An advisory panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will hold an emergency meeting on June 18 to discuss rare reports of heart inflammation after doses of COVID-19 vaccine.
The meeting comes as the CDC looks into few cases of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscles, in young people and adolescents who received the shot.
During a meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee on vaccines on Thursday, the CDC revealed that it had identified 475 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in people younger than 30 years old.
Preliminary data suggested that the vast majority of such patients had fully recovered from their symptoms.
The data further suggested that the number of cases was higher in people aged 16-24 after the second vaccine dose.
But Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC vaccine safety official, cautioned that not all of the reported cases of these conditions would actually be true cases, CBS News reported.
“It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because, again, these are preliminary reports. Not all these will turn out to be true myocarditis or pericarditis reports,” Shimabukuro
Last week, a study published in the journal Pediatrics highlighted seven cases of teenagers between ages 14 and 19 who developed symptoms of myocarditis days after receiving their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The CDC said late last month it was investigating a “relatively few” number of cases of myocarditis” after getting vaccinated.
According to CDC data, more than 166 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been administered and 127 million doses of Moderna’s.
