Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
We are still not anti-vax at all. In fact, I might go for my next booster today.
The one thing that angers me is that this incident cost us $10K. Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.
Doctors help basically just "we don't know, there's no research, it will hopefully get better". It did after a year. Great. Govt pushed people to vaccinate to prevent the spread (despite individual's risk being very low) with promise to compensate in case of issues. lol, they didn't even compensate people who were paralyzed after vaccination with response "You can't prove it's from vaccination, sorry."
Zero benefit from the vaccination itself, since she didn't go for a second shot after this.
Cost/benefit very negative, since she likely didn't need the vaccination in the first place since she's not in the risk group and this was just "for the society" thing. And turns out it doesn't work againt spread much either.
Can you expand on this please? I find it extremely hard to understand how an ACA-compliant health care plan could "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis. Unless you're on a high-deductible plan and the entire stay was less than your deductible?
I suspect the maximum annual out of pocket.
Try being hospitalized without insurance. You'll find out really fast. (I was, twice, circa 2010. I was unemployed and uninsured)
However when going through the annual election process it generally makes it very clear how much you are paying out of each paycheck and what the employer contributes. Now whether people pay attention at all I can't say.
I think Obama-care (as much as I still support it in contrast to just letting private healthcare continue as-is) actually made things worse in the US by letting insurers and providers use the government involvement as a justification for their BS.
When you compare US costs to countries like the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and similar it is indeed true that US is significantly more expensive.
It is also true that over time US costs are rising significantly.
However, the ratio of US costs to the costs of other countries has stayed roughly the same over time.
In other words, the rest of them are having the same problem of rising costs that the US is, and their costs are rising at roughly the same rate. We pay a lot more than they do now because we paid a lot more than them a long time ago.
This is worrisome, because it suggests that even if we can lower our health care costs to be in line with the rest of the developed world we are still heading for unaffordable healthcare--all we'd be doing is making so we reach that when the rest of the world does instead of a few years before they do.
Here's some comments from earlier discussions with numbers and a link to the data [1] [2].
There is certainly some inefficiency in the US healthcare system but mostly it reflects the poor health of the population. Switching to some form of socialized medicine won't fix that problem. Other developed countries are doing a little better at the moment but they're on the same trend line and will inevitably hit the same crisis. At some point if we want to prevent a systemic collapse we're going to have to get serious about emphasizing prevention over treatment.
As a personal anecdote when I lived in the US there were three months in a row where I paid 10/pill, 3/pill and 1/pill (I also had earlier paid 0/pill when I qualified for VT medicaid) for the same medication[1] as I was 1) initially uninsured 2) covered by the "cigna preferred rate" but otherwise had no drug coverage 3) had regular drug coverage. As a bonus a few months after that run a generic for my medication came out and I paid .10/pill for the brand name because the generic existed but they didn't have it in stock.
Please explain how that makes any sense at all.
1. Concerta - the 54mg version now apparently retails for $545 per 30 here's a weird website talking about it (I now live in Canada and while there isn't Pharmacare in my province the drug is free with some cheap insurance) https://www.singlecare.com/blog/concerta-without-insurance/
Actually no, you still won't. Because the hospitals send out fraudulently inflated/overitemized bills to help their negotiating positions.
To know how much medical care actually costs, you need to have "insurance" and read through the itemized bills and explanations of benefits. The top line large number is the fraudulent amount that has no basis in reality, there is an "adjustment" based on the rates the "insurance" company has actually agreed to pay, there is the amount the "insurance" company pays them, and then there is your portion. Adding the last two, or taking the first minus the second, is as close to knowing how much something costs as you can get in this fucked up system.
Also it bears repeating, never pay a medical bill unless you're damn sure you're responsible for the amount [0]. Even if you have "insurance", often you'll get sent the fraudulent bill right away, and it will take a month or two for "insurance" to bother doing their job. Also billing departments have no problem blatantly lying to you about your (non) responsibility for the fraudulent bill, since it might get them more money.
[0] Of course some times they have you over a barrel like ongoing care getting denied if you have an unpaid balance. In which case you just have to eat it and then hassle your "insurance" company for half a year to get your money back.
In practice how do you do this? I've never got a medical bill that made complete sense to me and when I did argue it went around in circles for so many months that it was not worth my time so I just paid it.
Then, you need to know your general deductible and copayment schedule. The bill should show original charges (fraudulent), "adjustments" to those charges to make them line up with what your "insurance" company has negotiated to pay, and then payment by the "insurance" company. The part remaining that you need to pay should line up with your deductible.
If you've got a large deductible (common) and this is one of your first bills, then the "insurance" company won't have anything to pay, but there will still be an adjustment. If you think that is off, you can contact your "insurance" company to check if it matches their negotiated rates. In my experience, their customer service departments haven't been totally gutted yet.
Calling the provider's billing department is generally pointless unless/until you know exactly what you're talking about. Once, a phone rep (at a small place even) called me to nag me about a bill. I told them that their charge was above the Medicare limit for a service, and that it needed to be corrected before I could pay. In response, they insisted harder that I "owed it" and I "had to pay". I told them they were wrong, ended the conversation, and just waited. Lo and behold 4-5 months later they finally billed the "insurance" and sent the correct bill. I think they were just hoping I'd fall for their fraud so they could pocket a few extra bucks.
I'm certainly not an expert on this subject in particular, just generally experienced at cutting through the avalanches of paper that psychopaths try to bury us with.
The parent poster likely benefits from the following items on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act:
> Annual and lifetime coverage caps on essential benefits were banned.
> Insurers are forbidden from dropping policyholders when they become ill.
> All policies must provide an annual maximum out-of-pocket (MOOP) payment cap for an individual's or family's medical expenses (excluding premiums). After the MOOP payment is reached, all remaining costs must be paid by the insurer.
Obama was a sellout.
’Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.’ ... I said, ‘Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself.’ ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.’
We could be dealing with worse shit, however shit remains shit.
Sorry to hear that.
One of the massive negative side-effects of ACA will come to the national forefront in a few years. We now have tens of millions of people enrolled in Medicaid. What most don't understand is that, after 55 years of age, this isn't insurance at all, it's a loan you are required, by law, to repay.
Don't take it from me, here's a summary directly from the Medicaid website:
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/estate-recover...
I looked into this a while back. The State can place liens on your estate and your children could be stuck with a bill because of that. For example, if you have a home it is very likely that 100% of the value of your home will be consumed by your healthcare bills if you needed what I am going to call a normal level of care for that age group from 55 onwards.
In other words:
People were told they they were getting health insurance through Obamacare. In reality, they agreed to receive a credit card using their estate as collateral. If this isn't fraud, I just don't know what is.
Obamacare might just be the largest private-property grab by any government in the history of this nation, if not humanity. I wonder how many people actually understand they will not be able to leave anything to their children. Or worse, leave them a huge bill owed to the State.
These are the things that really rattle me: Politicians selling pushing programs in the most dishonest ways possible. How many people would have supported ACA had they were told they would have to sign-over their estate to pay for their after-55 medical bills? Very few, if any.
What really sucks about this is it affects the low to middle class portion of the population in a disproportionate manner. They are the ones who end-up on a Medicaid plan, not people who can afford to pay for something else. Once again, politicians claim to be for the little guy and, instead, they royally shaft them every time they are able to. All they care about is their votes.
Medicaid expansion is also just one portion of the ACA.
The low premium option is the least cost option if you don't use much healthcare, or if you use a lot; but there's a range somewhere in there where the higher premium plan may lower your total costs. Of course, if you're getting a premium subsidy, the calculation changes.
But yeah, Obama promised access to healthcare and delivered access to healthcare insurance. It's not unuseful, but it's not really enough.
If it were up to me, I'd lower the medicare eligibility age every year, and gradually grow the system, a couple decades later we'd have Medicare for All (ish, not all seniors are eligible).
An Obamacare Bronze plan is like the bank extending credit - they carry the umbrella after you when the sun is shining, but at the first drop of rain they disappear.
Of course, paying the hospital is usually sort of optional. They're most often happy to bill you later and send you to collections, and you can let it accrue. It's not great, but if you're so sick you can't work, what are you going to do about a debt you can't afford to pay? Better to not pay it.
These days, because of the ACA all plans are "emergency only", except without the lower premium.
They were cheap for a reason. They're back in force, if you want to grab one. I don't advise it. https://www.propublica.org/article/junk-insurance
These days all coverage is emergency only coverage, because of the insanely high deductibles. Except without the benefits of lower premiums.
I am aware that some things improved, but not for the average low risk person.
I do. My wife and I went bankrupt with it, via $90k in copays and coinsurance.
We had good insurance, but back then insurance could have uncapped costs of this kind. As a bonus, they could a) set a maximum annual and lifetime amount they'd pay and b) decline to renew our coverage, leaving only high-risk pools (4-5x as expensive for premiums) available.
I have a zero-deductible ACA plan. There are plenty of them.
How much does that cost? And which state?
No, that's not the case at all. We had to negotiate with the hospital and settled for this amount. The ACA covered none of it or a very small portion. I don't remember the actual bill, my wife dealt with all of it (she is a doctor and knows how to discuss such things with hospitals).
The ACA is not an insurance plan, so I assume you are using "ACA" as shorthand for "ACA-compliant insurance coverage".
It is simply not plausible that an ACA-compliant plan would wholesale "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis, absent extremely niche and bizarre circumstances.
Given that you don't seem very familiar with the specifics, I have to assume that your information is either missing some very important details, or incorrect.
Suppose the insured did use a non evidence supported vaccine or whatever, the vaccine itself would not be covered by insurance, but the healthcare needed by the damage caused by the use of unsupported medicine would be covered.
Similarly, health insurance has to pay for your healthcare if you get into a car accident and do not have sufficient auto insurance to pay for your healthcare costs. Technically, you are sort of buying redundant insurance if you buy PIP.
Falling while skiing is not FDA approved. A woodcutting axe applied to the hand is not FDA approved. Drinking bleach is not FDA approved. And yet, health insurance will cover medical complications arising from any of these actions.
As a lifelong heart patient, I've had many post-operative stays not covered, past a certain duration regardless of my current condition and I've always paid for the highest tiers of health coverage (for over 2 decades now). I find it very likely that ACA would not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis.
I'm of the personal political opinion that almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this. If they do step in, they also have to regulate the supply side as the free market is effectively broken at that point, and people who...say want to pay their own bills or for their own education by working or don't qualify for whatever government program is helping others, are screwed by the system.
Government intervention always seems to rake money into companies' pockets rather than helping consumers and tax payers.
> almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this.
I agree with all the points you make in your comment. I'll just add that the problem is far more complex than this. And, yes, it is all, 100%, caused by government intervention.
Without diving too deep, the problem starts with substandard education in the US all the way down to K-12 level. From there it goes to the insanely high cost of university education due to the government being involved in guaranteeing loan. Nobody in their right mind would give an 18 year old a $300K loan or $120K loan for a bullshit degree with no prospects of repaying it in their lifetime. Then we have heavy, expensive regulatory frameworks and horribly slow and bureaucratic processes to build or make just-about anything. And, finally, lawsuits.
When someone is laying on an operating table in the hospital, they are surrounded by a team with somewhere in the order of three to five million dollars in student debt. The same team likely spends somewhere close to a million dollars a year in liability and other licensing and insurance.
Each and every manufacturer of the equipment in that room and the tools used for the surgery, employs people with student debt in the range of $100K to $300K per person. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. The companies has huge regulatory, legal and insurance costs.
The hospital is in a similar situation. Millions of dollars per year in legal, insurance and other costs and a workforce that owes millions of dollars in student loans. Not to mention the various laboratories and services that make the hospital run.
If you follow the various tentacles and construct financial cost model showing what it takes for a person to be on a table in an operating room, the resulting number will be massive.
That's the key to our broken healthcare system and why no socialist utopia is going to fix it.
