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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

> They estimate the rate of myocarditis after two shots of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be 162.2 cases per million for healthy boys aged 12 to 15 and 94 cases per million for healthy boys aged 16 to 17. The equivalent rates for girls were 13.4 and 13 cases per million, respectively. At current US infection rates, the risk of a healthy adolescent being taken to hospital with Covid in the next 120 days is about 44 per million, they said.

This is a bad comparison. We're all going to get covid eventually, so we should compare the risk of getting the vaccine with the risk of being unvaccinated when you do get exposed and/or infected, not with the risk limited to an arbitrary time interval.

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What's an expected timeframe for the hypothesis that "everyone" will get it? What is the risk reduction of getting it despite being vaccinated? The overwhelming majority of Myocarditis cases happen on the second shot, what are the implications of administering booster shots? All of these questions remain to be answered.

Furthermore, new vaccines, treatments and prophylaxes are still being developed. Those may have a more favorable risk profile.

What is a non-arbitrary time interval, then? Over what period of time should these risks be assessed? It's common sense that one would want to know what the results are over the months following the jab, so how is that arbitrary?

not OP but the point I believe is that while only portions of the population will be exposed to COVID over smaller time ranges like 4 months. Given that the disease is seemingly endemic, the probability of any individual person being exposed to it at any point in the future goes up so restricting it to 4 months includes those exposed and not exposed. To compare the relative risks, it might be more accurate to compare the risk of hospitalization for those individuals who have gotten a covid diagnosis versus those who have been vaccinated.

Lifetime, or maybe more realistically the timespan over which the vaccine is effective (could end either based on fading immunity or the dominant strain evolving to escape).

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