It was early in the pandemic when Dr. Lawrence Kleinman, the vice chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Rutgers University, started paying attention to the unexpected impacts of COVID-19 infection in kids. Studies coming out of Europe showed that some young patients were developing multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a condition that can cause certain organs to become severely inflamed. By the end of May 2020, there were more than two dozen cases in New Jersey in which children who had contracted the coronavirus had then developed MIS-C. “Being in New Jersey and New York — one of the first areas where COVID-19 came into the United States — we were a part of one of the very first studies that looked at [MIS-C],” Kleinman said. “So, we were thinking about these kinds of things from the moment those observations were noted in Europe.” To read the full story.