Until we fix the underlying cost structures driving the system, it is impossible to pass laws to truly control such costs. The "single payer" idea is, in this context, in a range between utopia and demented.
Why is it demented?
here's an analog: We take out one credit card with zero interest for a year. The intent is to use it to pay off all of our other credit cards within that period using this card by transferring the balance. People do this all the time.
Here's the problem: They don't change their spending behavior. Instead of ending-up with no credit card bills after twelve months, they wake up one glorious Monday now owing more money and having one more card to pay off.
You have to fix the underlying cost structure first. The problem can't be solved without this important first step.
This means getting the government out of education, student loans and a bunch of other areas. It also means demanding that the government be efficient and effective in doing the work we hire them to do.
The problem with this concept is that the people need to understand reality in order for them to vote appropriately. We don't have an informed citizenship. Not even close. We have clans fighting against each other and a few of us in the middle yelling "the emperor has no clothes!", and nobody listens.
Simply because they can and no one is going to stop them, so why not? This is the system working as intended.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
According to this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ there is no increase in Myocarditis cases among unvaccinated people who have contracted Covid-19. This study tracked 196,992 people which is a huge number, so the data here is quite good and clear. Contracting Covid-19 does not put you at increased risk for Myocarditis, the same cannot be said when evaluating a population that simply received the vaccination.
It's a decent data point but not conclusive.
> We estimated extra myocarditis events to be between 1 and 10 per million persons in the month following vaccination, which was substantially lower than the 40 extra events per million persons observed following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
and they include a brief literature review:
> Our findings are consistent with those from a case-control study of 884,828 persons receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine in Israel21. That study observed an association with myocarditis in the 42 days following vaccination (risk ratio of 3.24), but no association with pericarditis or cardiac arrhythmia. Two further studies from Israel add to our observations by providing clinical review to ensure robust case ascertainment22 and reporting investigations and outcomes in individual patients with myocarditis following the BNT162b2 vaccine23. Witberg et al.21,22 observed a small excess in events 3–5 days following the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine, but most were mild presentations and just one classified as fulminant22. Mevorach et al. observed an incidence ratio of 5.34 for myocarditis in 5,442,696 persons following BNT162b2, although this was attenuated when restricted to the 136 definite and probable cases of myocarditis23. Risk of myocarditis was restricted to males under the age of 40 years and only observed following the second dose. Similarly, two studies from the United States have reported an incident rate ratio of 2.7 for myocarditis in the 10 days following the second dose of both mRNA vaccines24 and an estimated 6.3 and 10.1 extra cases per million doses in the 1- to 21-day period following the first and second dose of both mRNA vaccines, respectively, in those younger than 40 years25.
And conclude:
> In summary, this population-based study quantifies for the first time the risk of several rare cardiac adverse events associated with three COVID-19 vaccines as well as SARS-CoV-2 infection. Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 in adults was associated with a small increase in the risk of myocarditis within a week of receiving the first dose of both adenovirus and mRNA vaccines, and after the second dose of both mRNA vaccines. By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantial increase in the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmia.
It checks for the myocarditis infection from COVID-19, but it doesn't actually control for vaccination status. The people studied either are believed to have been COVID-19 infected, or had been vaccinated, but there was no designated unvaccinated control group.
In which case, you are potentially using "breakthrough cases" of COVID-19 causing Myocarditis to make your point (assuming they would be the same pre- and post- vaccination), rather than a definitive look at people who did not get the vaccine and how they fared. All the study proves is that COVID-19 infections cause increased Myocarditis... in vaccinated people. If you assume that COVID-19 has the same Myocarditis effect in vaccinated and unvaccinated people, it works; but if you accept that maybe the effects of COVID-19 are different in vaccinated people, it could fall apart, which is why the study about how Myocarditis doesn't seem to effect the 160,000+ unvaccinated people studied still has value.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
Risk of myocarditis following infection before vaccination was 11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] greater than the risk of vaccination, and risk of myocarditis following infection after vaccination was 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87] greater than the vaccination itself.
Easier to digest press release:
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
The German vaccine watchdog issue a warning letter because there were roughly 300 cases in total reported for the approx. 200m doses administered until May 2021 in the entire EU.
Myocarditis/pericarditis are very rare and the effects for young people were mild.
Moreover, clinical myocarditis and pericarditis are only tips of the iceberg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vveMHtVk_mY
People who have no significant symptoms can still have troponin in their blood, indicating damage.
More often than not it goes away on its own, but the sad thing is there is no surefire way to treat either condition. I've been to the best pericarditis/myocarditis doctors in the world, and I'll let you in on a secret - even these people don't know. Docs will throw Ibuprofen, Colchicine and steroids at it, maybe an experimental drug, or sometimes will just take that portion of the pericardium out. If it's myocarditis, well then, hopefully the medication works.
Like I said, the damage is irreversible. A year or two have passed for some of these kids. Many of them won't experience the long term effects until much later in life, or when it recurs. Just like the scar forms on the outside of the body, scarring forms on the areas damaged in the heart. A young person's heart isn't going to feel the immediate effects, but over the course of 10/20/30 years, quite the opposite.
I'm not anti or pro COVID vax as there is no reason to be tribal here, but there was definitely a more pragmatic path than simply vaccinating everyone. The logical side of my head says these kids were unjustly exposed to a risk they never should have been exposed to. It just doesn't make any sense why a healthy kid should take a vaccine when they could still spread COVID. We were all in the dark about this at that time, but the lack of debate and long term studies should have at least raised some kind of flag for people, especially the average Hackers News user. You cited 300 cases in 200 million like it's no big deal, but that is not justification for the 300 families or parents who voluntarily or forcefully exposed their children to this vaccination. Even if it's just a blip, it's 300 too much, not to mention all the cases across the world.
And again: becoming exposed to Covid without vaccination has even higher risk for myocarditis.
https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/dossier/coronavirus/coronavir...
Still I thing the whole thread of discussions shows that people are afraid of something which isn't such a big deal.
I am being as honest as I can be with regards to our feelings on this. I can't say we are angry about that incident at all. I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot. Frankly, I don't even remember if the data was available (I do think it was, BTW). Remember, at the time, only about 700 cases.
Of course, the outcome might have had something to do with the lack of negative emotions. I can probably admit our position today would be massively different had we had to face a range of negative outcomes post-hospitalization. These can range from life-long afflictions to death.
"I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot."
You pretty much hit the nail on the head here and is my biggest gripe about this whole fiasco.
I'm not sure about your situation now, but if this disease recurs and you feel like your kid's heart doctor has no idea what they are talking about, I recommend either Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. I don't have Facebook, but I've been told there are many support groups for this disease as well there.
Good luck to you, and my prayers go out to you and your family.
Seriously? That's shitty. What's the insurance company's rationale for denying the claim?
Isn't there some kind of government fund to compensate people for vaccine side effects? Seems like you'd have a strong claim to get reimbursed from them.
They didn't, if the parent poster only got billed $10k. Two weeks in the hospital costs more than $10k; that amount is likely their insurance plan's annual deductible, coinsurance, and copays.
These expenses were a thing pre-ACA, to be clear; deductibles, coinsurance, and copays existed before it. The ACA capped the amount you can be charged.
As in you paid the whole cost, and it was $10K, and it didn't count on your deductables / out of pocket max? Or the patient paid portion was $10K, the insurance paid portion was $0, but now you're a lot closer to your maximums?
Did you file with the CICP? https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrze...
Yes, we did. It's worse than dealing with the DMV. I don't know where we are in the process other than my wife (she is a doctor) telling me not to hold my breath.
deciding not to get a covid-19 mrna vaccine != anti-vax
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that. I just wanted to make it clear that, despite this incident, we have not changed our position with regards to vaccines of any kind. That's not to say we might exercise more caution in the future.
I'm curious about this. In my world COVID is over now. I live in San Francisco. Nobody I know is getting boosters or is worried about it anymore.
Where do you live and what are the circumstances like there that you're considering getting your "next" one? (you've been boosted before?).
Covid definitely isn't over, it's just that we've gotten better at treating it and people have decided that they are over it. It is still killing almost 2000 people a week in the US and it's very possible that we will see a huge spike in that as we get further into winter.
the "next" booster is referring to the updated vaccine that more effectively targets the dominant "Omicron" variant.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/six-recent-covid-deaths-...
That's why the age skew is so high.
The last time it was under 2000 was july '21
Ah thanks for the context.
I've only gotten the J&J vax (the worst one?) back in April of 2021, no boosters. I considered getting one but by then they were recommending boosters every few months and I decided to just "risk" it by not getting them? (I'm in my 30s and in good shape/health so don't feel vulnerable, but I understand that could be hubris and back-fire).
Back in those first few months I was keeping an eye on reports of side-effects, and J&J actually looked like the safest of the 4 available in the US. But it and AstraZeneca got absolutely vilified while any claims against Pfizer and Moderna got ignored as crazy conspiracies.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti...
These stats don't indicate whether other confounding factors led to an individual's death.
The problem is it has to stop everywhere for us to get complacent. Especially, given that everyone wants to travel -- and travel abroad.
Pandemic is here. Nothing is over. We are distracted with other things. Things are "good" in San Francisco and the Bay now. No guarantee it will be so tomorrow.
That's not really established for COVID-19.
Also, endemic doesn't mean something doesn't matter. In much of Africa, malaria is endemic.
What you mean is "As a society we stopped caring."
E.g. I see lots of young not wearing masks to protect themselves, and I see more older people protecting themselves with masks. Seems like a reasonable balance.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pandemic-vs-endemi...
It does not describe severity. Ebola is endemic in parts of Africa. I still hope nobody gets it.
We can change the meanings of words for political reasons but who do we do a disservice too?
Given that it is a word from my mother language I find it a bit insulting when politicians decide to change my language though to benefit for a year or two.
Tl;Dr: Saying that covid is "endemic" to the whole world, is an insult to my ears, logic, and a whole language and people. They should pick a different word if they want to disagree with doctors worldwide.
I think we just have a new normal in terms of life expectancy and mortality :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...
Furthermore, respiratory disease avoidance on a society-wide scale has never and almost certainly will never be achieved. The assumption that it is an attainable goal is truly nuts.
A CDC study found that people who wore N95 masks were 83% less likely to get covid than people who wore no mask,[1] but that overstates their effectiveness. People who wear N95s tend to behave differently than people who don't wear masks. They get vaccinated more, avoid gatherings, and generally try to reduce their risk of infection in other ways. Also the timing of the study is important. It was conducted before more infectious variants such as omicron were around. And since it was conducted when California required masks indoors, only 5% of participants claimed no mask usage. So the study compared N95 people against the most hardcore anti-maskers, not the typical person who doesn't wear a mask these days.
It is for these reasons that I would bet that the real effectiveness of N95 masks is around 50%, not 83%. Useful, but not something that lets you go back to normal life risk-free.
The boosters likely make sense for some people, but there's little real data on their effectiveness. Outside of the more vulnerable, I'd avoid them personally. The proof just isn't readily available of continuous boosters being worth it to me.
Los Angeles.
I know lots of vaccinated people who are getting infected. Just last week I went to a conference here in LA. I was going to meet-up this week with on of the people I saw there. He told me he got COVID at the conference.
Yes, I've had one booster. I travel a lot for business. I think it might be prudent to take further precautions. I have no reason to believe this is unsafe for me.
When I got it, I was a healthy, fit person without any of the comorbidities that go along with COVID.
Last week I had a mountain biking accident and broke half my ribs and punctured a lung. Then I got COVID in hospital. Fortunately it was quite mild, and even that was a bit of a nightmare as coughing was hell and I had quite low blood oxygen.
Given the risks of a booster are so low (though non-zero) and the risk that your health can change before you manage to contract COVID, it seems like the smart proposition to me to get the booster.
