Risk of myocarditis after the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination in the USA cohort study | Hacker News Reader

Risk of myocarditis after the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination in the USA cohort study

thelancet.com

107 pointsnradov179 comments

Synthetic mRNA based vaccine induces heart damage is not a binary concept (i.e. you either have it or not), but depends on the amount of cardiac cells attacked and destroyed by the immune system due to exposing the spike protein. People develop problems many weeks after vaccination, here are exemplary case reports (excluded from the FDA funded garbage study):

* "18 days after his second dose": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/pace.14486

* "chest pain one week after second dose": https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/internalmedicine/advpub...

* "chest pain 2 weeks after mRNA vaccination": https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMc2109975

Population level studies (including risk studies) will reduce complex conditions to specific modelled criteria in order to try to ensure validity. This is especially true when you're dealing with complex health conditions which exist on a spectrum (i.e. heart/circulatory system damage). It is extremely important to note that individual case reports are meant to highlight exceptional cases explicitly and to provide the medical community with a starting point for population level studies.

It is irresponsible to present individual case reports as, in any way, representative of risks for the average individual. This leads to extremely distorted estimates of risks - especially in laymen. Is it possible some will experience effects like those described? Yes, of course. Anything is possible. However, we have to look to well controlled population level studies to get context as to just how likely negative impacts are, for the average person. The answer to that? It's extremely, extremely unlikely - i.e. so much less likely than it is likely to be caused by eschewing the vaccination and getting the disease. This is at the very heart of how the medical community and regulators either approve or reject vaccine candidates and medical practices/procedures.

In short, please stop misleading people by editorialising, re-framing, and presenting data/case reports improperly and without proper context so as to lead people to faulty conclusions.

> It's extremely, extremely unlikely - i.e. so much less likely than it is likely to be caused by eschewing the vaccination and getting the disease.

> In short, please stop misleading people by editorialising, re-framing, and presenting data/case reports improperly and without proper context so as to lead people to faulty conclusions.

I guess it was hard to follow your own advice and not editorialize an opinion that is not qualified medical advice from a personal doctor.

This is essentially the same as replying "no u". The risk results in question are clear and numerically comparable on their own. It's not a complex diagnosis, analysis, or treatment issue that would require a specialist's medical opinion. All you need is the knowledge of someone who understands basic arithmetic, statistics, and logic. This is not editorialising. This is not misrepresenting data or reports to mislead. I welcome you to try again - preferably with a point beyond "no u" next time.

Not at all as you did not apply the quality control to the data as you suggested it needed to have to come to a conclusion.

that post you're responding to was not misleading, but rather quite clear and on point

bringing up individual case reports for a population-level question is indeed pretty ridiculous, especially in the comment section of a study which addresses the question much better

this also applies to sources of info: if someone is trusting individual doctors they found on the internet instead of a consensus of the population of doctors, they are also likely to mislead or be misled.

That’s not true for younger people. The risk of the vaccine is probably higher than the risk of the virus for them. Search elsewhere in this thread.

What I have stated is true with regards to studies, their construction, and case reports - in general. As to your statements about the risk of vaccination versus the risks of infection without, in younger people, you are also, sadly mistaken. In short, your conclusions are likely not based on an independent evaluation of the evidence but evaluation of evidence preselected to support your particular conclusion. Search elsewhere for an explanation of why this is true.

Two people saying "trust me."

It's a whole lot more than just two people saying "trust me". It's a hundred countries, thousands and thousands of organisations and experts, and millions and millions of others. All these people, orgs, countries and authoritarians and big pharma moguls who would just love to call each other out on the conspiracy and provide incontrovertible evidence of foul play -- if there were any. Seriously; what is it with people who think that half the world can keep a secret from the other half? Four people can barely keep a crime secret; when it gets to ten, it's just about impossible. Why is any of this different? I honestly just don't get it.

Why do ypu need a conspiracy where incompetence would suffice (not saying that’s the case but nobody fully understanding what’s happening seems like a more reasonable explanation compared to “foul play”)? Also it’s not unreasonable to believe that many of the researchers understood that not all the side effects were known but still judged that deploying the vaccines is worth it because the benefits outweigh the risk by a magnitude or two (again it’s hard to say if they were right).

Yes, the struggle between knowing enough to act correctly and not acting because we don't know enough to act is the trade-off we wrestle with at the heart of medicine. This is what it means to do no harm. Improper actions don't need to be the result of a conspiracy to result in disaster, no. However, what we do have to do, is work with the best information we have to make the best decision we can and act when we're confident we know enough. Where we don't make the right decision, in hindsight, we learn from it for the future. If our processes and systems, uncorrupted - as best we can tell, say that it's much, much more beneficial to perform a procedure or take a medication then we generally do that. That's how modern medicine, as we know it, has worked since it has been modern medicine. It's always a game of statistics and learning.

Doctors still feed people green jello and white bread. And statistics is not applied in every hospital in America to prove this is shit food and not good for your health.

Wide spread poor choices in industry backed by science is not only possible, it's frequent and common.

To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.

Your supposition that I endorsed any of these positions you assert I did simply does not follow from my statements. I cannot respond to your rebuttal of an argument I did not make. Please, try to avoid non sequitur, if you wish to discuss our views and opinions confluently.

However, to touch upon your point about the recent evidence-based medicine and hospital management movements - yes, they were once sorely lacking, with existing pre-modern medical practices handling quite a bit of load. However, the consensus is that evidence-based practices are already well established for high risk areas of practice and only increasing as time goes on elsewhere.

It's important to note that modern versus pre-modern medicine isn't a hard line, but a continuum we're continually shifting to the left. It's very much more like the border between generations instead of the hard line between decades.

In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches. This is a very good thing as they are, generally speaking, much more powerful tools. We've figured out how to understand evidence and understand when we have enough to make good decisions and now we use it. We didn't always, but we're working towards replacing what came before but until then we're often forced to use it because we've nothing better or it hurts worse to do nothing. That's how most things are - that's how medicine is.

> To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.

The consensus of experts on the validity of the collection and interpretation of data, relying on the tools of statistical analysis of that data to make sound decisions about the applicability of that data as evidence, in relationship to deciding the answer to question at hand - relying of multiple points of view and power to cross check, reproduce experiments, and systematically eliminate biases - is exactly what science is. Is the process perfect? Absolutely not! Is it better than taking everything in and saying "well, both sides make good points so I guess we'll never know", "look at all this untrustworthy, untested data I don't know how to interpret but with which I agree so the mainstream opinion must be wrong" and "who trusts academics anyway"? You know, actual anti-science? Absolutely, yes.

> In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches.

At least for "new devices" I really wish this was consistently the case.

However there are many horror stories (including here on HN), about new medical devices being grandfathered in using some prior device or category certifications (from rough memory of the description).

And it really sounds like they shouldn't be. :/

That being said, there are other HN posts about rigorous things some new device manufacturers have had to go through too.

Doctors don't feed people in hospitals. They have registered dieticians on staff for that. Most hospitals now feed patients more healthy food. Sometimes they just need to get some calories into certain patients, and green jello and white bread are easy to digest.

To be fair, it's not the doctors doing the feeding; it's the hospital administrators who are almost always business folks representing the interests of the shareholders (increasingly, PE firms).

Hospitals are glorified hotels with super over-priced roomservice and activities. But the business model is very similar.

>It's a hundred countries, thousands and thousands of organisations and experts, and millions and millions of others

In most countries it's literally official policy to fire doctors if they question the vaccine or speak out against it.

and yet, for all the countries which don't do that, none have presented independently verifiable incontrovertible evidence of a show-stopping problem the others have not presented or addressed.

You know, the thing about silenced people is just that - they're actually silenced. You don't hear from them. So, all these people shouting about being silenced while also shouting about the vaccine not working or not being necessary and posting links to studies and case reports and nonsense?

Yeah, they're not being silenced. It's just that the evidence they're posting just isn't good evidence. The studies they're posting just aren't good studies. The case reports they're posting, well, they're just that - single case reports. Case reports do not generalise to populations.

That's all.

Just out of interest, why should the burden of proof be the way round you've framed it?

