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Comment by suzzer99 | Hacker News Reader

Here's a good study about the risk of myocarditis (it's very low). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475

There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.

Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.

Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.

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> But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.

This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.

Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.

Here's a simple chart of relative risk by age group: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

There are roughly 53,300,000 people aged 18-29 and ~3400 deaths (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...), which works out to 1 in 16,000. Of course, you say, that's assuming all 18-29 year-olds have had COVID, which is wrong. There's only been 7,400,000 cases among that age group (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254271/us-total-number-...), giving a 1 in 2200 risk.

Then again, those 1/500 are old age or with existing debilitating health conditions. The rest of the people have a close to zero chance of dying from Covid. It is not a great idea to expose them to that 1/17000 chance of getting an unnecessary heart condition that will affect them for life. And remember, myocarditis and blood clot issues are secondary effects we know about now. The vaccine was invented and released very recently and there is no way to know the long term effects. And don't forget, this vaccine works with a brand-new genetic technology never before released to the public.

How about "The safety of Covid-19 mRNA vaccines: a review" (https://pssjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13037...)

Which has the amusing paragraph:

"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."

The thing is that death is not the only strongly negative outcome of CV19. It's not uncommon for young and formerly healthy individuals to experience long term effects, sometimes with debilitating severity. That is just as much worth avoiding as death is and needs to be factored into risk calculations.

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