In my family sphere, covid is over. Though, to them covid was always overblown with the response being worse than the illness.
In my main friend group, most still feel we are still in the middle of covid. Though, from my perspective, their words/fears seem to differ from their actions.
Your San Francisco social circles are different from mine. Most people I talk to about this got the bivalent booster and got the old booster last year.
But people do not seem super worried at this phase. The booster is something routine like a flu shot.
I don't recall it ever being sold to me as that, and though I regularly get them, I've never gotten a flu shot with that expectation. It reduces your odds and makes the thing more mild. That's the point. That's what I've been told my whole life. They're not magic solutions to everything in your life, they can't even be 100% sure about how to tweak them for the dominant strains that season, but they help.
This stuff makes people go a little crazy with unreasonable expectations. I remember people complaining in pre-pandemic years ... "the flu shot is only x% effective so why bother?" And the reason has always been that x > 0, any two-digit number for x is pretty worth it, even if it intuitively sounds small. It's pretty similar for COVID.
We really don't know much about this virus and by association it's vaccine - it does not behave like the flu - lost a colleague to Beta who was way fitter and way healthier than me (he did Murtai and BMI) - he ended on a ventilator and died, and I was just man down for week and a half at home.
It still took me weeks to recover back to myself again - still got the booster shot afterwards.
that angers me too. america bumbled its way through the pandemic, and we're no closer to getting single payer healthcare. not even for medical care related to the pandemic, which is collectively beneficial.
They may be saying the hospital or some provider within it was out of network, challenge this on the grounds it was an emergency. Challenge everything on the grounds that it was an emergency.
We had excellent grounds to challenge a few of the charges from the hospital (clear billing mistakes), but it never got to the point of evidence. We just called to argue and they instantly dropped them. I would strongly advise just calling and complaining and seeing what that gets you.
Many hospitals offer interest/fee free installment plans, you just have to ask.
I am, by nature, a mild mannered (perhaps even meek) person, but let me tell you that just doesn't work with hospitals and insurers. Their process requires you to take an adversarial/demanding role with them otherwise you will not just get billed unnecessarily but also not receive all the care you are entitled to.
This isn’t true at all, the ACA did a lot of mandating what insurance companies must cover, what maximum deductibles were, etc.
Edit: ah, yes, found the sub thread on cicp.
You had 15 kids at the time? How many kids do you have now? My hat is off!
The ACA individual mandate penalty was eliminated in 2017.
The ACA destroyed the prior insurance market. There is no way we can get what we had before for $650, in terms of cost, coverage and quality of care.
Calling this out as bullshit. Show me a reference.
You can get a PLATINUM plan on the California exchanges for less than that for a family--and your co-pay for everything will be under $250.
I would also like to point out that "myocarditis" qualifies as a preexisting condition. Without Obamacare, your child would never be able to get health insurance at all.
You mean, like this:
https://i.imgur.com/iIz30xw.png
Take note of the rating.
The fact that they are labeled "Platinum" is nice marketing. We've had family members and friends on some of these plans, they are --and I am being kind-- not great.
The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month. Our deductibles were half what they are today and we had all the catastrophic stuff just the same. I assure you that, with my wife being a doctor, we did not have shit insurance.
What should horrify everyone is that, today, in the US, a family has to spend $30K per year for health insurance. That's just insane.
Before you say "we don't". If you get your insurance through your employer you should ask them how much they are spending for your insurance. Unless they got you on a shit program, they are likely spending $20K to $30K on you. This is money that is not available to give you a raise. In other words, you are still suffering the consequences of the ACA scam, you just don't know it.
Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc. We went from $7,800 per year to $27,600 per year. More than that actually. Due to the high deductibles we have to spend thousands of dollars per year before any of it actually kicks in. I haven't done the math at this point. I would not be surprised if we've reached $40K.
Again, no problem helping others. That doesn't mean robbing families of tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's fucking criminal.
I know many don't feel this way. That's only so because they have never been on the receiving end of something like this. We love to talk about the concept of "fair share". Well, tripling health insurance costs isn't anywhere close to "fair share", it's government-enforced theft under false promises.
I'm standing here with a friend who got full mental health care ($0 copays for almost everything) from "Sharp Health" and didn't even need to use the exchange to get the rate ($600/mo direct retail from Sharp). Kaiser is on the same order of magnitude.
Hell, even straight up Blue Cross/Blue Shield is better than what you picked. Good grief.
> The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month.
Okay, okay, let's refresh your memory:
My mother was widowed and had to buy health insurance at 60. She got lucky and could tap into the PA Teacher's Pension system for a mere $1,100 per month. She paid that for 5 years until Medicare. This was prior to Obmamacare. Where was her $650 plan?
My wife was 35 and had sleep apnea and her cheapest plan that would even cover her was $3,500 per month with an enormous deductible. This was prior to Obamacare.
10+ million people couldn't get coverage. "Excision panels" worked hard to dump you off the rolls the moment you tried to use them.
Okay THAT was the system before Obamacare. Remember now?
What you are pining for was the old "indemnification" system that was due to the extremely strong labor unions. Unfortunately, that went away in the 80s due to the rise of the HMOs and the fact that everybody dumped on the labor unions. Many of us fought against that knowing that the HMOs were picking off the "profitable" people and were eventually going to to collapse the indemnification system--which is precisely what happened. And then the HMOs weren't so profitable once they got those patients and would dump them--which they did.
And THAT was the situation before Obamacare.
The objection everyone's having is that the $2400/month plans are exceedingly unlikely to refuse a medically necessary hospital stay for myocarditis. People are trying to figure what critical piece of information is being left out there.
> Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc.
Nothing in the ACA changed how doctors pick which insurance networks to honor, but if you switch insurers as part of picking an ACA plan you may have a different network just like you'd have if you did so with a non-ACA plan.
You're highlighting ongoing problems with the American health insurance industry and falsely portraying them as ACA-specific. High-deductible plans were on the rise with insurers before the ACA (https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-the-p...). Premiums were going up 5-15% a year before the ACA (https://www.fastcompany.com/40470468/this-scary-chart-shows-...). Doctors were dropping insurers before the ACA. etc. etc. etc.
Again, look at https://www.fastcompany.com/40470468/this-scary-chart-shows-....
1999: a bit over $5k/year in average premiums
2009: about $13k/year in average premiums, the year BEFORE the ACA was passed
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
Chances you kid would have gotten any troubles from covid are statistically absolutely negligible, given his age and hopefully absence of other illnesses.
Now you can blame as anti-vaxxer and sorts, but at least I didn't get myocarditis.
it boggles my mind that despite being plugged into an information network people can be this staggeringly ignorant about the wild success of vaccines
Hard for me to consider that anything other than a wild success. Is it perfect? Of course not. Do I wish it was better? Obviously. But it reduced the risk of COVID significantly for a huge number of people.
Those of us in countries that had successful lockdowns look at the mortality rate of those that were not able or willing to do so & pretty thankful we were able to postpone the virus until the vaccine was deployed.
I live in a place which has the unfortunate claim of longest, harshest lockdown in the world (Victoria, Australia). Multiple lengthy lockdowns, curfews, masks outside enforced by cops, sitting on the beach was illegal, taking kids to park illegal; people were literally chased down the street by cops demanding to "see your papers". Many cops resigned, and now in 2022 Victoria is struggling to find new recruits after a mass exodus of cops - many of whom did not agree with the job they were ordered to do.
Most people here do not consider those lockdowns a "success", and experts including epidemiologists have referred to our lockdowns as "draconian", and harmful.
Now, in 2022 we have more covid deaths than before, and that's with a very high rate of vaccination in the community, particularly the older age groups. But they're still dying at a record rate. The virus still spreads and still takes out vaccinated and boosted victims. Therefore, I would never adopt the blanket "thankful" rhetoric that you've shared. Thankful for lockdowns, thankful for mandates, thankful for what is frankly, an underwhelming vaccine compared to other vaccines. Yet, "saved millions of lives" is the go-to catch-phrase, and anything else can't possibly be true. Can it.
I don't think it's totally unfair to call it 'underwhelming' though. We are so used to vaccines being wildly successful at stamping out a bunch of diseases that when something as virulent as this comes along & the efficacy isn't as high (in no small part due to the fact that so many countries decided to make it the only line of defence), it's easy to be disillusioned.
I live in Queensland, Australia, where we had lockdowns that were similar in harshness but much more limited in length. I am very familiar with the Melbourne lockdowns (one of my colleagues got stuck there for months after he got trapped there after going down for a 1 week holiday).
We probably just got lucky that we didn't have a Melbourne-style outbreak. But the simple fact is the lockdowns prevented us from having a widespread outbreak before the vaccine was deployed. The lockdowns sucked but my anecdata from my network (certainly generally privileged people whose careers were not wildly affected, so not a representative sample) was the lockdowns were worth it.
It is trivial to look at mortality rate data between, say, US/UK and Australia to see the impact that the lockdowns had. It's simply undeniable that they saved lives. People complaining loudly about 'draconian' tend, in my experience, to be dipshit libertarians that would never brook any lockdowns under any circumstances simply because of their insane political views. Others complaining about lockdowns not working tend to be talking about their own lockdowns in their own contexts which were not as harsh as Melbourne (which, arguably, ended up working).
Of course we have more COVID deaths than before - we've dialled back all the preventions! The policy decision was made to let COVID run free through society and that the vaccines (which we both agree are imperfect, but perhaps I'm the only one that acknowledges they're vastly better than nothing) were the only mitigation that we're apparently willing to tolerate.
We've done fuck all about it and everyone seems surprised that the body count is still so high. I don't know why people are still surprised people are dying - we've clearly decided the policy position is to sacrifice people on the altar of the economy and that people are bored of dealing with COVID. We're not bothering with other mitigations despite it being a top 5 cause of death in Australia (top 3 in the US?).
The pursuit of being a responsible citizen can cause people to find themselves in the red zone. Pushed by coercive campaigns designed to make you not only think and act a certain way, but also spread the message and attack those who disagree. It's fascinating stuff.
"Dipshit libertarians"? Wow. I do wonder where the line is, if any, for those loyal to whatever lockdown rules are enforced. 100 days at 2 hours of outdoor exercise per day? Or are you the ambassador of compliance, willing to sign on to 500 days lockdown, 9pm curfew, and 5km travel limit from home.
It so happens that one of those "dipshit libertarians" who used the word "draconian", is professor Adrian Esterman. He appeared on TV in Australia many times during the pandemic, encouraging vaccines and encouraging preventative measures. He promoted caution and safety every time. But even he used the word draconian in an interview to say "no, we don't need draconian lockdowns" when asked recently whether lockdowns are needed again.
> "Of course we have more COVID deaths than before"
What do you mean "of course"? If you're suggesting everything that has happened was expected, you'd be wrong. Experts have REPEATEDLY said the virus has surprised us and behaved in unpredictable ways. The increased deaths in Australia this year were NOT expected.
And finally, part of the data about vaccines saving lives, comes from the over-represented numbers of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital. Early on at least, this was repeated often, with the footnote jab "pandemic of the unvaccinated". While the statistic is generally accepted, there are many factors involved in why certain people end up in hospital with covid. You may not have considered that unvaccinated people were more likely to take LESS precautions in general. After all, they didn't bother getting vaccinated, even though they were in the high risk age group. So they wouldn't take precautions with social distance, or hand sanitizing, or reducing social events. Those who quickly got vaccinated however, would be more likely to be cautious - therefore stay at home, social distance, and generally avoid the virus. But was anything like this discussed in relation to higher representation in hospital? No way. Nothing like that was ever discussed because they were so focused on pro-vaccine messaging. All we were left with was "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and a large group-think onboarding of that message, the remnants of which still can be found in posts such as yours.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin
It's not a single separated case as you may want to counterargument.