"independently verifiable incontrovertible evidence of a show-stopping problem" seems a fairly high bar.

The risks from COVID have been fairly well understood for a while now, if you're young and healthy and have no comorbidities the risk of dying from it is quite simply vanishingly small:

https://qcovid.org

EDIT: so a hypothetical 19 year old unvaccinated me has a 1 in 1,000,000 risk of dying after catching COVID according to that University of Oxford model.

You do know there are far worse things than death, right? Permanent disability. Heart/lung conditions. Mental illness. Chronic fatigue. All from a young age. This simple focus on death rates misses the mark entirely and it acts like these consequences don't exist or increase the more times you are reinfected. It's sad, really.

The burden of proof is on those who are arguing for a specific action or inaction to cause a specific result. So let be the weight of the clear and convincing evidence against the other - all of it.

> Permanent disability. Heart/lung conditions. Mental illness. Chronic fatigue. All from a young age.

Is there a serious study showing that the young and healthy (those w/o any comorbidities) are at significantly increased risk of these due to catching Covid itself? Those issues were affecting people long before Covid arrived.

QCovid predicts that that hypothetical 19 year old unvaccinated me has a 1 in 62,500 risk of "catching and being admitted to hospital with COVID-19". For context: what's the risk of ending up in hospital after a car accident in your part of the world?

> This simple focus on death rates misses the mark entirely

Some would say that two years+ of singular focus on Covid is what's missing the mark.

As my doctor keeps telling me, there are plenty of other viruses and plenty of other health conditions.

Honestly, if you want to talk about relative risk, I'm surprised you don't have that information already - especially given the implications your making. Of course there are always other conditions and diseases, this absolutely is reflected in the available data. Feel free to bring up specifics once you've retrieved and analysed them at your leasure. Happy to discuss them once you have.

> Of course there are always other conditions and diseases, this absolutely is reflected in the available data. Feel free to bring up specifics [..]

Covid is simply too new for any of us to have reliable long-term data. Even the UK's ONS said so in the Spring[0]:

"More deaths were registered in young people aged 15 to 29 years in England in 2021 than the average number registered in 2015 to 2019; however, there was no excess in 2021 for deaths from circulatory diseases.

We do not yet have a complete picture of how the coronavirus pandemic has affected deaths in young people, because it takes a long time to investigate deaths from external causes; we will continue to monitor the safety of vaccines and the changes in excess deaths.

Early indications show deaths in 2020 increased for some causes, particularly suicides in young females and accidental poisonings (mostly drug poisonings) in young males"

So let's put Covid to one side and talk about seasonal flu, since that's been with us for long enough.

The US and Canada were (at least relatively recently) the only places that recommend everyone over six months to get the (seasonal) flu vaccine.[1]

"Apparently, not a single country in Europe asks the general population to seek that same kind of protection, according to Robb Butler, the World Health Organization technical officer in vaccine preventable diseases and immunizations in the organization's Europe office in the Netherlands.

That's because global health experts say the data aren't there yet to support this kind of blanket vaccination policy, nor is there enough money"

The USA is "the land of the medicated" according to a NBC article[1] and "What the drug companies are doing now is promoting drugs for long-term use to essentially healthy people. Why? Because it’s the biggest market."[2]

YMMV, but $BigPharma's shareholders would definitely prefer you to take more medicine, and not ask too many questions.

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/health/flu-vaccine-policy... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/america-land-medi... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-Companies-Deceive/dp...

So, if you want to examine the data we do have about risks from COVID-19 in the setting of comparative risk, including other diseases, then I'm happy to do so. However, I do not wish to speculate about COVID-19 by changing the topic of discussion to influenza, excluding COVID-19, in this context, as though it were comparable. COVID-19 is not the flu. Speculating about data is not what we're discussing. If we don't have the long term data, we don't have the data. We do have preliminary data for COVID-19, so if you want to speculate about that and how it might develop - that'd be much more relevant.

A very large proportion of the population spends 8-10 hours a day, 5-7 days a week, 3/4 to 11/12ths of the year, doing things they don't particularly enjoy, for money. Per Piketty & our dear senator from Vermont, less than 1% of world population controls over half of of the world's wealth.

"Conspiracy" is just rhetoric. It's a word to shoo people away who aren't inclined to think things through. Replace "conspiracy" with "paycheck", and you've just explained how the world works. There are chemical plants, with hundreds of employees each, that have been poisoning communities for generations. And most of these employees live in the same communities they've been poisoning! And the situation persists! And you're rolling your eyes at us for doubting that the medical establishment--the 3rd leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer, with its whopping 19.7% of US GDP--couldn't hide their boo-boos (even if they tried!) behind esoteric epidemiologyese?

> "Conspiracy" is just rhetoric.

I believe that's at the heart of what we're discussing. There's an important distinction to be made between actual malice and simple ignorance. This is not a Russel Bliss/Times Beach situation, as you seemingly imply. This is many independent actors all working independently on many potential solutions, each of which stand to gain massive financial benefit for exposing malfeasance. I would not confuse that with "looking the other way for a paycheck". It's quite the opposite, in fact.

The WHO and it's director has an enormous amount of centralised global power on this matter, which anyone would argue is ridiculously dangerous and disproportionate, especially considering how many scandals and investigations the WHO have already had due to funding from private corporations and pharma companies.

And the fact that they simply changed the definition of what a pandemic is, seemingly on a whim, to no longer include death rates, with no scientific intervention, is that something we should accept as some kind of perfect and neutral decision making that's obviously in the interest of.. whom exactly?

I'm sorry, did you have a specific assertion or accusation to make? I can't tell.

>The WHO and it's director has an enormous amount of centralised global power on this matter, which anyone would argue is ridiculously dangerous and disproportionate

better phrased: 'I, personally, as 1 of the people in the world, argue this thing'

so, argue it, but try to stick to specifics: "This is the direct evidence that the CDC killed scientists who disagreed with this study" or whatever the specific conspiracy theory is as it pertains to this article

They aren't independent actors. If you spend any time in the journals, it's all funded by either the government or pharma. Mostly the government. And given regulatory capture, these entities might as well be one-in-the-same. Disagree with either, and kiss your grad students goodbye. There is also an unspoken professional hierarchy. It is simply understood that if you run contrary to the current 800-lb gorilla of the field, your career is going nowhere--look into what's been going on with the beta-amyloid hypothesis for the last 20 years, or recall Planck's remark that "science advances one funeral at a time".

Or, to paraphrase Lewis Grizzard:

"One boy, one whole brain. Two boys, half a brain. Three boys, no brain at all."

I have another aphorism for you: If you distrust everyone - especially those who do not know each other and have little to no other reason to cooperate or seek each other out - no one is going to be able to convince you to trust anyone.

I am an empiricist. For my own ailments, the track record has been:

Dr Google & Dr. Wikipedia: 4

GPs & Specialists: 1

And the one ailment that the system did successfully treat was primarily a result of misinformation that the system perpetuated. If the system were functioning, there would be no way for an amateur to outperform them so consistently.

edit: and since HN is slowposting me now:

I mentioned a study in my original comment:

https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.long

While this comment made no claim to being a study. It is highlighting an extreme improbability. If random taco cart guy is besting the average software dev 80% of the time, that's a pretty clear sign something is wrong with the field.

edit 2: and to joshuamorton

Mine was by a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and his research assistant, subsequently published in the British Medical Journal. Yours is a blog post by a "science communicator," whatever that is supposed to be. Of course the BMJ article would be widely criticized by an industry that claims almost 20% of US GDP. They can afford to have it criticized--by professional criticizers no less.

And the BMJ article is but one of many on the misrepresentations and oversellings of modern medicine. Read Ioannidis, or Mendelssohn, or Illich, or Mullins, or so many others!

As an old person, who has seen a lot of people cut short by the hospitals, all of these takedowns have held true to life. I've seen heart patients MRSA-ed to death by the hospitals, who would have been just fine if they stayed home; cancer patients killed off by post-radiation pleural effusion long before the cancer would have gotten them; people losing 1/3 of their blood volume, or suffering from intestinal perforations, from "routine" colonoscopies.

