So according to this study, if you're under 40 and have taken the Moderna vaccine, you are more likely to develop Myocarditis than after a Covid infection.
> Whilst myocarditis can be life-threatening, most vaccine-associated myocarditis events have been mild and self-limiting [0]. The risk observed here is small and confined to the 7-day period following vaccination, whereas the lifetime risk of morbidity and mortality following SARS-CoV-2 infection is substantial.
In general, even if you will have very mild infection and you are under 40, COVID-19 can do a lot more damage than vaccine. Long COVID among people that were not hospitalized is quite common (more than 10% after 3 months [1] [2]) with wide ranging symptoms. From loss of smell to being debilitating enough to prevent you from working. And medicine has very little idea what is happening with these people or how to help them.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29564815
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
We also have some data on SARS survivors [0]. The SARS virus is closely related to SARS-CoV-2, but it is a lot more severe.
> Dr. Paula Gardner, a psychologist at St. John’s Rehab in Toronto, has been documenting the health of survivors, post-SARS.
> “They’re still, after 10 years, experiencing problems. Issues such as fatigue, muscle and joint pain, shortness of breath and some newly developing problems such as neuropathy, numbness in the feet and hands,” she said.
We have also experience with the general chronic fatigue syndrome that seems to be related to infectious diseases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome#Viral...
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/404562/sars-10-years-later-how-ar...
The vaccine-induced spike proteins (which damage your cells and internal organs) can stay in your body for 12 months, which means that if you're regularly boosting, you're not getting rid of them.
This is not the case with Covid, and people rarely if ever get Covid twice.
How much of a mis-representation is extremely hard to judge, because often it's not done deliberately.
Wikipedia says about Peter McCullough:
"During the COVID-19 pandemic, McCullough promoted misinformation and falsehoods about COVID-19, the COVID-19 vaccine, and COVID-19 treatments."
That's definitely concern to be very skeptical.
What remained was the disagreement with the scientific consensus. How likely is that?
If it's any helpful, that's my heuristic to spot valid criticism.
I also seriously don't trust any tech platform on covid information at this point. It's clear there is something along the lines of massive regulatory capture of tech platforms by the official FDA, CDC, NIH lines and they hardly ever allow dissent. Time and time again it's been proved that the censorship has been too much. Lab leak hypothesis, vaccine safety, vaccine stopping the spread to name a few. It's clear that the black and white censorship that's happened (it's not a lab leak, vaccines are safe), is just not true. Both those things are pretty gray areas, as this study shows.
The vaccine is basically turning into a personal trolley problem for everyone. Do I take the vaccine and make an active decision and take a small risk, or do I not take action and take a slightly bigger risk?
It's clear there isn't a risk free option, which is what vaccines were sold as.
So, tldr, I think taking that sentence from wikipedia as some sort of indicator is not a good idea.
I see the 'it's not a lab leak' as China's narrative, which, well, by definition I can not see as black and white. It has never been communicated or pushed as a 'fact' here either, as far as I can remember.
As for vaccine safety, possibly side effects have always been taken seriously here, halting vaccination when there was doubt (astra I believe) and giving certain vaccines (not) to certain age groups. Also, I personally think vaccines are safe. No, there's no flat out 100% guarantee that you will NOT have any side effects, but chances are so small and they are often temporary. I still call that safe.
Yes, there's a chance you're that very unlucky one. It's something you can say to yourself throughout the entire day, when you get in the car, get on a plane, ride your bike, walk through the city at night, eat food, enjoy nature, or even sneeze. Yet we don't, we just go and live our lives. I do understand it feels different when it's a conscious choice you have to make, but that doesn't change the numbers.
Why are people still talking about mandating this nonsense?
Now, does that warrant mandating? I'm not so sure, that's a much more difficult discussion swaying us (among other things) back and forth the between freedom of one person and the health of another.
As for adults, what we've seen here (86% of 18+ vaccinated) is a lot of pressure on health care (and especially, the people working there) directly and on people in need of non-immediate, non-covid care indirectly (as that gets dialed down), as well as society as a whole through new lockdown like measures. This pressure came from unvaccinated people, initially mostly, later still disproportionately (and after boosts, possibly mostly again). It's a crazy difficult dilemma. Luckily we've managed to stay away from mandates so far, but it's costing.
Also keep in mind that risk-of-myocarditis-from-infection is overestimated, because plenty of people are utterly asymptomatic and aren't counted in the stats.
I heavily doubt that the 14% are the cause of the problems instead of being a very convenient excuse.
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus235442252/Fakten...
But what it says is that the German authorities don't have data on the vaccination status of most COVID cases. Instead of admitting this they just relabel all people of unknown status as unvaccinated.
