(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) New York-Presbyterian Hospital released an advertisement to raise awareness about childhood myocarditis, an illness that 1 in 100,000 children developed per year before the COVID-19 vaccine caused cases to spike, Summit News reported.
The 30-second video follows Suri, a girl about 10 years old, who discusses her experience with myocarditis and offers a hopeful experience for other children who develop the disease.
“One day I had stomach ache so bad I didn’t want to do anything,” she said. “The team at New York-Presbyterian said it was actually my heart. It was severely swollen—something called myocarditis.”
“But doctors gave me medicine and used machines to control my heart beat,” she said. “They saved me.”
The video is part of NYPH’s “Stay Amazing” series that features stories about pediatric patients. The description on YouTube stated, “Our multidisciplinary pediatric critical care team worked to regulate her heartbeat – and got her back to feeling like herself.”
Several people who watched the video, with its attractive drawings and casual narration, commented that it seems intended to normalize childhood myocarditis.
I just saw a commercial on tv from New York Presbyterian with a little girl saying she was diagnosed with Myocarditis.
Just trying to normalize it now. Wow. pic.twitter.com/pB4Y6DafyS
— Tracy E. (@tsalt7) September 6, 2022
Before the COVID-19 mRNA became available to children, they rarely developed myocarditis. Most pediatric myocarditis cases came from severe colds and resolved on their own, without intense medical intervention.
Few pediatric myocarditis cases—about 100 to 200 per year—appeared in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) before 2020. In 2021 the number climbed toward 30,000, and in 2022 it reached about 23,000.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that COVID-19 shots increased myocarditis risk, particularly in young boys and men.
“Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men,” the study concluded.