The primary contribution to human life expectancy in the last century was not mainstream medicine. It was public hygiene.

As you're an empiricist, you also know that a study with an n of 1 is not a study; it is a case report and should be interpreted as such. You, by yourself, are not generalisable.

Someone who was interested in uncovering the truth, you'd look beyond the headline (https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/m...), and realize that that "study" isn't a study, its as far as I can tell not actually peer reviewed at all. It's widely criticized for being a terrible and misleading application of statistics.

It doesn't pass the smell test (it would imply that more than 1/3 of deaths in hospitals are due to medical errors, which is, suffice to say, silly), but is highly enthralling, as it allows one to believe they're better than the experts.

Which isn't to say medical personnel are perfect or don't make mistakes, but it is to say that if you believe that study, you should really reevaluate both how you analyze medical studies, because you're doing a bad job of it, and reevaluate your worldview, and see if you're aiming to be different solely to be different.

And the BMJ article is but one of many on the misrepresentations and oversellings of modern medicine. Read Ioannidis, or Mendelssohn, or Illich, or Mullins, or so many others!

The primary contribution to human life expectancy in the last century was not mainstream medicine. It was public hygiene.

edit: And if you, as a literate and numerate person, ever get sick, trust but verify. Listen to the doctor, but also do your own research. I can guaran-damn-tee that you will obtain vastly superior results. It's not that all doctors are scoundrels looking to kill you & take your wallet. It's that they are afflicted by the same tunnel-vision, group-think, & subconscious self-interest as any other group of professionals. When the only tool you have is a hammer...

Ah yes the "any criticism of what I'm saying is a part of the conspiracy".

When you have created an unfalsifiable position, you lose all credibility as you've ventured totally into conspiracy, not science or reason or empiricism or rationality or whatever.

> Listen to the doctor, but also do your own research. I can guaran-damn-tee that you will obtain vastly superior results.

Of course, and I said as much! But your fearmongering and aspersions on the medical community are both wrong and harmful. And doubling down on them isn't done out of evidence, it's because you need to feeling superior to the experts. That's stupid. The experts are usually right. Not always, but "usually*, and you're citing complete nonsense along with occasional mistakes by experts to imply that they're usually wrong. That's bad and dumb and wrong.

> I am an empiricist. For my own ailments, the track record has been:

> Dr Google & Dr. Wikipedia: 4

> GPs & Specialists: 1

cool! mine have been internet-1, professionals-5, which cancels out your own sample data.

consequently, you've got no more complaints about this, being an empiricist who follows the data and everything, right?

It is easy to forget the Snowden moment. Before him releasing the documents, most people in the HN group and in general public would call somebody suggesting such practices of the US goverment as maniac.

Sorry - your argument just do not hold whatever the underlaying question is.

Goverments and most probably the rich can keep the secrets from us, in particular when the topic is complex.

Oh, no, lol - just about everyone thought the NSA was spying on citizens. We just didn't know exactly how or the precise scale of the operation. Bill Binney and cohorts/whistle blowers were very well known ages before then. Heck, Nixon couldn't even keep Watergate under wraps! Don't distort what "the average person would think" to launder your own opinion into something that a reader might think has more weight than "because I say".

"These people did something I don't like, therefore they are guilty of anything I suggest without evidence" does not seem like a reasonable argument in favor of your position

Every previous study I’ve read that’s looked at this states the opposite.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z this study in Nature shows the risk of heart problems for young men is greater from the vaccine.

This study is written by biased authors [1], and they're simply measuring the emergency calls for cardiovascular events in different age groups over time. They literally don't know if the affected individuals were even vaccinated or if they had covid.

We really can't infer that the risk from vaccination is higher from this study.

[1] https://concerneddoctors.org/testimony-of-retsef-levi/

At the top of the article :

Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow once all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.

> this study in Nature

No, that's been published in Scientific Reports not Nature. Scientific Reports has a vastly higher acceptance rate, engages in pay to play, and published a picture of Donald Trump hidden in baboon feces. You're relying on junk science.

Is the amount of spike protein in the body during an actual infection larger? I.e. is it not still better to get vaccinatet rather than infected?

From what I understand this is correct for the first dose. You still have few antibodies bwcause your immune system is learning about the invading new protein. In this case it seems plausible/obvious that the vaccine should be better for your body than the real infection because it can not replicate itself in an uncontrolled way.

During the second dose however, you have a immune system that is extremely armed to fight this particular protein. When you inject the second dose, a huge battle breaks out immediately. This situation can not come about naturally because we don‘t inject massive amounts of covid but rather inhale small amounts that can be easily fought off at the border by the now highly armed immune system.

I don‘t know how this could break havoc on heart cells but probably due to some collateral damage when the injected proteins reach the bloodstream.

This is an absolute layman’s understanding of things so please correct me if I‘m wrong. But I haven‘t seen this issue discussed/refuted by experts, yet.

That might explain why I felt nothing after the first does, felt like I was dying after the second dose and nothing after the third and after getting infected. Interesting.

I know here in Norway the second and third doses have not been pushed on young men due to the heart issue. As I understand it health officials are not sure the boosters are better than getting infected for young men. Same reason why children are not getting the vaccine at all, for the vast majority of children covid is benign and the vaccine might carry risks on it's own.

You are incorrect. The immune response to contracting actual symptomatic COVID will be much higher than any vaccination. You get symptoms largely due to your immune response (up until you start getting actual directly damaging multisystem COVID and you're hospitalized). Symptoms are a good enough proxy to viral loads affecting your immune system, which pretty much proves your argument is flawed.

Anti-bodt levels drop after some months though, according to what I have heard on news and read online fwiw, and that is when the second dose is recommended.

not a biologist by any mean, but i think location is very important, especially for an air transmitted disease like covid : mouth / nose / lungs are all part of the "outside" of your body, aka the mucosa. That's probably where the largest part of the infection takes place in the case of a natural covid infection.

Vaccines otoh enters your bloodstream and may result in infection everywhere in your body, touching many places that wouldn't be by a natural contamination process.

(disclaimer : please correct me if i'm wrong, and in all case never take medical advices from random people online)

This is not really true, vaccines first and foremost enter cells at the point of injection (intramuscular) through fusion of the lipid nano particles with the cell membrane, not via the ACE2 or TMPRSS route as the live virus. The immune response then depends on the migration of antigen presenting cells to the mostly peripheral lymph nodes where the full immune response is mounted including germinal centers. This has little to do with blood borne propagation. The virus on the other hand has multiple ways of entry into cells, ACE2 dependent, the endosomal route, syncytia formation and others that are still discussed. What is not up for debate though is that SARS-CoV-2 regularly infects other organs, including the kidney [1] and the liver were it does damage. It has also been shown to persist in organs like the intestine for more than a year in its live form. Due to the (super-)antigenic nature of the virus and the subsequent systemic inflammatory response the rate of post-Covid myocarditis also by far exceeds the incidence of myocarditis after vaccination in all age groups and cases tend to be more severe with the virus. It will be important to develop mucosal vaccines because current vaccines only elicit a very limited and short-lived IgA response and IgA antibodies, thanks to their shape, confer protection without excessive inflammation and offer protection against infection. But your description of the spread of the virus and the vaccine is just not accurate.

1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

thanks for the clarification. I think to have read that vaccine was in fact observed spreading much further than expected, reaching organs everywhere.

Since you seem knowledgeable, can you confirm ?

It absolutely is. There are some outlier cases (e.g “should I get the third jab even when I’ve had Covid?”) but overall it is clear the severity of all known vaccine side effects is a fraction of the severity of Covid and complications, after the likelihood of either are factored in.

That's not at all clear. Amongst people me and my girlfriend know it's the opposite. The effects of the vaccines were worse than that of COVID, both in terms of frequency and severity.

Actually the focus on my heart problems is weird and frustrating. I have a close friend who had a heart attack after taking the shots (it was never reported!) but by far the most common problems we've heard about affect women and their reproductive systems. Broken periods and the like. The frequency of this is massive compared to heart issues, but is being completely ignored.