Hospitalization and IC numbers have other problems, especially with confounding. I don't think Germany provides enough data to check for problems and anyway their stats are meaningless for as long as they are playing such obviously dishonest games.
But the UK data seems to be more honest. There a problem can be seen: vaccines don't get administered to the very sickest people who are dying anyway, which makes vaccines look artificially good / non-vaccination look artificially bad. This shows up in the UK data as a spike in deaths in unvaccinated people for non COVID causes that correlates with vaccine rollouts. Obviously, that's not biologically caused. Rather it's because the sickest people aren't given the vaccines because there's no point, and end up concentrated into the unvaccinated cohort. Then they pick up COVID in hospital anyway as so many do, and this is used as evidence for why everyone should take the shot without de-confounding.
Paper explaining the problems with the UK data that appear to show this confounding:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_st...
They also try to control for this problem and when they do, effectiveness goes away, which is very distressing. VE against death is supposedly very strong so it shouldn't disappear when the rigor of the analysis is increased.
There are other problems, like the standard delay period where people have been given a vaccine but count as unvaccinated. In one study, buried in the appendix, they show data that when this period is included the incidence between those who were vaccinated and those who weren't was equal, i.e. no effectiveness.
This article summarizes some of these statistical issues:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness...
It's very problematic that these data issues can occur but inevitable. Normally you want RCT evidence exactly to avoid these confounders, but COVID kills so few people that nobody was able to mount a trial big enough to show impact on mortality. Actually in the Pfizer trial more people died in the vaccine arm than the control arm, but there were so few deaths in total (from anything) they said this wasn't significant / meaningful. Hence you end up trying to find evidence in real-world observational data but those are hard to control.
Most importantly it's not just death I'm worried about, it's also not getting hospitalised (or worse, staying in coma for days on the IC). Not only for the individual, but also for society. At least here in the Netherlands, that was spot on the point we had to go back to lockdown like measures. There's a lot of numbers that suggest vaccins do wonders for that, for all ages (a bit less for elderly actually). An obvious one is the much bigger amount of daily infections we could now support with less beds compared to before vaccinations. These numbers are dropping, possibly because vaccinations being longer ago. Hopefully boosters will mitigated this.
Hospitalization is unfortunately also hopelessly confounded by the same factors - if you don't vaccinate people who are already dying then they are much more likely to be or end up in hospital - but then additional problems too. Again, RCT data didn't prove any effects on hospitalization, that just wasn't an end point they cared about.
Why not? Well, partly because it's extremely subjective. To be hospitalized for a disease like COVID you must either catch it in hospital, or choose to go. COVID isn't a sudden collapse like a heart attack or stroke where bystanders may rush you to hospital in an ambulance. It's a steady degradation and at some point someone has to call a doctor or emergency number and say, I think I need to go to the hospital. Hospitals can turn you away if your COVID isn't serious enough but in many places they have monetary incentives not to do so, and that's ignoring all the psychological issues - if you have some spare beds giving someone who's terrified some attention may be better than turning them away.
In normal/sane times this wouldn't really matter, as we can hope that people are roughly OK at judging whether they need this or not, and hospitals wouldn't spend resources on cases that aren't really needing to be there. But with COVID, years of relentless misinformation from newspapers and authority figures have totally destroyed people's understanding of the severity of the disease. US adults over-estimate the risk of hospitalization if you're unvaccinated by orders of magnitude:
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
"The results show that most Americans overstate the risk of hospitalization for both groups: 92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people .... For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19."
41% of left leaning voters think HALF of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized for COVID! The true number is less than 1%. That's an astonishing stat. I suspect these polls aren't representative and the true numbers are better than this but even so, they are indicative of the problem.
What happens if you trust the media and government so much that you're totally convinced testing positive for COVID = required hospital visit, and then those same authority figures tell you that vaccines will "protect" you from hospitalization? Well, you're much less likely to go, even in situations where previously you would have gone straight to the ER and demanded attention. And that's fine, they'll recover on their own as they almost certainly would have done anyway, and they'll say "thank god I was vaccinated otherwise it would have been much worse".
This is the sort of confounder a rigorous trial would seek to control for, but we don't have any useful trials. The vaccine trials were complete failures: for the only end point they targeted, they reported 95% effectiveness, which started dwindling to near or even below zero in the months after the trial period ended. No usefully accurate information was provided by them, which is shocking.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
doesn't even contain the word hospital anywhere in it.
It's not just Americans by the way. There's a French survey that shows something similar with respect to estimated IFR. Actual value between 0.1% and 0.3% depending on study, estimated value average of 14%. The misinformation campaign has been global.
