--- title: COVID-19 Vaccine Is Safe for Kids Ages 5-11, CDC Data Show description: Serious reactions are rare in children ages 5 to 11 who get the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent CDC analysis. canonical: https://time.com/6133317/covid-vaccine-kids-safe/ author: Tara Law article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-05T19:54:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:47.227Z article:section: Health og:title: COVID-19 Vaccine Is Safe for Kids Ages 5-11, CDC Data Show og:description: Side effects were common but mild og:url: https://time.com/6133317/covid-vaccine-kids-safe/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9937523f4ce96014/698a2145b3fce395de0c8cfc/Chrildren-Vaccine.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5995 og:image:height: 3372 og:image:alt: Children recieve their Coronavirus vaccinations for Children at Eugene A. Obregon Park in Los Angeles. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: COVID-19 Vaccine Is Safe for Kids Ages 5-11, CDC Data Show twitter:description: Side effects were common but mild twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9937523f4ce96014/698a2145b3fce395de0c8cfc/Chrildren-Vaccine.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The COVID-19 Vaccine Is Safe for Kids Ages 5-11, CDC Data Show > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine [Watch (HLS stream): The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BTNvQC2o.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2021-12-13. For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts._  by [Tara Law](https://time.com/author/tara-law/)  ## Tara Law Jan 5, 2022 7:54 PM UTC  7 year-old Wren Nagata with his sister 5 year-old Mallory Nagata of Pasadena shows off their bandaids after receiving their vaccinations during an event kicking off Coronavirus Vaccinations for Children at Eugene A. Obregon Park in Los Angeles on Nov. 3, 2021. 7 year-old Wren Nagata with his sister 5 year-old Mallory Nagata of Pasadena shows off their bandaids after receiving their vaccinations during an event kicking off Coronavirus Vaccinations for Children at Eugene A. Obregon Park in Los Angeles on Nov. 3, 2021. Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News  by [Tara Law](https://time.com/author/tara-law/)  ## Tara Law Jan 5, 2022 7:54 PM UTC Young children who get the Pfizer-BioNTech [COVID-19 vaccine](https://time.com/collection/coronavirus-vaccines-updates/) often have mild side effects, but serious reactions are rare, according to a recent government [analysis](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm705152a1.htm?s%5Fcid=mm705152a1%5Fw) on vaccine safety in children ages 5 to 11\. The data come from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a large vaccine safety surveillance system maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and v-safe, the CDC’s smartphone-based reporting system specifically for COVID-19 vaccine reactions. “After over 8 million COVID-19 vaccinations in this age group, we found that side effects reported to v-safe were generally very mild and included things like injection site pain, and fatigue and headache, and were mostly reported the day after vaccination,” says Anne Hause, the lead author of the CDC’s research. The report, released on on Dec. 31, 2021, included data gathered between Nov. 3 and Dec. 19. Of the reactions reported to VAERS, 97.6% were for non-serious side effects, and 2.4% were for serious reactions. Only 11 verified cases of [myocarditis](https://time.com/6113220/why-kids-should-get-covid-19-vaccine/), or inflammation of the heart muscle, were reported, and all children had recovered or were recovering. Two deaths were reported to VAERS; both children were in “fragile health” before vaccination and had multiple chronic medical conditions, and the data do not suggest a causal link between death and vaccination, the report says. V-safe data revealed that though reactions to the shots were common, the vast majority were mild. Only 1% of parents sought medical care for their child in the week after vaccination. --- ### More from TIME --- Because the latest report included information from two different surveillance systems—VAERS and v-safe—the results are particularly comprehensive. The two systems collect data differently. Any patient (or in the case of a child, their parent) can report an adverse reaction to any vaccination to VAERS. That ease of reporting means that the system can catch even a very rare adverse event or unusual pattern, but it can be difficult to determine what’s actually causing the adverse event or how often it’s really happening, especially because the system has a negative bias; adverse reactions are more likely to get reported to VAERS if they’re more serious, according to the FDA. News reports of side effects or controversies about vaccines can also skew how many people report a particular adverse reaction. “Everyone can dump anything into that database, and people in the past have for non-medical reasons,” says Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. For instance, in [research](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32176185/) published in the _Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal_ in 2020, Hause, Omer and other researchers found that after California eliminated non-medical vaccine exemptions in 2015, adverse reaction reports to VAERS rose. The researchers suspected that the increase was because parents were seeking medical exemptions for their children and thought that reporting to VAERS would make it easier to do so. It’s up to researchers to sort out how many of the reactions reported to VAERS are caused by the vaccine itself and aren’t just symptoms that coincidentally occurred after they’d received the shot; they do this by thoroughly investigating concerning cases, interviewing health care professionals and reviewing electronic health records. People who join the other database, v-safe, are encouraged to report their child’s reactions as they occur. Simple questions are sent by text message in the following days, like how their child felt and whether they were able to go to school afterward. V-safe participants are also asked to contribute to other tracking services; if they approached a health care provider to receive care for their child, for example, they were encouraged to report what was happening to VAERS. The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children has been monitored especially closely ever since it was authorized under emergency use; it was approved for kids ages 5-11 in October 2021\. (It was authorized for kids ages 12-15 in May 2021 and is fully FDA approved for people ages 16 and older.) That authorization status means that providers are required to report certain kinds of adverse events, says Dr. Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force. “The COVID-19 vaccines have been monitored under the most intense monitoring process in the history of vaccination,” says Shimabukuro. Neither database can tell scientists everything they need to know about the safety of [COVID-19 vaccines in children](https://time.com/6111965/vaccinate-kids-against-covid-19/). But they can show how the vaccines are affecting kids in real life—and what we know now is encouraging. ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en I think vaccines are misunderstood, and maybe it's because it seems like magic. That simplicity and the mystery of it is something that ends up creating a lot of skepticism. People are fooled by the speed. Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready. Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development. In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. But this was truly a moment of the right fix - a brand new kind of vaccine technology - at exactly the right time. I started out in math, and I moved to biology. And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. And so the first part of my career was trying to understand the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease and trying to make vaccines safer. I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work and discover something that no one else in the world knows on any given day. It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. When I first came to Penn from the NIH, pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. Although mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection, it took doctors Karikó and Weissman 16 years to figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. So I repeated the experiment and we could see that there was no inflammation in human cells. We're both scientists. We're not baseball players who cheer when we hit a homerun. We knew that it had great potential. But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. One of the really important problems in coronaviruses that had not been solved is really simple. What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. At that moment, you realize that you have almost what is a universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly. The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months, and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. "Do it mama!" (laughter) Most scientists never get to see a product actually used. And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, those were special moments. I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, and they reported that they received the vaccine. There were like 200 elderly in that home. And nobody died. On social media, when children were going back to visiting their grandparents again. Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases. Influenza, even cancer. 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