Official stats on this are all useless for the reasons you can see in the first comment - deaths and injuries that are obviously vaccine related are constantly excluded. After insisting that someone previously healthy dropping dead two days after a vaccination is a mere coincidence, they report that there are miraculously almost no vaccine deaths or injuries and COVID is definitely worse. The entire medical and research system pushed vaccines on pain of them losing their licenses and careers, so you definitely can't take what they say at face value.

You're dismissing the data that is available in favour of speculation and anecdotes. That may be emotionally satisfying on some level, but it's no way to reach an understanding of the world.

Trusting data only makes sense if it's trustworthy. This data isn't for all sorts of reasons. The lack of concordance with observable reality is only one of those reasons.

The slices of reality you and I observe are just tiny parts of the whole picture. That is why we need data...

> Is the amount of spike protein in the body during an actual infection larger? I.e. is it not still better to get vaccinatet rather than infected?

The question is rather: Is it a good idea to get a second vaccine dose although you have already been both infected and vaccinated?

The study only checks for myocarditis diagnosis codes 1-7 days after vaccination. That's a very short timeframe... We have multiple months worth of data at this point, I wonder what happens to the incidence rate at longer timelines.

I’m not a doctor but fairly well versed in inflammatory conditions for personal medical reasons. Myocarditis is primarily an acute condition. According to Google its onset is quick, and most people don’t suffer chronic forms. That’d imply that if myocarditis doesn’t happen in the first 1-7 days it seems very u likely it’d occur after that period. https://www.myocarditisfoundation.org/research-and-grants/fa...

I had viral pericarditis after a cold one time, but it appeared about 2 months after I had recovered.

That's pretty common with autoimmune conditions triggered by IgG autoimmunity response.

But we understand autoimmunity in response to individual exposure to antigens pretty well and while 1-7 days is probably too short to see a lot of responses, over 3 months is highly unlikely. There can be a long tail of certain individuals having autoimmune responses up until 2 years later, but in a population study if you capture nearly all the responses after 3 months. If you don't see anything 3 months later then there's no hidden long-term effects waiting to happen years later.

And there's nothing fundamentally unique about the mRNA vaccinations that would cause anything different. It is just a dose of mRNA that looks like any other mRNA payload from a virus which is wrapped in a lipid package that fuses with the lipids in your cell wall (and we understand the allergy to PEG that some people have against the lipid nanoparticle itself). All of the 200 years of understanding of vaccinations and hundreds of years of autoimmune conditions subsequent to viruses still apply to the mRNA vaccines. The "no we don't understand anything about these new things and the clock starts from zero" is just a fantastically ignorant argument based on no understanding of what the vaccines are built from and what vaccines and viruses are and how they interact with the immune system.

So both of you are kind of wrong. 7 days is too short, but 90 days is all you need.

Thanks, good to know about pericarditis. I’m not well versed on that or myocarditis and in particular the IgG or T-Cell response mechanism. Though the little I’ve read seems to indicate myocarditis is still primarily due to an acute immune response, but can re-occur or turn into a more autoimmune condition (chromic myocarditis or perhaps pericarditis).

That said I would normally give the benefit of doubt that the authors of a paper in the Lancet are more well versed on myocarditis and it’s behavior. It looks like they do adjust all their comparisons to odds ‘per 100,000 person-days’. If done properly that would adjust from an event basis to per-time basis or rate which could account for long tail reactions.

Using 90 days would risk including non-vaccine related myocarditis risks as well, which is perhaps why the lancet paper uses the time rate basis. If someone got a normal cold after a month and got pericarditis that'd skew the results as an example. Though I was disappointed to not see statistical analysis or comparison to normal occurrence rates of myocarditis without vaccine exposure, etc. though I didn’t thoroughly check their references, etc.

Check out this Kaiser Permanente Northwest study which points out the flaw in the "first 1-7 days" logic:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pds.5439

> The encounter methodology identified 14 distinct patients who met the confirmed or probable CDC case definition for acute myocarditis or pericarditis with an onset within 21 days of receipt of COVID-19 vaccination. When we extended the search for relevant diagnoses to 30 days since vaccination, we identified two additional patients (for a total of 16 patients) who met the case definition for acute myocarditis or pericarditis, but those patients had been misdiagnosed at the time of their original presentation. Three of these patients had an ICD-10-CM code of I51.4 “Myocarditis, Unspecified;” that code was omitted by the VSD algorithm (in the late fall of 2021). The VSD methodology identified 11 patients who met the CDC case definition for acute myocarditis or pericarditis. Seven (64%) of the 11 patients had initial care for myopericarditis outside of a KPNW facility and their diagnosis could not be ascertained by the VSD methodology until claims were submitted (median delay of 33 days; range of 12–195 days). Among those who received a second dose of vaccine (n = 146 785), we estimated a risk as 95.4 cases of myopericarditis per million second doses administered (95% CI, 52.1–160.0).

One of the author also did a podcast where she pointed out how the way some insurance claims (especially those from outside facility) works is that it takes a few weeks to receive the claim and it to get registered correctly. So they often get missed in short period windows.

When they took into account the correct numbers, they found rates of 537.1 per million for MALES aged 18-24.

Here in Ontario, our government reports rates of 200.2 per million in males aged 18-24. Note that Ontario stopped giving Moderna to under 30 year olds and also made the dosing interval to be 8 weeks but our rates of myocarditis continued to climb.

> most people don’t suffer chronic forms

This is misleading. There is no such thing as mild myocarditis. Inflammation of your heart muscle has to be taken seriously, even if you end up in the hospital for a couple days, that's not the end of inflammation because it leads to scarring and permanent damage. Heart is the only organ that's going to keep you alive the longest and any damage to the heart has to be taken seriously especially if you are balancing it with a condition that in itself is very low risk to youth.

Around 88% of the cases occur in males and up to 96% of the cases are hospitalized. Requires no exercise for 6 months and 6 month follow up Cardiac MRI still shows damage:

https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(22)00282-7/fulltext

And since the COVID vaccine doesn't prevent infection, you may end up compounding the risk if you get myocarditis first from the vaccine and then again from infection.

The largest study on this topic has been of 23.1 million residents across four Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. They found that:

> in young men 16 to 24 years of age, the risk for myocarditis after vaccination with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine is higher than the risk for myocarditis after COVID-19 infection.

> "We show that the risk of myocarditis after COVID infection is lower in younger people and higher in older people, but the opposite is true after COVID vaccination, where the risk of myocarditis is higher in younger people and lower in older people"

> "In the group at highest risk of myocarditis after COVID vaccination — young men aged 16 to 24 — the Pfizer vaccine shows a five times higher risk of myocarditis versus the unvaccinated cohort, while the Moderna vaccine shows a 15 times higher risk"

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/972453

Actual study:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

This finding from Scandinavian countries also seems to match the update to the Nature study which found the risk of myocarditis in under-40 males to be greater from the vaccine than from COVID. Discussed here few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697780

I only have time to checkout out your first article. It seems plausible the KPN folks might have caught a tail-end effect of myocarditis in Covid vaccination. However the Kaiser numbers don’t appear that different or concerning to me as an educated lay person. They’re not an order of magnitude higher AFAICT without re-normalizing the units used in the TFA and the KPN paper. AFAICT from the error bars on table 2 in the KPN paper they have pretty wide error bars and CI. That makes sense given that even with on the order of a 100k+ vaccinations you only get 16 cases occurring.

TFA presents their data in a form seemingly normalized to 100,000 person-days not just events-per dose. This would potentially also capture much of the long tail effect. Though I’m not well versed in the odds ratio statics most common in these sort of medical studies.

Now that being said I am actually somewhat concerned of the lifetime cumulative risk of specifically Covid-19 vaccinations. Particularly if it becomes standard practice to get a new booster every 6 months for the rest of your life. Luckily that practice seems to be ebbing as Covid-19 has become endemic. TFA reports higher rates after the second dose, and excluded booster shots AFAICT. It’s possible booster doses could present the same or higher risk of myocarditis in particular if you’re targeting the exact same spike protein. Some quick back of the napkin calculations show a lifetime risk approaching the fatality risk of say omicron of you did get a dose every 6 months, and the risk was constant. Both of those conditions seem unlikely. For example susceptible people would likely be “weeded out” and the myocarditis risk would drop, and it’s doesn’t seem likely people will gets bi-annual boosters. Also the dosing of mRNA vaccines will likely get better and methods for treating rare events like myocarditis will improve.

