning Ansorg, Public Health Officer for Santa Barbara County stated, “This is an extremely rare side effect, and only an exceedingly small number of people could experience it after vaccination. Most cases are mild and have a full recovery with minimal treatment. The vaccines are safe and effective and prevent the spread of COVID-19, especially with the Delta variant increasing in its spread among young people. The risk of suffering COVID-related heart disease if unvaccinated is far greater than experiencing side effects from the vaccine.”

Getting vaccinated is the best way to protect yourself, your loved ones, your community and to allow Santa Barbara County to return to more normal lifestyles as quickly and safely as possible.

For more information on the vaccine and how to schedule an appointment, visit: publichealthsbc.org/vaccine/

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  1. I’m with you, SoCalMommy. There is just not enough science on the possible long term effects to justify injecting my 12-year-old daughter with it. There are multiple examples from the last 50-60 years of various agents being touted as “safe,” only to find out years later that they had deleterious effects. My child is not going to be a guinea pig, sorry. For the record, she has had all the standard childhood vaccines (you know, the ones with decades of data available) and I have had my COVID vaccine as well. No conspiracy theorist here, just a concerned mom. We will watch and see how it goes.

  2. First off, there are long term studies for mRNA vaccines (these have been studied for at least 8 years).
    The ingredients in each of the vaccines are fairly common and also include years of understanding and research. The only truly novel ingredients is the mRNA and the lipid proteins which are inactive ingredients. All of which are deemed safe. Anyone that understands anything about biology will understand that the mRNA vaccines work under the same principle as a standard vaccine for which we have decades of research. We now have millions of vaccines given out demonstrating clearly demonstrating short term safety and efficacy. We have decades of research in vaccination in general showing long term safety in the vaccination methodology. Anyone doubting the vaccine needs to speak with their doctor and no one else.

  3. SBObserver, when you refer to science do you mean the same science that said the idea that covid originated in the Wuhan bat coronovirus lab was a debunked conspiracy theory and the natural origin theory that it originated in the wet market was “settled science”? Or do you mean the same science that dr fauci relied on when he told us not to wear masks when this all started? Or perhaps could you be referring to the science fauci relied on when he told us that remidesvir was a breakthrough in reducing recovery time and would become the standard of care for covid?

  4. While, yes we don’t know what long term covid effects are, there are now pretty reasonable ways to avoid getting sick. And if you do get sick, it’s just how it goes (a “chance”). But with a vaccine, people are choosing to put it in their bodies, so it’s no longer a “chance” – it’s a purposeful choice. And for some people, it’s not something they are willingly comfortable choosing or/to their kids.

  5. So why has the fda required every vaccine go through years and years of trials for all this time? And why can’t all the other vaccines being evaluated just get an EUA and start being used immediately? What is the reasoning behind the fda’s extremely cautious approach if the science says vaccines are safe and fully understood? Are they concerned about the consequences if they missed something?

  6. @SBObserver, please calm down. This attitude is just as bad as the far-right Freedumb crowd, and neither makes any logical sense. This is simply not a black and white “Get vaxxed or die and/or kill everyone around you” situation. I’m neither a Trump voter nor homeopathic hippie – I have the Covid vax and my child has received all the standard childhood vaccines. I am no science refuser. I am making a choice for my child, and you have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with it. Wish death on as many people as you like in your mania… it’s honestly a bit disturbing to see that the thought that you are unable to control people makes you so angry and uncomfortable. Make your choices, and leave others be. Thanks.

  7. When people keep talking and writing about “science” or “the science” it always makes me curious about their professional degrees. It’s seems that most of the S-word users don’t have an MD or PhD in one of the natural sciences. They’re just repeating something they heard on TV or read on the internet, and wouldn’t be able to understand any of the actual underlying biochemical concepts on virology or immunology. They tend to allow others to digest this information for them and, in robotic-like fashion, cut and paste links to fact checking websites that promote ideologies that make them feel comfortable. This is not how “science” works.

  8. Each year the influenza vaccine is modified and does not go through new trials. So saying that each vaccine goes through years and years of trials is not entirely accurate. Obviously the EUA is necessary considering we’re in a Pandemic and can’t wait 5 -10 years to prove what most experts already know. Of course the FDA would prefer to have long term studies. But, these vaccines are not created in a vacuum. There is enough scientific data available for the FDA and other experts to feel confident enough to approve the EUA.

  9. Public health recommendations for how to stop the spread of highly communicable diseases are going to put a fair amount of weight on “the public.” It is right to try to assess how a vaccine may affect your individual child. But the mRNA vaccines are not brand new, just tweaked for this particular virus.