A vaccine "wild success" is only attributable to financial statements for big pharma. This is really wild, I'll give you that
Just did a search on CoveredCA. Monthly premium for Platinum Plans for a family of 4: $1200-1800 for a zero-deductibleplan (range includes Blue Shield, Kaiser, Anthem, Health Net, and OSCAR).
Because, as the CoveredCA website points out: "Platinum and Gold plans have a $0 deductible."
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 eliminated the fine for violating the individual mandate, starting in 2019. (The requirement itself is still in effect.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
Furthermore how many people are covered by that $2400 a month? I'd assume it's at least 4 if not more?
But one thing I don't understand, are you saying that before Obamacare, the situation would have been better? If so, how?
Personally, I wish we had a healthcare system where people are simply covered for this sort of occurrence automatically.
The fact that this research is just now being done ought to be enough to immediately revoke the FDA emergency use authorizations and pull the product from the shelves.
The covid vaccines have been a complete and utter disaster at every level. The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
We now have victims of vaccine injury so scared of societal backlash they don't speak out, and doctors so scared of losing their license/job they ignore the evidence in front of them.
People in the control branch were told they were controls so that they had the option to get the newly-authorized vaccine for real. Standard practice for trials that go well.
I think it's standard practice for therapeutics, but not for vaccines?
This sort of claim can’t be made on that basis because a lot of people do not produce antibodies after infection.
Paper: “Predictors of Nonseroconversion after SARS-CoV-2 Infection” – https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article
Abstract: “Not all persons recovering from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection develop SARS-CoV-2–specific antibodies. We show that nonseroconversion is associated with younger age and higher reverse transcription PCR cycle threshold values and identify SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx as a major correlate of the systemic antibody response.”
Please note that this was already known when the study which is taken to show that people are imagining long COVID was published.
It’s not a good study.
Quite a bit of research has been done since then which further pins down the fact that long COVID is very real and how to diagnose it with biomarkers, which turn out to correspond very well with people saying that a SARS-CoV-2 infection messed them up.
Please also consider how harshly judgemental it appears when someone accuses a large number of people of imagining or making up a severe and disabling condition. You have to be very certain.
Also using steroids like dexamethasone were a later advent in treating covid that helped a lot. (They should have been standard of care right away like they would have been for any other respiratory illness).
These early follies increased the perceived need for a vaccine then and today still; risk : benefit analysis for the vaccines consider worst possible scenarios for covid, which include defunct practices like high PIP ventilator use and forgoing of common first-line treatments
The time frames for the graphs are not the beginnings of covid (EoY 2021). By that time the initial standards of care had improved to the steroid treatments (I can't say specifically which ones, because I do not know, but I do know they were generally the standard of care at that time).
The risk benefit analysis of the vaccine vs the disease is ultimately something that's impossible to do at this point, because it's impossible to be impartial to whatever side you think is riskier. In general, I think a disease is just always going to be riskier than a vaccine. Anything you say about the vaccine could be true of the disease as well until we have complete information about the disease.
I think for a lot of people COVID isn't "real". They don't know anyone who died. Or if they do they were old, and/or it happened in the hospital far away from whatever their personal reality is.
Believe me when I tell you the risk associated with the vaccine is nothing compared to what he went through. I fully believe had he been vaccinated he'd still be here today.
Sorry for your loss, but there’s no way you could know that. The very same logic you would require you to espouse the belief that any person who received a vaccine and died, died because the vaccine.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID. And of course long term studies on COVID are also still in progress with all signs pointing to even more bad effects of COVID coming out in the coming years.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
And I only mean that as it relates to specific demographic cohorts, not overall. If I were elderly, diabetic, immunocompromised etc. I don't think I'd hesitate. But the data I've seen on my demographic cohort is a toss-up at best, or even shows the vaccine to be riskier.
You don't know that, because we don't know what the "long term effects of the vaccine" actually are.
The most common outcome of Covid is feeling bad for a couple of days (up to a week), and then moving on with life across all age groups. This has always been the case.
However, when you are talking about populations of 10s of millions in low risk age ranges, it's 10,000's of preventable deaths!
Even if you don't care about the deaths (it's their choice to die; whatever), note that for every death, there are 10-100 long covid cases that are pulling resources from the health care system indefinitely.
The vaccine seems to cut those by about 90% too. Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Not in young age groups its not. Those 10k at risk of Covid death are at significantly higher risk of death from other causes too. If we stratified by more than age you'd see significantly reduced IFR among all age groups in the group without comorbidities. Quit lumping all people together, this is the age of big data and we should be using it to enhance lives not subjugate with blithe renderings.
You seem certain of this, but the vaccines are new enough that we can't possibly have long term data to even evaluate.
Bodies are complicated, even more than software systems. I've been in enough SEV reviews where the root cause was seemingly innocuous to know that I can't anticipate with much confidence that any particular change won't result in some cascading failure scenario. This is why we have test environments. Luckily in software it's extremely rare for a change to take years to manifest bad behavior, but not so in medicine.
I'm no biologist, but an obvious question to ask is if the spike protein by itself, which the vaccine will produce, has different impacts than the spike protein coupled to the virus envelope. It's certainly smaller, will it be able to pass through areas where the whole virus package wouldn't? What about the end of the spike that would otherwise be attached to the envelope, will it have an effect?
You can't naively draw a Venn diagram of virus and vaccine impacts where the vaccine impacts are fully a subset of the virus impacts.
Well... if you think that there's a case for an emergency use authorization, then you kind of can't wait to determine long-term risks. If there's a Covid epidemic threatening to kill millions of people in 2019, you can't wait for a study of long-term consequences that terminates in 2027. You have to decide with the information you have in 2019.
Was there a case for an emergency use authorization? Covid did in fact kill millions of people, so arguably yes.
> ... and certainly before any mandates.
Yeah, there I'm with you.
Sure, except for the 20+ million lives they saved:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/06/covid-19...
> The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
Source needed. Reading these comments, one would think nobody ever died of COVID. One would think we didn't have hospitals crammed to the gills with them.
There is no reason to expect 20 million people in the United States would have died if we had taken a european approach to vaccination approvals.
210,000 to 448,000 Americans die every year to preventable medical errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventable_causes_of_death#An...
This is more people than COVID kills in the same time period, but strangely there's no panic about that. No mandates. No significant steps from any authorities to do anything about it. Perhaps because there's no money in that, unlike pushing a remedy for something that's not as significant as people feel.
edit: Since HN is ratelimiting me and not letting me reply to the below, here's the reply I've tried posting after an hour of "slowing down":
Checklists: https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/checklists-can-reduce-fata...
The same thing NASA uses to prevent human error: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19910001641
Mandatory checklists would wipe out most of them, yet there's no mandate for them.
Humans are messy, can't hold all knowledge about everything in their heads at all times, and error prone. Unless you replace them entirely you're not going to be able to eliminate medical errors.
Also, many hospitals view things like infection control or antimicrobial stewardship as cost centers, and they're not doing nearly as much as they can.
Excess mortality is higher now than during Covid https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-excess-deaths-hi...
There is evidence of statistical lies perpetuated to benefit big pharma.
- The extreme false positive rate of COVID testing
- Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
- Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
- PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
The entire pool of data of Covid deaths has been poisoned. There is no interest in accuracy. But there does seem to be extreme interest in protecting the liability and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven, untested, ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection, spread, or reduce symptoms.
I'm glad I only got the J&J shot way back when it came out and avoided 3+ rounds of Pfizer or Moderna primary and boosters.
Excess mortality is higher now because we're in the middle of a massive rebound of all the other respiratory illnesses (that were stopped by widespread masking and record flu vaccination last year). Also Covid is still around. Omicron has partially "escaped" the updated vaccines (which you should take anyway).
Source for the respiratory illness spike:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/southeast-us-has-hit...
Interesting analysis of the UK's excess mortality published in the BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2524
> Surprisingly, mortality rates in 2022 for most of the 10 leading “underlying” causes of death such as heart disease, stroke, and lung and colorectal cancer have been similar to previous years, or lower than expected. An exception is the rate for “symptoms, signs, and ill defined conditions” (mostly deaths resulting from old age and frailty) which has consistently been higher than expected and also caused the most excess deaths, but not enough to explain the overall excess.4
> However, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ (OHID) analysis of deaths by “any mention” on the death certificate—rather than just the “underlying cause” of death—shows a substantial excess, in particular, of deaths from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes since April,6 prompting an investigation by the Department of Health and Social Care. Growing evidence suggests that covid-19 increases the risk of cardiovascular problems even months after infection,7 which could in part be driving excess deaths. Covid-19 itself remains the sixth leading cause of death, causing 200-400 deaths weekly—a reminder that this virus remains a threat for the foreseeable future.
> Another possibility is that people may not be receiving the care they need from an NHS that was already overstretched pre-pandemic and is now coping with unprecedented backlogs of care and pressures on emergency services. This “crisis” situation has an adverse impact on all patients, but a lack of timely care can be especially life threatening for people with acute cardiovascular problems.
> ONS analysis shows about 3300 excess deaths occurred during the heatwaves experienced in England and Wales between June and August, mostly in older people.8
> ONS also notes that excess deaths can occur following periods when deaths were lower than average, ie, “mortality displacement.”5 Could some of the excess deaths since April reflect the lower ASMRs in early 2022?
I'm also curious about why there's such a difference in relative excess death rates between the US and UK. Currently in the US the weekly death rates are far below what they were in 2020-2021: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Meanwhile for the US and European countries, Covid death and excess death numbers are pretty close.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/world/europe/covid-russia...
> Excess mortality is higher now than during Covid
When did Covid disappear? This year, every week at least 2000 people died of Covid in the US.
> - Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Have you heard of mask mandates? How do you think they affect the spread of Influenza?
Tools developed in one tenth of the normal time aren't perfect. Hardly surprising. If they detected covid most of the cases when people had it, they work. Much better than having no tools at all.
> Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
It does not matter if you die directly by a disease or by the sequels of the disease.
Lets assume that people were not dying really from covid. This still leads us with the problem that people were dying massively and more often than in normal years so we have a second hidden agent killing people that nobody found. How do we explain it?
> Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Easily explainable when everybody was using masks and social distance in those two years. People remaining at home don't pick influenza at the same rate than people in a concert
> PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
I'm unsure about what you want say with that. PCR testing needs to chase an organism that is mutating fast. They need to change at a high pace. Lab chemicals and reactives having an expiring date is not rare
> and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven,
Green card granted by all regulatory agencies, so proven
> untested,
overtested, the entire planet toke it one year before the first antivacs
> ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection
vaccines never claimed to prevent infection. The makers repeated it again and again.
> [not prevent] spread
About spread. Too litle, too late and one step forward, two backward.
Negationists and agents actively promoted the disease, sabotaged healthcare and created chaos. People was videotaped deliberately coughing in the face of other after tearing off their masks.
The same people were videotaped later grooming the masses to commit a coup. Caught trying to sell a computer stolen from the capitol to Russian agents. None of them where found linked with pharma companies (and is very unlikely that a pharma company would lobby for convincing people to reject pharma products).
Not really fair to blame pharma while people were sabotaging the control.
>, or reduce symptoms.
This is simply false. Is a proven fact that vaccines reduced symptoms and saved people. Just take a look at the statistical data.
Is proven empirically that most of the zillions of people that received the vaccines didn't developed serious collateral effects.
Is proven than the group that received vaccines had a lower mortality than the group that rejected them. There are dozens of notorious antivacs videotaped bragging about the "inoffensive" disease, actively trying to caught it, doing everything wrong on purpose... and realizing too late that they will were dying from covid.
I agree that the main cause of death here should be stupidity, not covid.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
Wait, what? As in people should just take it as a prophylactic for heart disease, without even taking covid into consideration? It seems like this would be shouted from the rooftops if it were true.
Also their dataset had 13% covid positive rate. So ideally we should multiply the non vaccinated risk by 13%.
