This side effect of the COVID-19 vaccine is more common than expected

The side effects of COVID-19 vaccines used to be feared and widely discussed, but they have now receded into the background compared to the obvious benefits vaccination has brought. Over the past few weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that a rare and potentially dangerous side effect is more common than they thought.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Cardiology, discovered multiple reports of heart inflammation in healthy men (mean age 25) within four days of receiving a dose of the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

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The upside is that the study was carried out on 436,000 men, with these heart inflammation results occurring in only 23 of them.

Heart inflammation after a COVID-19 vaccine is still extremely rare, but the data has still exceeded the expectations of the study’s researchers. Initially, experts predicted that only eight or fewer subjects would show this side effect. Fortunately, at the time of publication, all patients appeared to be recovering from the unexpected side effect.

This isn’t the first study to find a link between heart inflammation (known medically as pericarditis and myocarditis) and COVID-19 vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently classified heart inflammation as a possible but very rare risk side effect of the vaccine. These effects were likely caused by the body’s immune response to the vaccine that triggered the inflammation.

The FDA warns people to get medical help right away if they notice symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, fluttering heart, and the like, if they recently received their Moderna or Pfizer vaccines.

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Despite frightening side effects and tons of media coverage, medical experts emphasize the rarity of these cases and the importance of vaccination. Compared to the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine, unvaccinated Americans remain a bigger problem for now.