It is false that anticovid vaccines cause irreparable heart damage in children, as claimed by publications on social networks based on testimonies from supposed experts who distort scientific reports or official data to spread unfounded alarms against childhood vaccination.
Different publications have been circulating for days in Latin America and Spain , both on Facebook and Twitter, asking not to vaccinate children against covid-19 to prevent them from suffering from irreversible heart disease . Among these messages, those that cite the American investigator Robert Malone as sources stand out.
Malone himself, who introduces himself as “inventor of messenger RNA vaccines”, has recorded a video in which he denies that vaccinating children is of any benefit to them or their families and assures that, on the contrary, they can cause “irreparable damage.”
According to his argument, the vaccine introduces “a viral gene” into the child’s body to create spike proteins (“spike” or “S”) in his opinion “toxic”, which “normally cause permanent damage” to the heart and blood vessels. sanguine. In another recording, he maintains that the possibility of minors suffering heart damage “is six times higher with the vaccine than with the virus.”
DATA: It is false that anticovid vaccines cause irreparable heart damage in children. Cases of myocarditis (an inflammation of the heart muscle) among vaccinated minors are extremely rare, mild with rapid recovery, and this disease is more frequent as a result of covid than after vaccination.
Claims without any medical or scientific basis
Consulted by EFE, Dr. Angel Hernandez Merino, advisor to the Vaccine Committee of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP), explains that Malone’s claims lack any medical or scientific basis and even falsify the conclusions of an American study last July that maintain the opposite of what he affirms.
That report – still in the pre-publication phase – concluded precisely that the risk of suffering myocarditis was six times higher among children infected with SARS-CoV-2 than among those who had received the vaccine.
One case of myocarditis in 100,000 or one million
As explained by the AEP, the cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections is higher in children under 12 years of age than in any other group and, on the other hand, vaccine-associated myocarditis of mRNA decreases with age.
In addition, it is “very likely” that this risk is below 12 years “much lower than after vaccination of adolescents and young adults”, since the preparation for children has “lower amounts of mRNA”.
In any case, the registered cases of myocarditis appeared only with a proportion of 1 to 5 per 100,000 vaccinated, more frequently in males 16 years of age or older. “They are usually mild and recover quickly,” points out Dr. Hernandez Merino, and they pose “a lower risk than those of the natural disease to which the unvaccinated are exposed.”
This expert also highlights the latest data collected in the US by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): after more than seven million vaccinated children aged 5 to 11 years, there was only one case of myocarditis per million, also with slight evolution.
Benefits outweigh the risks, they are slight
In practice, the most common side effects in children 5 to 11 years of age are similar to those 12 years of age and older and include tiredness, headache, muscle pain, chills, and redness at the injection site. All of them “are usually mild and moderate and improve a few days after vaccination”, as specified by the EMA’s Committee for Human Medicines (CHMP).
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also made comparative estimates of benefits versus risks for children in different scenarios and all of them have been favorable to vaccination.
Pediatricians defend the need to vaccinate children because, although they usually have mild covid and the lethality is “extraordinarily low”, it can sometimes be complicated and, furthermore, right now it is the age range that presents the incidence higher transmission.
Therefore, its vaccination facilitates the reduction of the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 and the appearance of new variants and contributes to group immunity, without forgetting that it also serves to achieve safe educational spaces that allow the normalization of schooling and interpersonal relationships of the children themselves.
Neither did he invent mRNA vaccines nor did they inject toxic proteins
In his video, Dr. Malone assures that mRNA vaccinesmRNAs like Pfizer’s generate “toxic” spike proteins that cause permanent damage to the heart, but the reality is that these “S” proteins are neither toxic nor do they spread harmfully through the body, but are broken down shortly after the vaccination.
Although Malone is presented as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, this achievement is the result of the work of hundreds of researchers over decades and there were only discoveries that made it viable as of 2004. His specific contribution was scientific articles in 1989 and 1990 that demonstrated in mice how mRNA wrapped in fat globules can produce certain proteins.
