Safety Monitoring of COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Doses Among Persons Aged 12–17 Years — United States, December 9, 2021–February 20, 2022
MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report·
- DOI
- 10.15585/mmwr.mm7109e2
- PMID
- 35239637
- PMCID
- PMC8893335
- OpenAlex
- W4214687517
- Study type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- Centers for Disease Control MMWR Office
- Article type
- journal-article
- Integrity
- current
Why this research matters now
The findings support provider and public counseling that local and systemic reactions should be expected after adolescent booster vaccination, while serious adverse events remain rare. This information is relevant for informed consent and vaccine confidence in the adolescent population.
Structured evidence summary
Research question
This study characterized the safety of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine booster doses administered to adolescents aged 12-17 years in the United States.
Study design
Safety surveillance study using two complementary systems: v-safe, a voluntary smartphone-based active surveillance system for adverse events, and VAERS, a passive surveillance system managed by CDC and FDA. The monitoring period covered December 9, 2021, through February 20, 2022.
Population and setting
Approximately 2.8 million U.S. adolescents aged 12-17 years who received a homologous Pfizer-BioNTech booster dose at least 5 months after their second dose, following FDA Emergency Use Authorization expansion.
Main findings
Among 3,418 booster doses reported to v-safe, reactions occurred with equal or slightly higher frequency compared to dose 2, were primarily mild to moderate in severity, and most frequently appeared the day after vaccination. Of 914 adverse event reports submitted to VAERS, 837 (91.6%) were classified as nonserious and 77 (8.4%) as serious.
Public-health relevance
The findings support provider and public counseling that local and systemic reactions should be expected after adolescent booster vaccination, while serious adverse events remain rare. This information is relevant for informed consent and vaccine confidence in the adolescent population.
Important limitations
This summary is limited to the supplied single-article abstract and metadata. V-safe participation is voluntary and may not represent all booster recipients; VAERS is a passive system subject to underreporting and reporting bias. Decision-grade interpretation requires access to the original paper for methodological detail, denominator verification, and clinical adjudication procedures.
GIDS interpretation
This article is discoverable through COVID-19, vaccination, and vaccine safety topic classifiers, as well as United States geographic and surveillance topic filters. It provides baseline safety data from a defined monitoring window for adolescent booster doses and may serve as a reference for safety signal context in that age group and product.
Related GIDS surveillance
Literature context does not validate, explain, or change a surveillance signal. Exact and contextual relationships are shown separately.
Evidence relationships
This article has 13 auditable classifier relationships to diseases, places, topics, and study design.