I'm not saying something as simple as "vaccines are bad" - although COVID vaccines specifically could well be for younger age ranges, where disease risk is so low that it would require an astonishingly weak sauce to avoid tipping the cost/benefit balance negative. But the actual argument is that we don't really know any of these things with the level of rigor that should be required for a forced global vaccination programme. Literally all the data is either wrong or hopelessly confounded, and scientists are not only mostly ignoring these problems but doubling down on them by insisting that analyses of side effect databases are illegitimate because they're "correlational" (which is a bogus argument but apparently enough to repeatedly get such papers retracted).
Here's a summary of an paywalled interview in the Telegraph with former Vaccine Taskforce chief Clive Dix:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chi...
"The battle over Covid transmission was lost some time ago. I am afraid that the vaccines will not stop the spread of the virus in the short or medium term – but that is not a disaster. Indeed the vaccines were not designed to end transmission. It was evident to me at the time I helped with the procurement of doses, as interim chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, that the intention was to stop people from getting severely ill or dying."
"Given that young and healthy people not only have a very low chance of suffering severe Covid in the first place, but also already have substantial immunity from severe disease thanks to the first two jabs, I cannot see how boosting them is more valuable for public health than doubling our focus on the most vulnerable and cracking down on the backlog of chronically sick patients, such as those with hypertension, diabetes or even cancer."
Having said that, I've also seen graphs with 4 quadrants (vaccinated or not on both axis for the two persons involved in a transmission) where the transmission was clearly higher in the case neither were vaccinated. So I'm not sure if it does absolutely nothing for transmission, but at least not enough to be a strong argument in this discussion.
This sounds impossible but the UK data shows very clearly that once the vaccine wears off you're nearly 2.5x as likely to catch COVID than unvaccinated people are! This kind of negative effectiveness has happened before and immunologists know about the effect. They call it "original antigenic sin" and it refers to a type of imprinting effect, whereby the immune system misfires when presented with slightly mutated viruses by re-manufacturing the same antibodies it made before.
Thus, if you trick your immune system with a vaccine, it learns to fight whatever the vaccine was targeting but that's a now obsolete and extinct 2019 strain of the virus. Then you get hit with the new strains and the antibodies it makes aren't so effective anymore, creating a delay before the body realizes its mistake and spins up new antibodies (or sometimes it seems, it may never do this - gulp). This can cause negative VE when vaccinating against something that can mutate very quickly.
With "work" I mean they get rid of a large percentage of mortality, hospitalisation and (a bit less certain) long haul covid. How big that absolute risk reduction is differs per person.
But more importantly: I don't see our society getting through Covid-19 in a humane manner without vaccins. Without vaccins, the IC's will flood, or we'd need (suffocating) measures and a lot of patience. But I'm ver much open to different ideas here.
As far as getting through this without vaccines that's not the question I asked. I asked in light of the data on the ground why are people still trying to push mandates. If people want to take these products with the efficacy rate and risk factors as they are knowing the manufacturers are wholly shielded from any and all liability that's one thing. The suggestion anyone ought to be forced to is entirely another.
I really was trying to answer your question regarding pushing mandates. Again I'm not saying I'm for them (here in the Netherlands we're staying away from mandates, for now at least). Individual efficacy (vs risk) is not the ONLY argument for mandates (actually I'd find that a less strong reason by itself even with a higher ARR), my argument would be the benefit for society as a whole. Sure, we should be able to make it through also without 100% vaccination rate, that's probably why mandates are less clearly on the table in places where it's high without mandates already.
Beta, Delta and Omikron just called to disagree. In particular Omikron seems to be (speculative at this point!) spreading well amongst the previously infected in South Africa.
As a reference point, we are re-infected with the other endemic human corona viruses every 1.5-2 years.
What the article references is a report that 76% of vaccine-associated myocarditis events were described as mild [0].
> A total of 76% of cases of myocarditis were described as mild and 22% as intermediate; 1 case was associated with cardiogenic shock. After a median follow-up of 83 days after the onset of myocarditis, 1 patient had been readmitted to the hospital, and 1 had died of an unknown cause after discharge. Of 14 patients who had left ventricular dysfunction on echocardiography during admission, 10 still had such dysfunction at the time of hospital discharge. Of these patients, 5 underwent subsequent testing that revealed normal heart function.
We also know that long term effects of COVID-19 overall i.e. not only myocarditis are not always mild and can be debilitating even for people below 40, even after mild COVID-19. See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29564815
The way I read it, they counted 2+1+6=9 incidences more for one dose, another 10 for two doses (total 19), compared to 40 more if you got Covid. So basically the vaccine decreased the incidence for the infected.
Only with children age <15 the cost benefit ratio gets close.