Occurrence of acute infarct-like myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination: just an accidental co-incidence or rather vaccination-associated autoimmune myocarditis?
Bishwas Chamling, Volker Vehof, Stefanos Drakos, Mareike Weil, Philipp Stalling, Christian Vahlhaus, Patrick J. Mueller, Michael Bietenbeck, Holger Reinecke, Claudia Meier, Ali Yılmaz
Abstract
Sirs: the high prevalence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) drives us towards the urgency of vaccination to control the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as soon as possible. Four different vaccines against COVID-19 have been authorized in the European Union (EU), following evaluation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) so far, including two vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca) that have been already used in millions of adults-and one of them (Pfizer-BioNTech) being recently approved even for children aged 12 years Beyond casual mild to moderate postvaccination side effects that normally disappear within a few hours/days, some other rare adverse effects such as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, acute ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) with large thrombus in coronary arteries We would like to present the findings of three different patients that presented to our hospital until mid of June 2021 and showed unusual serious adverse cardiovascular events of infarct-like myocarditis (in