[0] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)
I see the argument here in this thread that the vaccine isn't really preventing you from getting covid at this point (which is probably largely true) but shouldn't being vaccinated mean that you'll have a lower viral load and shorter duration of illness?
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
Reverse-transcriptase enzyme in liver cells in a lab has been shown to convert the mRNA vaccines into DNA. While it's unclear if it would actually be a permanent change to cells, DNA is a lot more stable than RNA and could hang around a lot longer than expected, and result in a lot more spike protein than expected.
A) The general method of action of the vaccines is that the mRNA enters a cell (generally dendritic cells), the cell transcribes it into the spike protein, then the cell detects something off about the proteins and presents them on their cell wall for the immune system to respond to. The proteins aren't just "free floating" unless your immune response is
B) The likelihood of an immune response to an active infection never doing the same thing with cells that contain partially constructed virons / viron components, or achieving the same effect by breaking down full virons, is basically zero. So it's almost certain that an active infection would have "free-floating" proteins in some capacity as well.
covid vaccines are always present in the bloodstream after injection, even if injected intra-muscularly
an early study in japan showed only ~25% of the vaccine stays at the injection site
Absolutely terrible reporting in that link - instead look at the paper: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
In men younger than 40 years, we estimate an additional 4 and 14 myocarditis events per million in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively; and an additional 14 , 11 and 97 myocarditis events after a second dose of ChAdOx1, BNT162b2, and mRNA-1273, respectively. These estimates compare with an additional 16 myocarditis events per million men younger than 40 years in the 1 to 28 days after a SARS-CoV-2–positive test before vaccination. [ChAdOx1 == AstraZeneca, BNT162b2 == Pfizer, and mRNA-1273 == Moderna]
The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
> The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
That's from the study you linked; for the group most at risk of vaccine myocarditis, the vaccine was associated with a higher risk than the virus. In this study, this was true for Moderna, with Pfizer being about equivalent risk to the virus (albeit without considering that the risk of infection remains after vaccination). However, there have been other studies that found this to be true for all mrna vaccines.
So to answer your question, its technically true, but only if you dilute the at-risk group by including the entire population.
Earlier in pandemic 196k post Covid patients were monitored a year... "We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
i.e. I would think that number has significant survivorship bias.
Also, can you imagine losing a child to something that was preventable? You can play numbers and statistics all day, but we're talking about children's lives.
You're probably not a parent? But for reference, go find examples of people who are parents that have lost children to some cause, and see what they're doing now? I would bet 9/10 times they're trying to prevent that from happening to others.
there are plenty of comments here that speak to the general age recommendation other countries have provided, but i have yet to see people connect the other MAJOR group of people that should, by all means, totally, 100% consider getting their nth vaccination -> anyone with a comorbidity! if you are a young man with diabetes, the risks you face from the vaccine vs a covid infection are no longer as murky.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480849 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221924#29223881
Children are not dying from covid. So there is no need to vaccinate them unless they are in a high risk category.
The NY Times reported "For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify."
And it would be just as backed up as if I were to say "Children are not dying from covid vaccines."
There are 31 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination for children 5-12, and ‘10.9 million US children ages 5-11 have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 2.84 deaths per million. Again, VAERS notoriously undercounts.
https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
When you say "VAERS notoriously undercounts", I think you're probably referring to the flu vaccine (where we would have historical data), but I don't think it's fair to say that would be true for the Covid vaccine.
Specifically because at the onset of this new vaccine, people are much more likely to report that a death happened after a covid vaccine. There is a segment of the population that has never trusted the covid vaccine, so they are a lot more likely to report a death after vaccination of a loved one. Also as the vaccine is new, there's probably a lot more data gathering around it because scientists would definitely like to know if the vaccine causes death. Lastly, it's an event you're much more likely to have talked to with your loved ones before you passed away, than with the flu vaccine.
My family knows I got a covid vaccine. My family has no idea about my flu vaccine status.
Lastly, and most importantly, the numbers for those are not intrinsically linked. There's not actually any implied causal link in any of those numbers "VAERS Covid/Flu Vaccine Reported Deaths by Days to Onset all Ages". They are all just correlated. If you want to look for a causal link you'd have to compare against the total number of people who got vaccines on that day. And then compare against total number of deaths for the whole population.
Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported.
Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event,
less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events
are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low
reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs
and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for
drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting
include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what
to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part
of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative.
Sensitivities ranged from 72% for poliomyelitis after
the oral poliovirus vaccine to less than 1% for rash
and thrombocytopenia after the MMR vaccine.
And regarding the protestation that correlation does not imply causation, it’s not on me to prove that the treatment is harmful, and otherwise it’s safe and thus administered—-it’s on you to prove that it confers an all cause mortality benefit. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that such a benefit obtains in children, and suggest that this dearth of evidence explains the failure to approve the vaccines for children in many European countries.
As well as explaining confounding variables that your reference doesn't take into account for what that means. None of your sources are accounting for how politically embroiled this vaccine is, and how much of a difference that would make in who/what gets reported.
Just in case, I will make this point. If you had a loved one get a covid vaccine, and then die 20 days later, would you report it to VAERS?
So... what you're saying is that the vaccine is not better than the virus? Because that is the simplest and best explanation for this observation.
Knowing what I know now, were a family member to die 20 days after a vaccination I would certainly submit a VAERS report, but I find this question incredible: are you really disputing multiple studies that conclude that VAERS underreports adverse events by appealing to your nebulous feeling that family members surely would not neglect to file a VAERS report after the death of a family member?
Does the fact that only a tiny minority of the population even knows VAERS exists provoke doubt?
How about what HHS has this to say about the matter (https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html):
“Underreporting" is one of the main limitations of passive
surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting
refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small
fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting
varies widely.
As for the insulting claim that no standard of proof would convince me that the vaccine is better than the virus: all I require is a sufficiently powered RCT with a genuine placebo in the control, full disclosure of patient level data, and all cause mortality as the primary endpoint. It baffles me that you don’t demand the same.
https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-052273
https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fijpo.12920
To be clear, I am not telling anyone to avoid vaccination for themselves or their children. Vaccination is a good option for the vast majority of patients. Talk to your doctor.
And ironically, school closures and lockdowns during the pandemic actually increased the rate of childhood obesity. The purported "cure" was not only worse than the disease, it actually made the disease worse by placing children at greater risk.
https://www.cureus.com/articles/107920-increased-incidence-o...
It seems like I'm getting a continual -2 on votes for all of my arguments just cause I'm coming off as "pro-vaccine". So it doesn't actually seem to matter what appeals I make.
Also though, I don't really believe I'm changing anyone's mind on this. I'm just inviting people consider the humanity of things like "child deaths". Which, is much easier to consider as a number than it is as an actual concept.
I don't really have time to cross reference all your different comments, but when you post a comment that is just appeal to emotion, I tend to mention it.
In all honesty, I will say that pointing out rhetorical styles is probably the least constructive internet discussion you can have. Mostly because even if you can point to a logical fallacy, doing so doesn't negate the underlying argument unless you can actually explain it.
Now if your argument is "what's the harm?, why not vaccinate everyone?" my answer would be we don't actually know what the harm might be to these kids later in life. No one does. Probably no harm, I guess? Maybe a 3/1,000,000 chance of harm? no one knows.
Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
But also, I don't know how familiar you are with gov't messaging. But the more widespread you make a message, the less nuanced you can make it. People at large don't take nuance very well, and people at large are bad at evaluating circumstances. So if you give them a message like "People over the age of 65 should get 3 doses, and people over 30 should get 2 doses, etc." You're going to end up with most of the people not knowing what to do.
To add to that, you have people "doing their own research" who have no idea what the requirements for actual peer-reviewed research is, screaming from the rooftops that you can't trust anything coming out of anyone's mouth. And they will latch onto any piece of nuance and tear it to shreds.
Now, I still think that American institutions have done a bad job communicating, but considering they were undermined at every step of the process, I'm inclined to believe that it's more reasonable for them to give a blanket across-the-board recommendation than it is to destroy their own goal by adding confusion of "nuanced recommendations".
What age groups does this affect?
I think I have condition Y so I should go get vaccinated, but I have conflicting information on that from multiple doctors. Should I get vaccinated?
Also, in the US people often take advertised medications to their doctors and ask if they should take it, rather than doctors recommending things to people.
Finally, there are large segments of the population that don't consult doctors for varying reasons.
You wanna try and make that message simpler?
The mRNA vaccines weren't even tested for transmission during the early trials. It was impossible to make educated statements about reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination without any data. This did not stop people from introducing mandates in some places, even after it became clear that herd immunity will not be reached, which goes a little beyond bad communication.
In hindsight, that was incorrect, but you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. It is reasonable to assume that viruses would be subject to herd immunity, because it's been true for the vast majority of viruses we've interacted with in the past.
I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power.
Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.
In converse: we should have skipped phase 3 trials (effectivity) and should have started vaccination after safety was approved.
If anything the vaccination campaign has shown that sometimes acting fast can be tremendously helpful.
Since my dad had his health go so poorly after the vaccine, I decided to not risk it, specially considering my existing conditions.
It was an emergency.
At the time the vaccine got authorized, we were in a middle of a pandemic, millions of people with no immunity were getting sick, and we couldn't stop the spread even with heavy restrictions. It was clear that we will all have some immunity eventually. The point of the emergency use of vaccine was to give people immunity in a way that wasn't as bad at getting sick. Wait too much, and the vaccine would have been mostly useless. It was a game of how much uncertainty we allow vs how much more deaths if we do nothing. And I think the (fairly conservative) bet saved millions, maybe we could have saved a bit more if we actually vaccinated people before the end of phase 3.
We are now in the end game, and the rules have changed. We are now almost all immunized in one way or another, the virus is now optimized for immune escape instead of raw speed, thankfully making it less deadly in the process. Because of that, the way we approach vaccination needs to change too. We can't compare today's situation with the beginning of 2021.
Some time in 2021 there was a story about COVID vaccines and heart issues here on HN. The comments filled up with people saying that ever since they'd got their shots they were experiencing new heart-related symptoms they'd never had previously like permanently racing heartbeats, palpitations/fluttering, inability to do exercise and more. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to re-find that discussion. I also have a good friend who works in IT who had a heart attack in the weeks after his shots, but he refused to believe that's what happened and never went in to get diagnosed (the symptoms were an exact match however).
Some rough calculations indicate the numbers affected by this kind of (hopefully) low level heart damage seem much higher than claimed. They say of the "hundreds of millions" of shots there are only 1000 cases of diagnosed heart damage from the vaccines. Call it 1000/100,000,000 or one in a million. There are approx 5M readers of Hacker News per month, so far less per day. Of those only a tiny handful have accounts and post comments. If their numbers are right then there should be ~no HN commenters with post-vaccine heart problems but this thread filled up with people posting their own experiences of such a thing.
Then there's also the other health problems. My gfs friends who took it have been complaining that they seem to get sick with colds/fluey things way more frequently since the shots, I heard similar complaints from a couple of old coworkers. One of those girls complaining of frequent sickness also reported disrupted menstruation but the doctors have ignored it all because as far as they are concerned, the vaccines are 'perfectly safe'.
I don't know if I should keep getting boosters or risk a potentially worse outcome from covid, which I haven't had yet, though I've been very exposed to.
Anecdotally, some, not all, but some of my triple vaccinated friends are getting sick constantly and they've said that every time they catch covid, it gets worse. This is just a few people out of several that I know, so it doesn't mean much if anything.
Unofficially the effect does exist and goes by various names: OAS, Hoskins Effect, immune imprinting. It can be seen in some of the vaccine effectiveness data back when it was being collected by places like the UK, where vaccinated people were getting COVID at 4x the rate of unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting (and the rate was worsening with time).