> I am actually somewhat concerned of the lifetime cumulative risk of specifically Covid-19 vaccinations. Particularly if it becomes standard practice to get a new booster every 6 months for the rest of your life

I think it's valuable to have this public debate in general, and also regarding the quarantine measures. Quarantine measures have been criticized as something of a ratchet that doesn't have anything to do with disease, but rather with authorities controlling the population.

And I guess in some locales that criticism has strong merit. But in my locale, all the extraordinary laws enacted to mandate social distancing, quarantines and so on were rolled back this spring, triggering a big Covid wave that turned out to be (in line with health authority expectations) relatively harmless due to vaccinations and previous exposure. Some businesses struggled with their headcount for a few weeks, but within reason. And the laws weren't re-instated. So I recently caught covid along with seven others at a small party, where someone was coughing without covering their mouth all night and of course no one considered wearing a mask. But this is now all in line with official policy. Literally forbidden one year ago, on multiple counts, in principle punishable with jail but generally fines.

So I do think it's important to follow up on these arguments. It's always a cost-benefit judgement, and it's ultimately a democratic, political question. Not something that can be decided by a bureaucrat. I've always figured that everyone getting booster shots every six months for 30 years sounded almost parodically excessive, but certainly there have been a few voices demanding that.

> relatively harmless due to vaccinations and previous exposure

This year's dominant strain was significantly less lethal/debilitating for unvaccinated people as well.

The restrictions are still reasonable in hindsight, especially in places like Canada where hospital capacity was quickly overwhelmed in all waves leading up to and until this Spring.

Restrictions obviously can't create a world with "COVID zero" but it can slow down the infection rate so that hospitals can still treat other emergencies (although, again, in Canada it was barely enough). Kinda hard to run a hospital as usual if you have 30 people per day rolling in and they never leave.

This year's COVID waves are quite harmless also to unvaccinated people. It's because Omicron is less dangerous, not because of vaccination, but of course public health authorities will ignore this and claim victory. What else can they do? Public health is a dangerous concept by construction because the social costs of them admitting they were wrong are so high.

when surmising that the only reason someone hasn't "admitted" they were wrong (and assuming you are right), is fear of the social costs, it's always good to take a step back and see if you are actually the one unable to admit being wrong, for the same reason

What social costs? I'm a nobody on the internet. Although outside of HN I've posted things about COVID and the failures of public health, they had little impact because I'm not a part of that community. As a consequence:

1. I have no career in public health or academia to defend.

2. If I was wrong (I'm not) then it might hurt my standing a bit, but lots of people on the internet have opinions on random topics that other people think are wrong and they still manage to get jobs, create products, get customers etc.

3. Likewise, being right also doesn't help my career or life very much.

Contrast this to people like Ferguson or Fauci:

1. Their entire professional existence hinges on the perception that they are experts in disease.

2. If they were wrong (they are) then it'd not only hurt their standing a bit, but cause hundreds of millions or billions of people to hate them viscerally due to the staggering costs of what they insisted on. It would also destroy their self-esteem and result in them knowing that they'd done evil things, making them some of the most notorious people in history.

3. In contrast, if they were right, they .... get to keep their current jobs, salary and social status, more or less.

Frankly if I did work in public health it'd be very hard to imagine ever admitting to mistakes either. Public health operates through government force and COVID policies in particular involved forcing people to do things harmful to themselves at great cost to themselves, against their will. You have to believe you made the right calls if you're in that position, it's the corrupting influence of power. If you didn't you'd immediately quit in shame and never show your face in polite society again, so the only ones that survive in that world are the merciless ones who can never admit they are wrong. Which is exactly what we see!

>What social costs?

this would be a good question to ask the experts you are accusing of dishonesty, so they have the opportunity to come up with a similarly defensive response based on equally plausible denials

take your example of Fauci for example - he's admitted mistakes, and has not lost the trust of most Americans like your premise claims (save for a minority who thinks mistakes, something all humans commit, are a sign of weakness).

so already we know the "social costs" for him that you're talking about as an example, are far overblown

indeed, most Americans understand the trade-offs that we made during the pandemic based on what we knew for sure at the time (not what internet people were claiming without trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies).

"he's admitted mistakes, and has not lost the trust of most Americans"

Has he? Which mistakes? I've never seen him admit any of the actual big mistakes like:

- Lockdowns didn't work (now the position of the German government's official enquiry).

- Masks don't work either.

- Deliberately lying about scientific topics to try and manipulate behaviour wasn't a good idea (he's admitted doing this to the New York Times, twice!)

- The vaccines were massively oversold.

Even Bill Gates has admitted the latter, but I don't recall Fauci ever doing so.

As for not having lost the trust of most Americans, maybe so, but that's just a testament to the shocking level of propaganda he benefits from. He's certainly lost the trust of anyone paying attention. The man is a self-confessed serial liar: he lied about masks, and he lied about herd immunity thresholds, both times making scientific claims about supposedly medical facts and then later changing his position, saying he was just trying to manipulate people's behavior. This is all on the record. Anyone who continues to believe this man about anything is certainly an idiot - fool me twice, right?

It sounds like you've already made up your mind on most of these things, and don't want to be convinced. For example, the U.S. never had an actually-enforced nationwide lockdown, and many conservative politicians and their supporters actively worked to make such a plan fail before it could even happen.

I'm impressed by the number of specific studies and writings you've gathered which happen support your conclusion. Tell me, what evidence and studies have you collected and evaluated which do not support it?

This comes across a bit disingenuous. Do you have evidence to the contrary? If so why not state what it is or that such evidence exists? I believe the Earth is spheroidal in shape and also haven’t collected evidence that supports it being flat. It’s not reasonable, in general, to look up the pros/cons of each belief. In the present case are you suggesting that people are cherry picking the studies to conform to a preconceived belief?

Yes, to your questions; however, do note that I am not the one publishing this unsatisfactory metastudy. As such the burden is on the publisher to produce something of value by looking up the pros and cons and comparing the two. Otherwise, anyone could just punch up google, print out the results for "flat earth" and claim to have done research which says you should believe it. Obviously, that's not the case.

This is not an academic forum and so the standards are a bit relaxed. Typically people post their beliefs along with a snippet of the reasons for said beliefs. Then others who disagree sometime respond by presenting contrary evidence. No one has a burden as such. We are not academicians beholden to standards of thoroughness.

My suggestion is that had you responded by stating that there are contrary studies and that those studies are better then your post would have been a lot clearer. At least it would have put the idea that the evidence presented was suspect into my mind. As it is it came across as unclear who has the stronger position objectively speaking.

Yes, of course, you're right. Unfortunately, Brandolini's Law often applies quite strongly. I simply do not wish to always subject myself to that and only wish to alert readers of the comment thread to think critically about the parent comment's contents. That is - the target of my comment is not the parent comment's author, but the reader of the parent comment. Generally, this is sufficient to meet my aims.

I understand that. I’m suggesting changing the wording. Your original post would have been a lot more helpful to people like me had it been of the form:

People should know that there are lot of studies and evidence to the contrary that is easy to find. The evidence presented above is flawed and you can look this up easily on your own.

My comment, as is, captures the tone I intended. Therefore, I will not edit it. Thank you for your kind suggestions. I will take them into account in future interactions where they are relevant.

What conclusion, besides the one you projected? He responded to a bunch of separate points the first of which actually addresses 'other studies.' Did you read it or have any thoughts on it?

I've read a number of these studies. My thoughts are that a number of them have confounders which are not well controlled for, and they often have limited statistical power, representation issues, or other technical faults which impact their expected validity. Further, in most cases, reproduction of the study is generally not possible. In any case, individual studies simply listed supporting a particular conclusion particularly without a listing of similar studies which present opposite conclusions - and a direct comparison therein - does not a metastudy make. What's attempted here is a metastudy and, as a metastudy, it's quite lacking.

