COVID-19 vaccination in children cuts risk of severe post-infection complication

Administering the COVID-19 vaccine to children and teenagers significantly diminishes the likelihood of multisystemic inflammatory syndrome (MIS) in children, a severe condition that emerges after being infected with coronavirus disease.

MIS, a rare yet grave hyper-inflammatory ailment, has been a concerning complication observed in children after contracting coronavirus disease. Naama Schwartz and colleagues sought to ascertain the extent to which MIS in children and its severe form are abridged after mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Analyzing data from a nationwide cohort study encompassing 526,685 PCR-confirmed coronavirus disease cases among individuals under 19 years old, including 14,118 fully vaccinated before infection, researchers collected MIS in pediatric cases from all hospitals from April 2020 to November 2021.

Researchers computed the frequency of MIS in children among two subsets: PCR-confirmed cases and estimated cases (including PCR-confirmed + suspected cases). Over the study duration, 233 MIS-C cases under 19 were diagnosed and hospitalized. Among estimated coronavirus disease cases, the MIS risk difference varied from 2.1 to 1.0 for every 10,000 cases of coronavirus disease. This risk difference ranged from 1.6 [95% CI 1.3–1.9] to 0.8 [95% CI 0.7–1.0] for every 10,000 cases of COVID-19 for acute MIS in children. The researchers observed significant risk differences for each rate after performing sensitivity analyses across a range of alleged coronavirus disease rates, emphasizing the critical part vaccination plays in alleviating MIS risk and its severe manifestations in the pediatric population, the study concluded.