  10. “First off, there are long term studies for mRNA vaccines (these have been studied for at least 8 years).”
    You do realize that the idea for mRNA-based vaccines began much earlier than 8 years—try 30. During those decades they realized that there all kinds of serious side-effects and that’s why this technology was never employed, until now.
    “The ingredients in each of the vaccines are fairly common and also include years of understanding and research.”
    In fact, these vaccines do not use “common” ingredients. Many of the mRNA nucleobases have been modified in an effort to disguise them from our bodies, preventing a harmful immune response. Yes, that’s right, you’re not supposed to have mRNA outside of the nucleus and cytoplasm of cells, as that’s a bad sign and your immune system will respond. Therefore synthetic chemists have changed a few atoms on the nucleobases, which makes them uncommon. They’re so unique they have their own CAS registry numbers.
    “The only truly novel ingredients is the mRNA and the lipid proteins which are inactive ingredients.”
    Wait, didn’t you just suggest that they were “common”, which is the antonym of the word “novel”?
    “All of which are deemed safe. Anyone that understands anything about biology will understand that the mRNA vaccines work under the same principle as a standard vaccine for which we have decades of research.”
    Not quite. Early vaccines were just boiled pathogens that were injected. The risk in that was that boiling may not completely destroy the pathogens genetic material. For instance, heat may denature double-stranded DNA, causing the single strands to separate. Upon cooling the strands readily anneal to form the original and intact double-stranded DNA. This phenomenon is exploited in melting temperature studies and PCR. The discovery of molecular biological techniques allowed scientists to use deliver specific sequences of the pathogen’s DNA/RNA/cDNA to an intermediate organism (e.g. banana plant) and this organism will make the proteins required to illicit an immune response. The proteins are harvested from this organism (banana leaves) and then purified for use in vaccines. My Hepatitis B vaccine was derived from banana leaves. mRNA vaccines cut out the middle-man and you get the genetic material directly, allowing your body’s own ribosomes to produce the pathogenic protein. This comes with a risk, as we are discovering. I prefer a plant to make the protein, but then this comes with the cost time for creating a recombinant organism, growing enough to harvest the protein, and then purifying that protein. It’s safer, but not as fast as the mRNA vaccines.

  11. I’ve personally worked with DNA, RNA, and related synthetic analogues, antibodies, recombinant organisms, purified resultant proteins, and performed binding studies that measure the interaction between biological molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids with each other and with small molecules such as potential drugs. If you call those “distantly-related scientific fields”, then you are free to do so. The few actual fellow scientists on EdHat will recognize, whether or not they agree with me, that I have all the experience necessary to make informed opinions, review the published data and comment on the theories and hypotheses that form the foundations of this research and related technologies. You are not one of these people.

  12. I see you have trouble realizing that the journalist is not giving the advice. He is reporting what people who really know what they’re doing advise. But, that’s typical of your paltering, and the egotarian crowd who think that facts are somehow biased.

  13. Riight. But you think Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Hannity are credible. Journalists, that work for places like Reuters, Factcheck, NYT, and WaPo, have a code of ethics that is enforced, as opposed to the disinfotainment sources that are so often parroted here, like the totally bogus pilot claim.

  14. Chem SF, Your reply is over the top. I’m asking how parents evaluate a somewhat newly approved and newly embraced childhood vaccine! There are nightly tv ads for Gardasil.
    Why are you trying to shut down conversation about a vaccine?! Wow… Your over the top response makes me question your scientific views. What is disturbing about asking about a vax that is advertised on tv every night?!

  15. What the heck?!!
    The assumptions here are disgusting. Someone, one of millions who has HPV and has extra yearly screening, has no valid opinion or right to ask about kids who might or have gotten this ground breaking ,cancer preventing vaccine?
    Oh, I agree. I’m out of here too thanks for playing!

  16. @11:12pm “what is disturbing about a vax that is advertised every night” is just that. You seem to eat whatever is fed to you. Full disclosure, I was put on a medication at 15 yrs old that was deemed “safe” for my age. A few years and several deleterious effects later, it was suddenly officially NOT safe for people of my age. I suffered the effects of that for years. Excuse those of us who have first-hand knowledge of things that don’t always turn out the way we are first told. Critical thinking and experience are your friend, and not something to be scoffed at.

  17. Chem Freak, and Seabird, it’s mindsets like yours that stigmatize STDs and prevent people from learning about them and treating them. As a scientist you should be ashamed, more than those who have STDs.
    Anyone pro -life should be interested, as these diseases may lead to infertility.
    Anyone interested in fairness should urge men too to get tested.
    https://www.cdc.gov/std/statistics/default.htm
    I’ve lost all respect for your scientific pose, Chem.

  18. @11:27, excuse me. I have spent literally a lifetime studying AIDS, HIV and STDs and supporting graduate work on the subjects. Sorry to burst your bubble with whatever you learned from Google University. Your generalizations are sub par and ill-informed.

  19. Here’s an actual fact, in the UK where the Delta variant represents over 95% of the COVID cases, 42 people have died of Delta variant and 12 of them were greater than 14 days post dose 2 of the vaccine. 12/41*100 is 29%. TWENTY NINE PERCENT OF FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM THE DELTA VARIANT! See Table 6 in Technical Briefing 15 from Public Health England (June 11, 2021).
    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads
    /system/uploads/attachment_data/file/993879/Variants_o
    f_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_15.pdf

  20. My understanding of how normal vaccine trials usually go is that there are long term studies. So naturally parents can be concerned that there haven’t been long term studies. It seems reasonable to have this concern SCMommy.