Have you ever asked this question anyone else in any other context, when presented with scientific evidence?

It's an extremely important question to ask and especially when someone dumps a wall of text and a ton of studies on you that all support one viewpoint:

* Have you also evaluated studies that don't support this?

* If not, why not? Are you only looking for studies that support what you want to prove?

* If you have also looked at studies showing negative results, why have you decided not to include them here?

That's not really how debates work.

It is absolutely how debates about science work.

Yes and, especially, of myself.

Chronic inflammation is not a symptom of Covid-19.

Turns out that myocarditis is though https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34341797/

myocarditis isn't generally chronic, particularly in kids. and that study concludes that the risk of the vaccine in 12-19 year olds outweighs the risk of the virus if you bother to read it.

No, if you read the article it's from 12 up the benefits outweigh the risks, quoth:

The ACIP report projected that mRNA vaccination in 12-17-year-old males would result in 215 fewer hospitalizations and 71 fewer intensive care unit stays. Benefits of the vaccine outweighed the risk of myocarditis from vaccination in all age groups, 12 years-old and up. Our results suggest that the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 infection itself exceeds the known risk from vaccination by a considerable margin. In light of more infectious variants, the new school year nearing and many colleges now requiring COVID-19 vaccination (either for all students or just those living on campus), these results are especially timely. Whether considering all the risks and benefits of COVID-19 vaccination or just myocarditis, vaccination appears to be the safer choice for 12-19-year-old males and females.

Yeah I accidentally typed the exact opposite of what I meant.

It might be that any activation of immune system has an effect of additional risk of myocarditis.

If billion people caught a cold rougly at the same rate as covid vaccinations were rolled out we might probably easily see additional risk of myocarditits from that.

https://blog.getwellue.com/a-common-cold-may-cause-viral-myo...

We are seeing now weird cases of hepatitis in children when 3 years worth of common colds and flus got compressed into one because of lockdowns in 2020, 2021.

This additional risks are so low that we can't measure them when they are spread randomly over of period of time but noticeable if we pay close attention to relationship between the event (like cold or vaccination) and the severe rare symptoms.

We have indeed had a spike in heart inflammation from literally every other vaccine in history. Clearly.

Symptomatic pericarditis after influenza vaccination

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00123...

Post-vaccination myositis and myocarditis in a previously healthy male

https://aacijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1322...

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy after anti-influenza vaccination: catecholaminergic effects of immune system

https://www.ajemjournal.com/article/S0735-6757(13)00416-6/fu...

Acute Fulminant Myocarditis Following Influenza Vaccination Requiring Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

https://www.ajemjournal.com/article/S0735-6757(13)00416-6/fu...

(and influenza isn't a novel virus and everyone will have already had their immune systems 'tested' by influenza antigen early in their life)

Can’t tell if this is fully sarcasm or acknowledging some of the data historically.

It's definitely sarcasm. The "Clearly." at the end is a good indicator.

Well that's what I figured but it doesn't make a lot of sense either way

> Our study results, along with the benefit–risk profile, continue to support vaccination using either of the two mRNA vaccines.

Seriously, why not choose the non-mRNA alternatives? We have so many different vaccine to choose from.

Any vaccine triggers an immune response, so it's not surprising that there's some small risk to people in taking them. But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.

Not for young healthy people. And the covid risk for that population, even before omicron, was negligible in the first place. As you said people are really bad at doing the maths, and it is easy to scare people with risks that are of the same order of magnitude than winning the lottery or dying in a plane crash.

The study reported 411 events in over 15 million people aged 18-64.

Meanwhile the US has had 6300+ Covid deaths for the ~46 million Americans aged 18-29.

Pretty easy to see the numbers favor taking the vaccine.

It really depends. How many of the 6000+ had other major health issues? What are my chances as a healthy 20 something from dying or having a serious complications? VS the unknowns of the vaccine for short term and long term issues? If I had other issues I'd think harder about it. But especially since I already had covid this spring, I'm really see no need in getting the shot.

And on top of what you say, even based on the numbers from the parent we are comparing a 99.986% to a 99.997% chance of being ok. Either way not something worth worrying about, tiny risks.

I am sure you can draw similar differences in risk of boarding a boeing plane vs an airbus plane (because so few events contribute to deaths and boeing had a few crashes recently). The reality is that either is a risk too small to worry about and it would be absurd to insist on one over the other.

Understanding statistics isn’t just about computing things, it is also about looking at the numbers.

I don't really understand this mentality. If the difference is negligible, why wouldn't you want to get vaccinated just to do more to protect other people around you? They can do everything right (get vaccinated etc) and still get sick and die if they're exposed to covid.

1. it doesn't protect people around me, the vaccine does not meaningfully reduce the spread of the virus. It is puzzling that people still make this argument.

2. I had side effects after both injections, including a day in bed with fever. This is not a candy.

How many of the 411 had other major health issues?

Anecdotes often help people defy math.

For example, I know a guy that was a triathlete but a year after Covid still can’t breath well enough to run.

He is 19.

> Not for young healthy people. And the covid risk for that population, even before omicron, was negligible in the first place.

About 20% of young and 40% of adult people in the US are considered obese [1], which has been closely associated with more severe COVID-19 cases [2].

Additionally, even young and completely healthy people have parents and grandparents. While they themselves can be completely fine after a run-in with COVID-19, their family may not be... just look at your workplace and sick leaves. It's usually all the parents that call in sick at the same time because some wave of shit is sweeping through the schools, be it the regular common cold, RSV, flu, norovirus, whatever. The problem is, us humans have adapted somewhat to these viruses, but not against SARS-CoV-2... and now it spreads to the affected generations via the children.

Can you imagine just how horrible a 10 year old feels when he learns that the COVID infection he got at school killed off his grandparents?

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/obesity-a...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/why-covid-19-more-de...

> Can you imagine just how horrible a 10 year old feels when he learns that the COVID infection he got at school killed off his grandparents?

The mRNA vaccines don’t stop the spread of COVID.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565v...

That’s not what your pre-print, non-peer-reviewed citation says.

But you know this, right? After 2+ years?

At this point, it’s one side of the aisle cherry-picking pre-print, non-peer-reviewed papers to justify their not getting vaccinated because they bought in 100% to the narrative that it’s not a big deal and will blow over.

> Additionally, even young and completely healthy people have parents and grandparents.

Everyone knows this by now.

The people you’re conversing with simply don’t care if they kill someone.

What a pity the vaccine didn't stop infections/eradicate the virus.

You shouldn't use the sarcastic tone. It didn't seem at all clear in 2020 that the virus would quickly mutate to more than double its already dangerously high R0 number. If you're aware of someone credible who said this as more than a wild-ass guess at the time, it'd be interesting to see a link. I'm sure someone somewhere managed to reason that far, but we work based on the facts we have, not how they look in retrospect.

The mRNA vaccines did reduce R below 1 in populations with reasonable vaccine coverage of the initial Wuhan strain, increasing to optimistic (but achieved in many countries) vaccine coverage with the "British" Alpha strain. And then becoming unviable to reduce R below 1 with Delta and later. But even then, vaccination reduced the average reproductive number, which from a public health perspective had great temporary value in buying more time for getting vaccines to all who needed and wanted them.

Europe will probably officially roll back its vaccine passport thingy soon, exactly due to this. Granted, that's a bit late, which is another example of not working based on the facts we have, but then again most countries have practically ignored these rules for more than six months already.

I do have sympathy for the arguments around bodily autonomy/coerced vaccination/violation of fundamental democratic right of travel and so on, but it's a question with a bit of nuance to it.

I think the argument for a mandate is stronger when the prevalence of the vaccine can eliminate the virus from society and I think in that case I would support mandates. But that was never the case for covid.

Instead we have absurd covid policies. France for instance treats double jabbed but not boosted people as unvaccinated. Whatever was the short term effect expected from the booster in Dec last year, it is long gone now, and the omicron wave never translated in a meaningful increase in hospitalisations, booster or no booster. Health authorities are applying moronic policies. My patience with this absence of common sense has evaporated.