It can also be seen in the boosters trial data where they had to switch the definition of success to antibody production, because the boosters were not actually reducing infection incidence e.g. the bivalent boosters were tested on all of 8 mice and all 8 got COVID when exposed so effectiveness is zero, but that didn't stop them being approved on the basis that they caused production of antibodies (to the variant targeted by the OG vaccine, not Omicron).
OAS unfortunately can be caused by any vaccine tech. It's not mRNA specific. The antibodies you produce are for the older extinct variants that the vaccine trained you for, not the current variants. The body doesn't recognize that there's a difference.
Bing/DuckDuckGo go is much better for anything with a negative vaccine sentiment. I stopped using Google altogether, because of the pandemic, after repeatedly watching news articles and research papers disappear from search results. I want a list, not a guided experience.
[1]https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pericarditis/....
"Both the Vaccine and Covid are known have a low chance of causing heart issues."
It is 'known' by people who are deeply conflicted by their own pushing of the shots and could thus never admit it, if their policies had led to immune or heart damage. Nothing much can be said about vaccine safety given that the public health and research system are clearly terrified of doing or saying anything that might reduce compliance with their policies.
There are people talking about heart palpitations or pains, yard to say if that's enough to say they had myocarditis though.
For some reason still decided to get the third booster.. and I still ended up getting COVID twice (very mild both times). Don't think I'll be getting any more COVID vaccines.
Well the study is funded by the vaccine makers. So we can toss it out before it's even conducted.
Same goes for anything done by parties who have equated taking the vaccine with moral righteousness. If there are serious health risks it will only be found by a skeptic with a lot of perseverance.
Science is not a religion, and we don't have to believe in it. Instead we need to be critic, conduct experiments, evaluate our thesis, put everything into discussion. Something we didn't, because you are a fool if you have doubts about vaccines, if you talk about negative effects, they are 100% safe and you are an ignorant.
This is the contrary of doing science. We didn't studied these vaccines enough, we didn't take for serious people lamenting adverse reactions, we did hide the news about that because we feared people not taking the vaccine. Is this science? It's not.
If you look at the news, vaccines are 100% safe and doesn't have any side effect. You ask people that got that, you get another opinion. Me too after the third dose (that I wouldn't had got if I wasn't forced to do so by our "democratic" government, no wonder here in Italy last elections won the "fascists", if these are the democratic people) I had serious side effects, I was basically not feeling well for a week. To take into prospective, when I got COVID in March 2020 when it was still a new thing I only got a slight fever for two days, nothing compared of the effect of the vaccine itself...
Would you care to elaborate? I had really bad brain fog.
I did not get the boosters. I’ve had people say I’m anti-vax, from this.
Did you find out the root cause? Did they hit a nerve directly?
Being unable to work properly for longish time (say months to a year), without needing hospitalization is quite serious to anyone in working age. There was no way to judge how long particular side effects can last (and likelihoods) from vaccine studies, because data for judging this were not published, despite for sure being available from the original trials to the researchers.
There's apparently a lot of research about how to push people to vaccinate and about vaccination hessitancy, though. :) But providing some useful data about side effects, like how likely they'll last 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months for a vaccination that was intended to quickly give to almost everyone... No, can't have that. That was almost impossible to find. And if you did find something, it was some independent research with small sample size.
It's possible that such a vaccine causes a number of such cases, and still prevents a much larger number of them. In fact it also seems to be true in this case.
Discussing the vaccines out of this context, is scaremongering. You're much better off taking your chances with the COVID-19 vaccine than taking your chances unvaccinated.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
You can't make the trade-off solely on myocarditis.
I fail to see any evidence of "much reduced risk". We know before vaccinations existed some people died, some people were a-symptomatic. After mass vaccination campaigns, same results. Have the deaths gone down? Sure, but there are obvious factors, outside of vaccination, that are certainly contributing to that, if not wholly responsible for it. We know the virus has been getting less deadly with each new strain, we know that putting people on ventilators and cranking them up was 100% the wrong treatment. The media has largely stopped beating the fear drum, there are no more death counters up on the news stations 24/7 so people aren't freaking-the-fuck-out. I highly suspect you could have given out placebos instead and would have seen the same results.
If you just do a basic per-capita analysis the reduced risk of death is in the range of 5-16x depending on age group and vaccinated or vaccinated+boosted. There are obviously confounding variables (do vaccinated people behave differently? are healthier people the ones getting the vaccines?) but I would argue that those numbers are a pretty big W for vaccines as far as risk reduction goes.
And of course that is just deaths. You could certainly look at numbers for severity of infection or long-covid outcomes to further measure the efficacy of the vaccines.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-compare-co...
I am not questioning that, but couldn't that 5-16x be contributed to the latest strains being far less deadly that the first few strains, much better and accessible treatments (monoclonal antibodies), safer hospital practices (not putting people on ventilators so quickly/easily), etc.? How can we be so sure that the majority of that 5-16x was from vaccination?
... COVID can still kill me, or give me one of a number of other long-term health issues. If myocarditis isn't one of them, it doesn't really change the risk ratio.
Not at close to the same rate, no.
"can" would be a technically true but entirely misleading word there, as the topic of conversation is the risk ratio. "1 in 10 chance" things can happen. "1 in a million chance" things can happen, also.
But these two "can" usages are not the same.
You should know this. You should not be playing word games. Do you think, falsely, that COVID vaccination it totally useless? If not, why imply it?
What makes you say that? It doesn't sound accurate at all, given that Autumn booster programs are underway in USA, UK, EU - and those are the only ones that I have checked. And what are you attempting to imply?
In the UK's case, the NHS "invites people 50 and over for autumn boosters" (1) which doesn't rule out any further action later for under 50s.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/2022/10/nhs-invites-people-50-and...
That is highly debatable, especially with the current (weaker) strains. Unless you have comorbidities or are otherwise in a high-risk category the chance the Covid will kill you is near 0.
What makes you say that the current strains are weaker?
Well, no. That's moving the goalpost. The question was if COVID was more likely to result in myocarditis than vaccines. "Yes, but" still grants "yes."
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
>In 42 842 345 people receiving at least 1 dose of vaccine, 21 242 629 received 3 doses, and 5 934 153 had SARS-CoV-2 infection before or after vaccination. Myocarditis occurred in 2861 (0.007%) people, with 617 events 1 to 28 days after vaccination. Risk of myocarditis was increased in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of ChAdOx1 (incidence rate ratio, 1.33 [95% CI, 1.09–1.62]) and a first, second, and booster dose of BNT162b2 (1.52 [95% CI, 1.24–1.85]; 1.57 [95% CI, 1.28–1.92], and 1.72 [95% CI, 1.33–2.22], respectively) but was lower than the risks after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test before or after vaccination (11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] and 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87], respectively).
BEFORE OR AFTER VACCINATION.
Every single person in that study was vaccinated, some of them caught covid (either before or after being vaccinated), some people did not catch covid at all. The people that were vaccinated and contracted covid fared the worst. There is no un-vaccinated group that caught covid and never took the vaccine at all in this study.
I might say there's a "statistically insignificant increase", but to say there's no increase is just factually wrong. (And statistically wrong too).
"Inpatient myocarditis and pericarditis diagnoses were retrieved from day 10 after positive PCR. Follow-up was censored on 28 February 2021, with minimum observation of 18 days."
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
The second does of vaccine knocked my wife and I on our asses for three days. I broke a sweat unloading the dishwasher and then had to go take a nap to recover. I figured we were just unlucky enough to have an especially strong reaction and didn't bother a doctor about it. Was that mild myocarditis? I'll probably never know.
Which mechanism would cause myocarditis when you get COVID 19?
The 2nd link in nradov's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599243) states:
> These findings indicate that introducing the mRNA vaccine into the circulatory system can lead to acute cardiac inflammation. The mechanism behind this requires further elucidation. However, it is speculated that this may be due to the pro-inflammatory properties of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used as carriers for mRNA.
The actual COVID-19 infection doesn't have any lipid nanoparticles, does it?
Agree with overall sentiment of your comment though: the overall real-bad symptoms caused by an infection when fully unvaccinated are probably not worth skipping vaccine.
The clinical trials in op's article as well as nradov's comment on "aspiration" to reduce myocarditis risk during vaccination are both important topics to explore.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
> During March 2020–January 2021, patients with COVID-19 had nearly 16 times the risk for myocarditis compared with patients who did not have COVID-19, and risk varied by sex and age.
> To minimize potential bias from vaccine-associated myocarditis (6), 277,892 patients with a COVID-19 vaccination record in PHD-SR during December 2020–February 2021 were excluded.
This started with chest pains, gradually increasing over the course of a day or two before I went to the hospital. I had to ask them to test for myopericarditis, because they were pretty much only considering an embolism or a panic attack. In that sense I was lucky that I had read a paper a month or so before, indicating young men (such as myself) as having an increased risk after Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccination. After diagnosis I had to go through a 3-month medication regimen which, I'll be honest, wasn't all that fun for my intestinal tract.
Thankfully I was deemed healthy after half a year, with low probability of lasting damage. Yet, the psychological weight of being confronted with heart disease in your mid-twenties is heavy. My opinions on vaccinations haven't really changed, though I think the legal and societal pressure to get everyone vaccinated was out of line and that opinion has gotten stronger. Especially after knowing that vaccination doesn't affects transmission as much as they hoped, I expected them to focus much more heavily on the at-risk groups, but that didn't happen.
The worst part about all of this though is the obstinate denial my cardiologists had of any possible relation between my Pfizer shot and the pericarditis. They'd point to the fact that young men can develop myopericarditis without vaccination. This is true, though it's almost always the result of an infection, and in my region of the world the vast majority of these cases result from flu infections. However, when I had my diagnosis there were barely any flu cases in the country, it just wasn't the season, and most of all I wasn't ill. Pointing to the close proximity to the vaccination was met with immediate and absolute denial.
I think that's what bothered me most: I did my part, I tried to protect society by getting a shot, but when confronted with negative fall-out I had to fight for a diagnosis and was pretty much laughed out of the room for suggesting a relation to the booster. I don't think I've processed this yet. It really feels like I did everything I was told, giving up much of my hobbies, social life etc., but when my health was on the line... "Ho pal, can't be saying anything that could be contorted into criticism of vaccination".
Little of it seemed "fair".
I recently came to believe that it's not accurate to model random humans as reflections of self. Situations like this make much more sense if you think the humans to be not much more but nodes of some greater societal 'meme' (as in infectious idea/ideology). Almost everyone is such a node in almost every respect. Better to drop the belief that you're operating in a world of copies of yourself, and rather embrace the model that you're operating in a world of memes, the nodes of which the people around you are. At least when it comes to explaining behavior which you have trouble understanding.
https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab941
https://doi.org/10.1007/s43440-022-00361-4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2021-141119
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/acip-recs/general-recs/admi...
The vaccines were not built to be aspirated, once the plunger is up they can not be reset. It represents a fundamental lapse in standard harm reduction.
Also "wait 15 mins to see if emergency care is needed" could well have been replaced by allergy screening given before the injection. Many thousands of cases of anaphylaxis from the shot have been documented some of which were fatal, all avoidable with allergy screening which is practically free.
There exist syringes which the injection cannot be aspirated with, but those weren’t used when I was being vaccinated.
—
Strong agreement on the concern about deltoid vasculature.
(I have direct, lived experience with someone at risk of death from a substance going into a capillary which was supposed to stay under the skin on injection. It happens. It’s real. Some doctors will claim it’s “impossible”, which is obviously false when you look into it. The datasheet that came with the injector needles even state that they’re “over 99.5 accurate in delivering a subcutaneous injection”. I forget the exact phrasing. It means that statistically, 1 in 200 injections tends to go into a capillary.)
—
Also, it’s interesting to look into the reasons why aspiration was removed from standard practice. In a nutshell, it’s because of two things:
1: Some syringes exist which cannot be aspirated with.