  21. Your hopelessly deficient in your understanding of both statistics and epidemiology. Being vaccinated tremendously reduces the odds of infection, transmission, hospitalization, and death. Any claim to the contrary is simply a lie.

  22. “ACIP members agreed there is a likely association between the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines and rare cases of heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults. Almost all the cases resolved with little treatment and patients recovered quickly. The advisers said that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.”

  23. “The facts are clear: this is an extremely rare side effect, and only an exceedingly small number of people will experience it after vaccination,” officials said in a statement. “Importantly, for the young people who do, most cases are mild, and individuals recover often on their own or with minimal treatment. In addition, we know that myocarditis and pericarditis are much more common if you get COVID-19, and the risks to the heart from COVID-19 infection can be more severe.”
    Health experts agree that the benefits of being protected from COVID-19 outweigh the risks of developing this temporary heart condition from a vaccine. “There’s no zero risk proposition,” says Dr. Brian Feingold, medical director of the heart transplant program at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. “If you’re statistically going after what’s safest, the data right now stacks up [to show] that vaccines are absolutely the safer route.”
    https://www.npr.org/2021/06/23/1009522605/heart-inflammation-in-teens-and-young-adults-after-covid-19-vaccine-is-rare-cdc-

  24. Today the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a statement on ACIP’s findings, saying myocarditis and pericarditis are much more common if a person contracts COVID-19 than from vaccination.
    “Especially with the troubling Delta variant increasingly circulating, and more readily impacting younger people, the risks of being unvaccinated are far greater than any rare side effects from the vaccines,” the HHS said. “Even if your infection is mild, you or your child could face long-term symptoms following COVID-19 infection such as neurological problems or diminished lung function.”
    https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/06/experts-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-likely-tied-heart-inflammation

  25. And, fortunately, they rely on data, which they know how to analyze. You won’t see them concluding (and shouting hysterically) from a sample of 42 people that “TWENTY NINE PERCENT OF FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM THE DELTA VARIANT!” in a country with millions of fully vaccinated citizens. Common sense will prevail, and you will once again be shown to be grievously wrong.

  26. All the more reason to continue wearing masks indoors. The CDC should reconsider their position on recent easing of masks indoors where the virus is most likely to spread. Remember what happened when they delayed mask use in 2020… The virus is mutating fast, one might say faster then it would naturally in nature.

  27. @ChemicalSuperFreak All the more reason to continue wearing masks indoors. The CDC should reconsider their position on recent easing of masks indoors where the virus is most likely to spread. Remember what happened when they delayed mask use in 2020… The virus is mutating fast, one might say faster then it would naturally in nature.

  28. Yeah, the virus is the same size as a perfume molecule. NOT!
    Anyone that thinks that masks are not very effective at controlling COVID infection, at this point in time, is several sandwiches short of a picnic.

  29. “Take it up with CNN, it’s their headline.”
    So CNN is at fault for not including the entire article in the headline? Even if we grant that or any other poor behavior on the part of CNN, it doesn’t absolve the person who unscrupulously quoted their headline out of context as part of a fallacious argument, knowing full well that the rest of article undermines that argument.

  30. WHOA “Journalists, that work for places like Reuters, Factcheck, NYT, and WaPo, have a code of ethics that has been enforced…”. Where have you been living the past decade, so much BS has been put out as “fact” from unverified confidential sources that later are revealed to be completely false but the retractions are tucked away months later. Journalism is dead.

  31. As I said, Hado_Ken_57 already explained it. “29 percent of people who died from the delta variant were vaccinated” is not at all the same claim as ” TWENTY NINE PERCENT OF FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM THE DELTA VARIANT”.

  32. WHO says fully vaccinated people should continue to wear masks because of Delta variant spread
    “People cannot feel safe just because they had the two doses. They still need to protect themselves,” said Dr. Mariangela Simao, the assistant director-general for access to medicines and health products at the WHO,
    “Vaccine alone won’t stop community transmission,” she added. “People need to continue to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces, hand hygiene … the physical distance, avoid crowding. This still continues to be extremely important, even if you’re vaccinated when you have a community transmission ongoing.”
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/says-fully-vaccinated-people-continue-141614861.html
    ****Now we need CDC and Local Public Health to follow with mask requirement.

  33. All the more reason to require masks indoors ..we don’t want to return to 2020
    Dangerous Delta COVID-19 Variant Infecting Vaccinated Adults In Israel
    Half of the adults infected had been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine
    Spurred by the new information, the Israeli government has now reimposed an indoor mask mandate and quickly expanded its vaccination program to include children ages 12 to 15.
    https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/dangerous-delta-covid-19-variant-011913549.html

  34. 11:39 – That’s a hilariously wrong conclusion. 29% of the people who died from the delta variant were fully vaccinated. There are millions of fully vaccinated inhabitants of the UK. Just another example of your lack of understanding of mathematics, logic, and epidemiology. Either that, or you’re just trying to scare people away from life-saving vaccination.

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