> I think the argument for a mandate is stronger when the prevalence of the vaccine can eliminate the virus from society and I think in that case I would support mandates. But that was never the case for covid.

It could have been the case, but it was “all going to blow over” and “not a big deal”.

And hence the US became an infection vector for the whole world.

> France for instance treats double jabbed but not boosted people as unvaccinated.

So?

> the omicron wave never translated in a meaningful increase in hospitalisations, booster or no booster.

Pure disinformation.

“During the Omicron-predominant period, overall weekly adult hospitalization rates peaked at 38.4 per 100,000, exceeding the previous peak on January 9, 2021 (26.1) and the peak rate during the Delta-predominant period (15.5).”

It’s been more than two years. Disinformation such as yours is transparent by now.

Just admit that it’s political - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23405649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22614676 - and save all of us some time.

We are arguing different things, and would probably mostly agree if we sat down to summarize our views.

French authorities are corrupt morons, but there are countries in the world that largely do evidence-based health policy once they get around to it. Norway’s did very good, in general. Including cancelling AstraZeneca, which made everyone get up in arms about how irresponsible they were.

But you need to trust the data, and given the politicisation of the issue I get that people don‘t trust that this is properly researched/understood.

>But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.

Covid risks are not evenly distributed throughout the population. An extreme majority of serious cases are people older than 65, fat people, or people with other existing health issues.

If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid. If you are under 25, healthy, and active there is practically no personal health reason to get vaccinated for Covid.

"Healthy" isn't something that's immediately obvious, and it's entirely possible you're not as healthy as you think. I was running half marathons with undiagnosed stage 4 kidney disease, which by the classification we had in Canada, would have put me at the highest risk for severe outcomes of COVID.

> If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid.

While you're right that the risk is very small, you are still at much, much more risk from Covid than from the vaccine, though.

You may or may not catch Covid whereas a vaccination is a binary decision.

Everyone will be exposed to Covid.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Vaccination isn't a simple binary decision. There are choices to make regarding which vaccine and whether to get additional boosters.

Would you say "you may or may not catch the common cold" as well? I'm trying very hard to imagine any 2+ year old person living in a western country who wouldn't have caught the cold. "May not" seems dishonest here.

The data is that objectively you are more likely to have serious health issues resulting from Covid than you are the vaccine. And given the spread of Covid, the odds are close to 100% that you will catch it eventually. This is true regardless of health, age or obesite.

It's extremely simple math. If you have a 1/100 chance of something bad happening versus a 1/500 chance, you chose the 1/500 odds. It doesn't mean you throw your hands in the air and choose the higher odds just because they're low enough. You optimize for the best outcome.

That is just so flat out wrong… Omicron is less severe now, but there is a clear and real risk even for healthy people

The data is available for everyone. In the United States there have been 7,300 total deaths for people under 30 and 25,000 total deaths for all people under 40. Nearly 80% of all hospitalizations are from obese people. 40% have hypertension, 30% some cardiovascular disease, and so on and so forth.

If you are under 40 and don’t have a known comorbidity you can treat Covid the same way you would treat the flu. If you’re under 30 with the same health status you can treat Covid as if it doesn’t exist.

Kids under 20 are more likely to die from poisoning or an automobile accident.

You cannot look at the blanket outcome because it's affected by vaccinations in the individual, vaccinations on the societal level, and all Covid measures put in place, how they're enforced and to what degree individuals followed them. What you end up with is a skewed picture. You would need data on group A (Vaccinated healthy and young, living under the same rules, following them about in equal measure) and compare it with the outcomes of group B (Unvaccinated healthy and young, everything else the same).

What's more, it's the height of selfishness to think only of your own risk. Setting aside long Covid (which affects the healthy too), vaccinations reduces the severity of symptoms among everyone, reducing pressure on the health care system.

Yep, it's just inflicting suffering also to the healthy in a misguided and desperate attempt to improve a situation by making it more "fair". When in reality the total amount of suffering is just increasing many times, which just makes it much worse. But this is a typical communist/religious idea that you should "share" suffering by punishing yourself.

How is protecting yourself from a disease with a low but real risk of life-altering effects by taking a vaccine with minuscule (but also real) risks a form of self-punishment???

How? Because you are (forced) to take a second dose of a vaccine that's not needed, which makes you sick and gives you heart inflammation. That's how.

Well, taking the vaccine still has a much lower chance of causing heart inflammation than getting the disease while unvaccinated does, even when multiplied with the chance of getting the disease at all.

The main non-mRNA alternatives were the adenovirus vector vaccines, which caused blood clots in young people - quite a few countries ended up withdrawing them from use in those age groups because of this. Novavax, which is a more traditional protein subunit vaccine, is probably safer (and certainly seems to be better tolerated in terms of the more common side effects) but wasn't available until late on in the pandemic, still hasn't been approved in the US, and doesn't have a huge amount of real-world evidence because it arrived too late to be widely used. Safe vaccine design is just hard, as is determining their safety. Anyone who'd paid attention to the history of emergency pandemic vaccinations would've known this, there was just a push to ignore it largely for US domestic political reasons.

There's less "stuff" in the mRNA vaccines than in any other.

So for example, the fatal blood clotting conditions with the adenovirus-vectored vaccines turns out to be due to the binding of PF4 onto the adenovirus capsid causing an autoimmune reaction to PF4 after it is "ingested" intracellularly. This doesn't happen with mRNA vaccines because there's no capsid or anything else.

You're getting exactly the same mRNA payload with those, but you're wrapping it with a pile of other crap that you can have autoimmune reactions to.

Similarly inactivated virus is not just the mRNA payload of the virus but all the rest of the viral machinery, surface proteins, nucleocapsid, etc. All of those get presented. Plus you probably need an additional adjuvant to stimulate your immune system. And the chemical makeup of the mRNA in the inactivated virus will trigger the innate immune system to kill the cells presenting it (the use of pseudouridine in the mRNA vaccines makes the mRNA look more host-like so that the cells don't get killed before presenting antigen on MHC). The risks of autoimmune conditions will stack based on how much more mRNA and proteins are present in the payload.

There's a benefit of the inactivated virus in that you also get antibodies and T-cells to other proteins, including nucleocapsid, etc, but we just haven't seen any clinical net benefit after triple-vaccination (and if anything the outcomes of inactivated virus are slightly worse -- although after triple-vaccination HK studies have shown that they're comparable and that inactivated virus isn't particularly worse).

The other ones also have risk factors. It's always a cost benefit relation.

Blood clots

I had the original COVID-19 in early '20. It was a like a flu, why take any shots for this if you aren't at-risk group (old or immunocompromised like cancer and aids)?

I had the mRNA vaccines in mid '21. It was like any other shot, why risk covid if you can get the vaccine?

Point is, just because my experience with the vaccine was fine doesn't mean everyone's would be, and just because your experience with covid was like a mild flu doesn't mean everyone's would be. The rational thing to do is to weigh the two risks. And the evidence so far shows that the total risks of covid, even for a young, healthy person, multiplied by the likelihood of getting it, do outweigh the risks of the mRNA vaccines.

For children it's probably closer, at least in terms of acute risks. I expect the risks of chronic complications from covid are still enough to tip the scales, but I could be persuaded otherwise with more evidence. But you have to be willing to consider the evidence that exists, not just that which supports your priors.

because you can still get covid even with the vaccine... so if you are not in an at risk group, why bother injecting yourself with stuff you probably don't need?

You can die with the seat belt on in a car crash. Why wear it at all?

Because seat belts don't leave people with with side effects.

Sure they do. Seat belts cause injuries in crashes all the time. Sometimes (rarely) even more serious injuries than would have been sustained without one. Airbags even more so. Both will very occasionally even cause injuries outside of collision scenarios.

When seat belts were first mandated, there were lots of arguments about how it's safer not to wear one and government has no right to require it.

You're less likely to get it, and it's much less likely to be serious if you do.

