A Pittsburgh physician says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) report of rising hospitalizations among adolescents aged 12 to 17 is misleading, saying it makes “no sense to raise alarms” as the same data used in the report showed a significant decline in the month following the slight increase.
“It makes no sense to raise alarms about something that has changed completely,” he added.
Meanwhile, Joseph Allen, associate professor at Harvard’s T.H Chan School of Public Health, said it was misleading of the CDC to not include the last three weeks of data in their conclusion prior to publishing.
However, Allen says the latest data from May showed that hospitalization rates declined to 0.6 on May 29.
The CDC did not respond to The Epoch Times’ inquiry of why it didn’t include the data from May in its report.
The report involved 204 adolescents hospitalized between Jan. 1 and March 31, who were “likely admitted primarily for COVID-19-related illness” across 14 states.
Among those, 64 (31.4 percent) were admitted to an intensive care unit and 10 (4.9 percent) were put on a ventilator, “but there were no associated deaths.”
Most of the 204 patients, or 70.6 percent, had one or more underlying health conditions, including nearly 36 percent with obesity, 31 percent with chronic lung disorders, and just over 14 percent with neurologic disorders.
The CDC also reported that it had found COVID-19 hospitalization rates were 2.5-3 times higher than the rates of three seasonal flu-associated hospitalizations during comparable periods. However, the health agency noted that the widespread testing for COVID-19 “likely disproportionately affects influenza rates compared to COVID-19 rates.”
The CCP virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, causes the disease COVID-19.
Teens Encouraged to Get Vaccinated
Following the publication of the report, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky cited the study as a reason for adolescents to get inoculated and continue masking and social distancing if not fully vaccinated.
“I am deeply concerned by the numbers of hospitalized adolescents and saddened to see the numbers of adolescents who required treatment in intensive care units or mechanical ventilation,” Walensky said in a statement.
Adding that “Until they are fully vaccinated, adolescents should continue to wear masks and take precautions when around others who are not vaccinated to protect themselves, and their family, friends, and community.”
The CDC made a recommendation for teens 12 to 15 years old to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine on May 12 following the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to extend the emergency use authorization of the vaccine in adolescents.
Peter Doshi, associate professor of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research at the University of Maryland and an editor at the British Medical Journal, said that serious adverse reactions from the vaccines cannot be discovered within the six weeks observation timeframe after getting an injection.
“There’s a view out there that serious side effects always occur within six weeks of dosing,” Doshi said at the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting on June 10. “Well, it’s just not so simple.”
“The fact is that historically, side effects were not always discovered so quickly. For pandemics and influenza vaccines, cases of narcolepsy in adolescents were first reported around nine months after vaccines were given. And now with COVID vaccines, it wasn’t until this month, four or five months into the vaccination campaign in Israel that myocarditis was recognized as harm in young men.”
Around 275 cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, were reported in Israel following a second shot of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine among more than five million people who have been vaccinated.
Myocarditis, a rare condition, is occurring at a higher than expected rate in vaccinated individuals, the CDC says.
Pfizer said it supports the CDC’s assessment of the heart inflammation cases, noting that “the number of reports is small given the number of doses administered.”
“It is important to understand that a careful assessment of the reports is ongoing and it has not been concluded that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis or pericarditis,” the company told The Epoch Times in an email.
The CDC has so far identified 226 reports in people ages 30 and younger that might meet the agency’s “working case definition” of heart inflammation following the shots.
A quick search on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for only myocarditis and pericarditis, an inflammation of the saclike tissue surrounding the heart, resulted in 858 total events in individuals of all ages as of June 11.
While reports of heart inflammation are made on VAERS, it does not necessarily mean the vaccine caused the event because “the reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable,” the VAERS website states.
