> Burton cited data from France on males ages 12 to 29. It showed there were 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 people for Moderna’s vaccine compared with 2.7 cases per 100,000 people for the Pfizer vaccine.
> there were 86 breakthrough cases per 100,000 people for the Moderna vaccine. That compares to 135 breakthrough cases per 100,000 for Pfizer’s, he said
Are the differences meaningful? Assuming the data is real, Pfizer does seem quite a bit safer!
But that's just a case of 1. How severe is the myocarditis other people experience? According to a study I just googled [1], out of 2 million people, only 32 were hospitalized with myocarditis or pericarditis, with median hospitalization time of 1 to 2 days, no ICU, and no deaths. Doesn't sound so bad to me.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782900
Especially when you take into account that your risk of developing myocarditis is higher if you get Covid.
You have to compare the odds of getting the vaccine (100%) AND getting myocarditis with Moderna versus the odds of being exposed to Covid AND getting a breakthrough case with Pfizer AND getting myocarditis from said breakthrough case with Pfizer since the vaccine makes the symptoms of breakthrough cases milder anyway.
The problem is that getting the vaccine is a 100% event, versus a far less than 100% event in scenario 2 (breakthrough Covid case with Pfizer that causes myocarditis in that age group specifically). Add up ALL the maths.
Edit - this isn't a vaccine versus no vaccine comparison. This is vaccine versus vaccine. Pfizer (in the current recommended dose) has proven very effective AND safer. Also, what percentage of breakthrough cases with Pfizer have resulted in myocarditis? Maybe that particular stat changes the risk profile. I'm guessing it's low though.
Edit 2 - also maybe the risks of Moderna can simply be reduced by reducing the dosage. Who knows. More testing will occur over time I'm sure.
At this point my conclusion is that everyone either get
- the vaccine,
- the vaccine and covid
- or covid without the vaccine
- or just covid
within the next couple of years unless they live outside of society.
I see no way an ordinary unvaccinated person can avoid catching covid now except using extremely much more invasive countermeasures than the vaccine.
But I might have missed something. How do you suggest people avoid it?
(Just theoretical interest. I took the vaccine as soon as it was clear that those charge took it themselves ;-)
Read my post again. I specifically said I'm comparing vaccines, not comparing vaccine to no-vaccine.
Don't try to argue a strawman.
Pfizer prevents enough infections that the risk of a breakthrough case is low. Plus the risk of getting exposed to Covid over any given time period is less than 1, even if it's 1 over a long enough time period. It's also a low enough risk for the age group being discussed that they can take the time to make an informed choice of Pfizer vs. Moderna.
Which on its own isn't too helpful but then you know that the standard deviation is equal to the square root of the average. In this case both values bracket 100 so the square root should be around 10 making this a difference of roughly 5 standard deviations.
This isn't a Gaussian distribution so the 5-sigma limit used in physics can't be applied directly, but it's still a pretty big difference, especially for medical data.
You could (and in some cases should) do the work to get a proper number for the significance but this back of the napkin estimate suggests it's a statistically meaningful difference. And this being a calculation that can be done at the top of one's head, it is useful when the news reports on a change in some statistic that isn't anywhere close to significant.