2: Aspiration can be painful for infants and is tricky to perform because they are small and they struggle.
These are the reasons why aspiration was essentially removed from clinical practice. Really. Those are the reasons. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s obviously harmful that aspiration was stopped.
The papers the grandparent post links to are good.
What is the scientifically acceptable way to phrase "I'm not concerned about BigPharma planting 5G chips in my future children's eyeballs to turn them into communist ; but I'm very concerned about blind spots during testing and biases in protocol and just plain bad luck that made us miss something ?"
Maybe I just write too much software for a living, but my only certitude was that something, somewhere, was going to break. At least I can TDD the hell out of my paranoia. Don't let me write health policy, ever.
Sidenode: if this kid had chosen the wrong profession in the wrong country, he would now be facing either "getting a couple of other shot" or "loosing its job".
If he had made a tiktok video about his problems, or a facebook post, or a twitter thread, etc... at some point it would have been flagged, and it would have only garnered the attention of the worst possible scammers.
And, worst of all, I'm pretty sure his grandmother would now refuse to get boosted.
Talk about loose-loose :/
People who expressed concerns or some doubts just a few months ago were attacked, downvoted, silenced and socially outcast.
This is not science. This is the opposite of science.
That did not make me any less scared of the "oooops" moment.
This will get worse (myocarditis today, menstural cycles tomorrow, maybe strokes and cancer later ?), then worse (vast number of people completely loosing faith into their docs and letting a much worse epidemy settle), then worse, before it gets... well, before life goes on and we mostly forget, as it has ever done and as we ever did, I suppose ?
Slowly, in carefully written form reviewed by people with the right training.
Unfortunately, in the middle of an emergency with the bodies of voting-aged people piling up... Not at all.
(Although, I guess not going to the other extreme of "having this conversation in bits of 140 characters among strangers with advertisers at each corner" did not help much.)
A lot of us have this inner "oh if only I was a better speaker / smarter / worked on my persuasion skills ..."
It's just not how power works. It's not how society works. I get that now, and it was amazing anthropology to see it unfold.
this is my favorite eric quote, which he also just applied to the ftx mess.
Eric's way of seeing things isn't a linear thing I can summarize, there's a few youtube vids you can search for the concepts of Kayfabe or his anger at the Consumer Price Index methodology which he's been making noise about for a decade, way before all the cool kids today tweeting about inflation.
It's about seeing narrative frames and language games that institutions play to intrinsically hide (to others and themselves) the mechanics of power/money. If you believe in beautiful liberal middle-class dreams it's really painful to square with reality of those machines.
He calls his own podcast The Portal because to see these patterns you need that moment where you step out of the calcified frame of current understanding, like in those kids books where youre stuck in a drab deadened state and then find a magical portal to narnia, can return transformed.
(You have to have those moments yourself, it usually feels like a loss of innocence imo)
Further, it intellectually constricts the speaker, both in thought and speech. It's running a race with lead weights and straitjacket.
For a smaller, but longer-lasting example, think of how many times in the past six years you heard someone preface a statement with "I hate Trump, but". Those who lived under Communism and Nazism experienced the same thing: Anything that might be perceived by another as being against approved thought in any way had to uttered in a way that would plausibly insulate the speaker from undesirable consequences. Now, think of how long-term adherence to such behavior crabs the intellect and soul.
The nuance is key. Frankly, I don't recall much in the way of nuance, I pretty much always saw concern about vaccines framed as a battle for freedom against a tyrannical political party.
Which raises a lot of questions (is "being scared" enough of a justification for refusing a law ? On the other hands, do democraticaly elected officials automatically get the right do decide what people should be "scared" about, without having any more evidence than anyone else - given that the only thing that can give evidence is time, time, and more time ?)
Questions that, unfortunately, had to be answered hastly and withouth much concerns for the unlucky ones - which, to be honest, is pretty much the theme of history, and we have been among the lucky one until now, so maybe we don't have that much to complain about.
You don't understand why someone with concerns about the safety of a vaccine might frame the problem not as the existence of a vaccine with tradeoffs other people might want to make, but rather as a political party forcing the decision on everyone? Or are you just being disingenuous? Be better.
Look, everyone is scared of doing something until they're scared of not doing it. Everyone distrusts government until they trust it, and distrusts pharma until they trust it. Some people will wear their mask in the grocery store even though it's a cloth mask that's as good as doing nothing because now it feels weird not to. Some people won't take the COVID vaccine but they'll happily take remdesivir and ivermectin. (Who do you think makes remdesivir and ivermectin?) Some people will happily go to an indoor comic convention that's an hour's drive from them, but not to an outdoor wedding, because it would mean getting on a plane (this actually happened with a family member of mine and I am not over it).
All of which is to say that what people are really doing is going with their gut. If your gut instinct is "COVID's not a big deal", then of course taking an emergency-use-authorized vaccine for it seems risky. If your gut instinct is "COVID is dangerous and deadly", you'll take anything you can get. Now that things are subsiding, and the fear is waning, I read an article like this and I think "hmm, that does seem bad, we should look into it, but also I am gonna keep doing what I'm doing and getting my COVID vaccine because it seems like it's helping." On the other hand, you have people who are literally dying of COVID who are still relieved they were able to dodge getting the vaccine because it felt scary to get a not-fully-tested drug.
So I'm pro-vaccine because they seem like a good idea and my experiences with them (four shots so far) have been positive, in that my side effects were limited and I know there were situations where I could have gotten COVID and I didn't. (And when I did get COVID, it was extremely mild.) Who's to say how I'd have felt if I were one of the few cases of myocarditis out there? Who's to say how I would've felt if I'd had mild COVID and recovered from it pre-vaccine? What if I'd been hospitalized with COVID pre-vaccine?
Can we just admit this isn't about logic or statistics, and never was? It was always a persuasion game either way.
My gut tells me "be skeptical of novel things, but balance that skepticism a bit by asking people whom you trust to have greater knowledge on the topic, ultimately making the best decision you can".
But I suppose we all preferred pretending we knew _somethings_.
How about we get some empathy for the people who just ended up on the many bad sides of the many bets ?
I meant basically: "maybe give the few young people who suffered from some unforeseen side effects a break, and the right to keep their job without a next round of jabs" ? As far as I can tell, "having suffered side effects from the first 1/2/3 injection" is still not a valid exemption cause for vaccine mandates.
We didn't just invent a completely new vaccine mechanism for covid, the mRNA technology has been known and in development for half a century. This is just the first time it was effective. Likewise with the disease itself, we know that it shares a significant portion of its DNA with the disease behind the 2002 SARS-CoV pandemic and has many other similar parameters.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-does-SARS-CoV-2-Comp...
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines targeting infectious diseases including HIV-1, rabies, Zika and influenza were already in clinical trials, as were mRNA vaccines targeting multiple hematologic and solid organ malignancies (Pardi, 2018).
If you have data that we did have a widely deployed vaccine using that tech (which I think, but don't 100.000% know, hadn't happened), then I'm interested to learn that.
Are you trying to say that we learn everything about this subject from clinical trials?
Kind of? The fact is that we've turned into a society where we can't even be unified in trying to prevent disease. If "the left" is for vaccines, masking, social distancing, etc. then "the right" has to immediately be against it.
I don't recall any of my friends or family needing persuasion at all. They believed in the science and were willing to adapt as we learned new things about COVID (e.g. around masking and social distancing). When vaccines were becoming available I know my circle spent time looking over what information we could find about which ones were better, side effects, etc., but were onboard with vaccine risk being better than COVID.
The FOX crowd, OTOH, went looking to scare people off vaccines and made not masking a point of pride. It was tribalism, pure and simple. If it were a persuasion game you might have seen a lot more diversity in who was for/against the vaccines.
30 years ago if we'd faced COVID (at least in the U.S.) and had the vaccines available, I think we'd have fared far better. People who couldn't agree on much else could've come together in the face of a deadly disease. Persuasion, and logic, are out the window.
Not advocating for social distancing as a policy at this point in time, just saying, it made a lot of sense from a risk-prevention perspective at the time.
But again, this is my point. It's trivially easy for me to provide a logical explanation for why social distancing was a sensible tactic. You are (probably) not going to be persuaded. You (probably) like your evidence because it matches how you feel, and I like mine because it matches how I feel.
To be clear, I don't mean this in an aggressive way - I don't think it is bad that you don't agree with me on this in some kind of a moral way, at this point. I just don't think any sort of evidence-based argumentation will bridge the gap between us.
that wasn't the guidance. It was stand 2 meters from anyone, even if no one is sick.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottli...
The vaccines weren't trialed and aren't approved to prevent the spread of the disease....so? I don't know about you, but I actually read the FDA's initial report on the Pfizer trials, and it was complete nonsense. They didn't even test each participant for covid, only some participants, with no clear reasoning as to which.
I'm never going to take experimental gene therapy drugs, it's just never going to happen.
The use of this term to describe an mRNA vaccine suggests you do not understand how these vaccines work whatsoever. I am not surprised you didn't understand the FDA's report given that you don't understand how the vaccines work at all.
Gene therapy accurately describes the drug's effect. It injects instructions into your cells to replicate a protein, that's gene therapy. In this case, rather than treating some disease, it's designed to provoke an immune response. Hard pass.
That's not what a vaccine is. Vaccines do not "require" an antigen, they "act as" an antigen. Whether they include the antigen directly or a mechanism for producing it doesn't matter. Live-virus vaccines are just a more imprecise version of the technology that powers mRNA vaccines. They're doing the same thing, but more sloppily.
> It injects instructions into your cells to replicate a protein, that's gene therapy.
Again, you don't understand the term. "Gene therapy" involves actually changing the DNA housed in the nucleus in your cells. mRNA vaccines can't do that.
This is also how every virus, including COVID works. "Injected into cells" is imprecise terminology that makes it sound like it's doing something novel that will persist in your cell after the mRNA decays. That isn't true. The mRNA doesn't become part of your DNA. It eventually decays and becomes useless. Until then, mechanisms within the cell use it to produce the protein - one of the same proteins COVID produces when you are sick with it.
If you are scared of this mechanism of action, you should be downright terrified of ever getting a viral infection, or any vaccine at all, or really just living in the world. Real viruses do the exact same thing, except some of them (like retroviruses) also alter your DNA. The human genome is littered with the genes for viruses that wormed their way in over time.
mRNA vaccines are just doing the same thing the virus already does, but in a more controlled, less dangerous way, and obviously without viral replication in the host.
But, again, the whole point of my original comment is that none of this will matter to you, most likely. I suspect you will keep believing false things about these vaccines which justify your position that you don't want to take them. Hopefully this information makes some difference to someone else.
Anyway, I think this is enough back-and-forth with you; between this and the "Marxist-level thinking" comment it's pretty clear there's nothing to gain by this anymore.
No, that's gene modification, one type of gene therapy.
Here's a paper that discusses using mRNA as gene therapy to treat cancer [1]. Transcription into a cell's own DNA isn't a requirement for something to be gene therapy, only that the intent is to have a cell produce something it otherwise wouldn't. That can be permanent (DNA transcription), or temporary (mRNA that doesn't replicate).
I'm sorry you've been misled by the media, but mRNA and Adeno-vector 'vaccines' are not vaccines, they are gene therapy drugs. Vaccines contain an antigen.
> between this and the "Marxist-level thinking"
I mean, you seem to be sharing ideas that are ideologically similar to Marx. Control the population with propaganda, if they don't comply, use force.
And now that science shows the vaccines have risks that weren't clear before, will this change how they feel about them, or are they going to stick to their preconceived ideas? Did they believe the science because they understood it, or because they chose to trust people who were ideologically aligned with them?
That's your takeaway? Perhaps you should start taking people at face value. It was about coerced vaccination, and enforcing masks, lockdowns, expanding government power, etc. You're conflating that with spreading the disease.