Exactly this. A bulletproof vest will stop the bullet from killing you, but you are also very likely to receive broken ribs, bruises, and other mild organ damage. The point is that it stops the bullet. You do not discard the vest because it does not protect you from harm entirely - you wear what you can to keep the bullet from killing you. Possible side effects? Reduced mobility, and if you're untrained, extra weight that slows you down. Is it worth it? Is dying worth the possible side effects? Not always, no, but almost certainly always, yes. That's the point.

> It was like any other shot, why risk covid if you can get the vaccine?

Because the (second) shot makes you really sick, and in many cases with lingering heart inflammation. Why do that to yourself, when you have a really good chance of not even getting infected (recovered/already vaccinated)?

Given that COVID-19 has been with us for more than two years, I have to imagine a person would know the answer to your question by now, even if they don’t personally like the answer.

Judging from the statistics I've seen, the risk of getting complications from vaccinations are lower than the risks of getting complications from Covid in all age groups, except perhaps very small children. So it is always rational to get vaccinated.

Simply put: the flu kills a lot of people each year. We vaccinate as many people as we can every year right before flu season for it because of that. It's not controversial. Believe me, if you've skipped the flu vaccine and had legitimate influenza (and not just a bad cold), you'll never miss a shot again. It's hell. COVID-19 is often much worse than the flu. See where I'm going with this?

I had influenza in Feb 20 and the original COVID in April 20 (flu I got abroad and COVID I got from my wife who contracted it at hospital when she was on a shift).

Trust me, both took me out for a week, but the flu was 10x worse than COVID. The flu gave me bad headaches, fever and a super runny nose and sore throat. COVID only gave me fever for 1 day, a cough and a mild sore throat for 1 day. The only thing that made COVID inconvenient was the loss of smell and taste for 5 days but otherwise I felt fine and went in with daily life after day 2.

COVID and the influenza both produce different responses in different people. You happened to get lucky with COVID and unlucky with the flu. Many do not and are not. Remember, you, as a single data point, aren't generalisable to a population.

You are disrespecting all the non at-risk, perfectly sane people who died of covid, my cousin among them. Worst thing is I'm pretty sure you already know that these cases exist, as for the last two years there have been a lot of reports of them.

And still you chose to ignore those people, to ignore their deaths and their suffering. You are a disgrace.

I’m sorry for your loss, but I don’t get why this question of personal choice should be disrespectful to the people you mentioned. Especially because you don’t make the herd immunity argument

Why is age cohort 18-64 stated as a direct count:

> A total of 411 myocarditis or pericarditis, or both, events were observed among 15 148 369 people aged 18–64 years

While 18-25 is expressed in "person-days":

> Among men aged 18–25 years, the pooled incidence rate was highest after the second dose, at 1·71 (95% CI 1·31 to 2·23) per 100 000 person-days for BNT162b2 and 2·17 (1·55 to 3·04) per 100 000 person-days for mRNA-1273.

Anecdotally a number of well known australiana have died of heart issues at unusually young ages over the last few months.

As I understand the emergency measures for COVID vaccine approval indemnify the pharmas from legal action if a connection was established.

https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/this-is-our-biggest-killer...

Probably as good a time as any to share the actuarial analysis of V2 rocket strikes in wartime London - https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1740-9...

We also had increased stress at the time, which is known as a trigger for heart attacks.

Aside from being anecdotal, that information is not useful unless we know the proportion that got jabbed, the types of vaccines, if they got Covid (which they may or may not have known about if it was asymptomatic), and what other changes in their lifestyle there were during the pandemic.

The order of magnitude for the risk is 1:100,000.

To put the risk into context: You get higher pericardial inflammation risk from tattoo, piercing the ears or going to dentist. The inflammation risk level is close to what you get from getting your skin pierced with supposedly sterile object.

Occurrences of hypersensitivity and inappropriate immune responses to vaccines are inevitable if the vaccine tries to boost immune system. The risk is higher with young people because they have more active immune system.

With one order of magnitude lower risk you almost certainly will get even worse, like Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). That happens with normal flu shots as well. Just the genetic variation among people makes it almost certain that 1 in 1,000,000 gets fucked.

ps. The risk of myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection among young males infected with the virus is up 6 times more likely s as those who have received the vaccine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34341797/

The difference is the govt wasn't trying to force you to get a tattoo or pierce your ears

Government is not forcing, it's strongly recommending.

The government is trying to save lifes and succeeded.

>The government is trying to save lifes and succeeded.

The original trials for MRNA vaccines didn't actually demonstrate that they save lives (no reduction in overall mortality), as per this preprint in the Lancet: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072489 .

By preventing you from going to work (eg NYC) or using public transport (Canada) or entering public spaces (much of the world.).

It absolutely stinks that people were compelled to take the vaccine despite the odds of harm from the actual disease.

All reasonable measures. All these 'personal freedom' people say government when they mean the society as a whole.

You were allowed to stay alone without vaccines. Participating in society is done with the conditions set up by the society. You can be free of society when you are alone in remote areas.

Well it's questionable when that personal freedom is part of the same society's constitutional law.

In that case, there would be no limits at all to what a society can and can't do, just declare martial law at any time for any reason. That's the same thing as living in a totalitarian dictatorship.

Can society actually become the opposite of itself over night, and this should not be questioned?

One of the core basic principles of society is this freedom, and suddenly it's obvious that society can take away freedom whenever it wants? Does not even need to be debated and people who have show any form of surprise or need to talk about this, should be ridiculed?

People talk about freedom restrictions from covid, but can't enumerate freedoms (real freedoms) that were removed.

You don't have freedom to go to work or travel and ignore rules and regulations. Never have and never will.

> Participating in society is done with the conditions set up by the society.

People say society when they mean governments (“conditions”)

In many regions, local society as a whole disagreed with the mandates of the distant government. That was my experience- people trying to go about their lives and being hassled by the police for having friends over.

This is a board of programmers, engineers, & businesspeople. Did you really need to explain 1:100k to them?

This study with 192,000 participants found no increased risk of myocarditis after Covid-19 infection - https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219

That's much too small. If all the participants of that study were were highest risk (18-25 males) and early COVID strains and vaccines were equally risky that study should have expected to find 2-5 cases. Then there are also problems like biases toward finding myocarditis towards the end of the pandemic when there was higher awareness.

This is a bridge. It can relatively safely allow me to get from this side of the river to the other side. But it also may collapse and kill me if a sudden big earthquake will destroy it. I'd better swim to the other side and avoid this dangerous bridge /s.

In the US the risk of dying (in 2016) was between 0.8 and 2 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles driven [1]. This doesn't even include serious injury of external death and injury (ie to cyclists and pedestrians, which is significant). Commutes are generally recorded as minutes per day but this estimate [2] suggests 41 miles per day is the average. That's almost 10,000 miles per year.

So just from driving to and from work the approximate risk of dying every year is approximately 1 in 10,000.

"Myocarditis" here isn't a disease or even necessarily a negative outcome. It is quite literally heart inflammation. That could be a risk factor for actual medical issues or it might not. Note that getting Covid-19 is a risk factor for myocarditis [3] so any alleged risks from a vaccine have to be compared to the risks associated with getting the disease the vaccine mitigates or even prevents.

But logic, facts and statistics here just don't matter. As you see from comments on this thread and any similar thread, any skerrit of evidence of a risk of myocarditis inevitably results in comments that can be boiled down to "see! we told you! even before we had any evidence!" These claims are peppered with (meaningless) personal anecodtes and cherry-picked VAERS data. Side note: VAERS is a voluntary unfiltered reporting system. You can quite literally report to VAERS "the vaccine killed me".

At this point we've administered billions of vaccine doses. The fact that we're still having this conversation about the vaccine killing people is a sad testament to human psychology and wanting to believe something in the complete absence of any evidence to the contrary.

I also now we'll be hearing about this until the next pandemic. Covid vaccines get compared to the "safe" existing vaccines but all of those vacciens were treated with the same skepticism and baseless conspiracy theories when they came out. The only thing that eliminated that opposition was the next pandemic.

Remember how we used to constantly hear about the links between MMR and autism? Covid means that's been completely forgotten and the same will happen with Covid.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

[2]: https://itstillruns.com/far-americans-drive-work-average-744...

[3]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33088905/

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