@BenWinter
Hello
My 8 year old has been offered the covid vaccine. What are the risks?
Thanks,
B
Chat to your health care provider or whoever has recommended your child be offered the vaccine. These threads tend to attract a fair bit of misinformation about vaccination.
The JCVI have been extremely cautious in recommending vaccination for children/teens, and so the fact that they consider it to be beneficial for CEV children in this age group should be taken with confidence IMO.
Here's what they have to say about risks:
Vaccine safety and efficacy
In a clinical trial of 2268 children aged 5 to 11 years randomised to receive 2 doses of 10 micrograms Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine or placebo, the vaccine was found to be safe and immunogenic.
Immune responses in vaccinated 5 to 11 year olds were at least as good as those measured in 15 to 25 year olds who received 30 micrograms of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine efficacy against confirmed COVID-19 was noted to be 90.7%, although with considerable uncertainty in this estimate due to the relatively small numbers involved. Adverse reactions due to vaccination were mainly low-grade local and systematic reactions lasting one to 2 days.
Compared to adults and older children studied in previous trials, children aged 5 to 11 years reported more injection-site redness (15 to 19% vs 5 to 7%) and local swelling (10 to 15% vs 5 to 8%), but less fever (3 to 7% vs 1 to 20%) and less chills (5 to 10% vs 6 to 42%). Children aged 5 to 11 years were just as likely as 12 to 15 year olds to experience swelling of local lymph glands (0.9% vs 0.8%). No cases of myocarditis were observed.
Initial safety data from programmatic use of COVID-19 vaccination in 5 to 11 year olds in the United States indicates no new or unexpected concerns. More data is expected to accrue over time as experience with vaccination of this age group of children increases internationally.
www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-update-on-advice-for-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-and-young-people/jcvi-statement-on-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-and-young-people-22-december-2021