If people could be persuaded to do things that are in their interest via rational discourse, and evidence favored vaccines, it wouldn't be necessary to do that kind of coercion. (Nor would it be necessary to so strenuously resist getting them, you'd just say "here is the evidence I don't need to get this," and everyone would accept it and let you live your life.) That's my whole point.
This is Marxist-level thinking.
See paying taxes, conscription, jury duty
Though judging the level of risk is very hard and there is often not a clear line of when force is needed.
Interesting. Of course, in this particular case that coercion happens to coincide with a position you agree with, but not in every instance that apparently justifiable coercion will agree with you. I assume, for the sake of consistency, you'll defend them in that case too.
Yes - there is a fund, the CICP (Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program). However, your odds of getting paid are basically nil, as an adult; due to an extremely high standard for proving causation, lack of awareness, and limited claim time (1 year from date of vaccination). So if you have a long-term effect after, say, 3 years needing compensation, you won't be paid.
"As of October 1, 2022, the CICP has partially compensated one COVID-19 countermeasure claim. There are potentially additional expenses to be calculated for this claim, therefore, the claim is still in the “Pending” compensation status. Forty-seven COVID-19 countermeasure claims have been denied compensation because the standard of proof for causation was not met and/or a covered injury was not sustained. Six COVID-19 countermeasure claims, all of which are COVID-19 vaccine claims, have been determined eligible for compensation and are pending a review of eligible expenses. One eligible claim is the result of anaphylaxis, and five claims are the result of myocarditis."
Six payouts as of October 1st, 2022. https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data
I don't really understand why so much focus is put on myocarditis though when it seems to be incredibly rare for all groups. This was a covid vaccine, not a myocarditis vaccine. Given the other negative effects of covid that are well documented, and especially the possibility of long-term debilitation from covid, I'd have felt secure in getting the vaccine even if I'd known at the time of getting it that it increased the risk of myocarditis by say a whole order of magnitude (which as far as I can tell isn't the case). That said, I don't think it should have been mandated and my gut feeling is that more people would have been convinced of its efficacy had it not been.
If that's the case, then there would be more myocarditis issues from people not vaccinating. I haven't received a straight answer on this.
Yes.
Myocarditis seven times more likely with COVID-19 than vaccines
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/967801
Myocarditis Risk 17 Times Higher for Unvaccinated Patients Ages 12-30 Who Get COVID-19 Than COVID-Vaccinated Patients
https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/myocarditis-risk-17-ti...
Myocarditis risk significantly higher after COVID-19 infection vs. after a COVID-19 vaccine | American Heart Association
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
The study you cite is just 200k people.
"Myocarditis is more common after severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection than after COVID-19 vaccination, but the risks in younger people and after sequential vaccine doses are less certain."
The study size is 43M people.
The study didn't look at the risk of COVID infection in unvaccinated individuals. All this study proved is that COVID infection can trigger cardiovascular issues in vaccinated people. It doesn't indicate in any way that the cardiovascular issues were caused by COVID instead of the vaccine. You'd have to look at infected-but-not-vaccinated patients to have even a hope of answering that question.
Of course, the study was essentially designed to elicit that disinformative quote, so I guess that means you're not entirely to blame...?
"but was lower than the risks after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test before or after vaccination (11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] and 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87], respectively)."
And more extensively in summary:
"First, the risk of myocarditis is substantially higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection in unvaccinated individuals than the increase in risk observed after a first dose of ChAdOx1nCoV-19 vaccine, and a first, second, or booster dose of BNT162b2 vaccine. Second, although the risk of myocarditis with SARS-CoV-2 infection remains after vaccination, it was substantially reduced, suggesting vaccination provides some protection from the cardiovascular consequences of SARS-CoV-2. Third, in contrast with other vaccines, the risk of myocarditis observed 1 to 28 days after a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine was higher and similar to the risk after infection. Last, vaccine-associated myocarditis was largely restricted to men younger than 40 years with 1 exception; both younger men and women were at increased risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273."
It does so by including "5,934,153 had SARS-CoV-2 infection before or after vaccination."
It's important to remember that you are n=1 and the timing could be a coincidence. It could be the vaccine. It could be stress from the pandemic causing angina. It could be lifestyle (do you exercise every day, eat healthily, sleep well, manage stress? - if not then angina in your 30s/40s is common).
It could even, as happened to a friend of mine, be a nerve issue in your chest muscles that's completely unrelated to your heart (aside: my friend was extremely relieved by this diagnosis which took quite a while to come by).
In the United States, we are still short-handed because nurses retired and nobody is stepping up to replace them.
During the pandemic, it broadened to "presence in office."
The three tools a society has to defend against rampant disease are hygiene, vaccination, and quarantine. Those who cannot or will not participate in the first two may, if necessary, be handled via the third, and this is pretty bog-standard "How not to have a whole city suffer from typhoid" stuff. As we're talking morality and not the law: there's nothing immoral about "No shirt, no shoes, no service."
The fact that people disagree means that it is not.
People chafed at the restrictions during the 1918 flu also, and many died who flouted them. Philadelphia saturated the city's capacity to process corpses.
We live with a social contract. The entirety of the state is build on mutual trust. There are avenues to people who are willing to put their neighbors at serious risk because they don't want to inject something, and that's fine.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/though-rare-moderna-covid-va...
Btw, those studies will be irrelevant and not trusted if will be made by same companies that pushing vaccines.
[0] https://www.fhi.no/en/id/vaccines/coronavirus-immunisation-p...
[1] https://www.sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against...
[2] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2022...
[3] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...
[4] https://thl.fi/en/web/thlfi-en/-/thl-recommends-coronavirus-...
[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-t...
[6] https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/21/florida-c...
https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2022-10-12...
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/11/medical-experts-rej...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scientists-pan-analysis-florid...
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2022/10/15/they-are-right-w...
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/2-top-fda-officials-resigned...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/11/white-house-threatens-to-fir...
3. https://www.health.com/news/new-covid-boosters-human-testing...
Even as an atheist, I'd be getting the religious exemption for sure! Mandating boosters for healthy young students doesn't make a lot of sense. We know now that vaccination is not the way transmission of the virus is managed.
https://www.harvard.edu/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-informa...
Yale students will be required to get an updated, bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster by the start of the spring semester.
https://yalecollege.yale.edu/get-know-yale-college/office-de...
Tufts University followed suit on Sept. 16, announcing it would require students, staff, and faculty to get the omicron vaccine booster by Dec. 2.
https://coronavirus.tufts.edu/healthy-at-tufts/covid-19-vacc...
"With this recommendation, the UC Vaccine policy now requires all staff and students to get the bivalent booster, when eligible"
[Edit] For anyone that wants to downvote this, please explain what I said that was untrue. Flu shots in the US have never been mRNA based. Covid shots in the US are mRNA based. Before covid, there was never at any point in history an mRNA based vaccine rolled out to the public.
No one is seriously tracking the adverse reactions, we've handed that off to the companies that produced the vaccines. And doctors are afraid to or don't care to raise concerns either. The vaccines are as statistically safe for me as COVID is for my age and health profile. And the vaccine makes no guarantee that I won't still catch COVID. Why would I double my risk when I've caught COVID, and it was nothing for me.
I didn't say there are no risks but those risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
it's by no means easy to identify trends that are worth pursuing for a medical investigation in a varied cohort of a billion people, and poll size is only a single attribute -- this is made even harder during a vacination campaign that is trying to effectively drive the un-vaccinated rates to as close to 0% as possible, making comparative studies even more difficult to establish.
Time/race/status/age/health all matter. You can't just take a look at what conditions that the billions of vaccinated share, that's ineffective for any kind of impact study.
It's my opinion that any 'precise' data is going to come about in years and years once we can establish a generational gap between this event and others so that we can effectively create a cross-generational comparative study.
However, at the same time we have people in sibling comments claiming to know multiple people with conditions ranging from changes to their menstrual cycle to death. This can't possibly be related to the vaccine at anything like the rate people are for some reason inclined to believe.
Personally I found the effects from the 3rd booster almost as bad as COVID itself so I'm unlikely to get another unless there is a compelling reason.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346
What you posted was condescending and demonstrative of a large blindspot as to the degree of adverse event surveillance actually being carried out.
Hope that helps you achieve the tone of discussion you're aiming for, in the future.
Indeed there is no point in communicating further, you made up your mind years ago and you will probably never progress beyond repeating the old talking points. Luckily most of the rest of the world has started to see reality is a bit more nuanced than ‘COVID is doom, vaccine is good’.
Finally also the danger of immunological imprinting[1] possibly resulting in less than optimal immune response. The fact these vaccines have little impact on transmissibility means basic evolutional biology theory is at play, driving selective pressures for antigens humans are less capable of mounting defenses against thanks to an already primed imuno response of the original virus' antigens. This is evident with the proliferation of variants and sub variants.
It may have been influenced by the bias for action, but the trade off was the death and disruption we saw in 2020-21, compared to a future risk that scientists projected as minimal.
It still seems like a solid decision to me. But if this research shows that millions die from increased myocarditis rates, I think it would have been a bad outcome. Still not sure if that would influence my perception to the process.
Making decisions under uncertainty is hard.
I don't blame rushing the vaccines at all. In fact, maybe we should have skipped more steps to get the vaccine to 70+ year olds or people who are obese faster. But let's just be honest, the risk profile for younger people just wasn't high. The data was clear very early on. That was even with underreported numbers. It should have never been mandated and if you were at a decent weight and under 40 you were never at that much of a risk, especially to say something like the flu.
The decision didn't have a great result because the assumptions didn't hold. Good process, bad outcome.
(Not to mention that if everyone had actually just gotten the shot, we might have stalled the viral evolution into the delta + subsequent variants. My understanding is those mutations reduced vaccine transmission efficacy. If people hadn't turned public health into politics, we could have possibly avoided the endemic nature of the virus, which I think we can all agree would have been a far superior outcome versus where we are today.)
And that is where I vehemently disagree. Bad process, bad outcome. Many people lied to make the information appear as you said. The incentives they had to lie should have a lot more scrutiny, rather than being shrugged off, and many of these people should be in jail.
I believed at the time (and still believe) the risk/reward ratio still favoured offering the vaccines to at-risk groups. Making it mandatory or de-facto mandatory for all was a colossal clusterfuck. It worked out well for big pharma though, but at what long-term cost?
I didn't mean to suggest you had any special ability. I was just wondering how you reached that conclusion. Internet text boards are bad at tone, I apologize if it sounded attacking. But I think it's a wide gap between officials lied and someone had a different interpretation and did not exhibit as much caution as I prefer in my p.h. officials.
I am certain people lied about covid. I'm not certain that was the ph officials.
Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
The original trials for the Pfizer vaccine were conducted on 46k people (half of which necessary recieved a placebo). At the time of those trials there was no shortage of willing volunteers to take part in the trial, no limit on the amounts of funding available and a considerable appetite to do something. Other trials have to make to with much fewer participants with hundreds to low thousands seemingly typical.
~10 yrs of trials and safety data collecting (Including long term studies) is the historical norm. We've certainly not had a complete halting of medical research from doing that.
My main point though is that with the level of data provided and the fact long term studies have not, and cannot have been conducted in this time frame - the push to mandate (and coercively pressure vaccination uptake through fear of losing your job, or access to regular life things bars, cafes, travel etc.) is unjustified and arguably doesn't even reach the bar for informed consent (with many people getting it under the impression it would prevent contraction and transmission).
>The true incidence of myocarditis after influenza vaccination may be underestimated because of the subclinical and nonspecific clinical manifestations of myocarditis. A prospective study about the incidence of cardiovascular adverse events after smallpox and influenza vaccination revealed that the rate of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis after smallpox vaccination was approximately 1:5,500, despite the fact that the rate of troponin elevation was 1:200 [9]. Similarly, 2.6% of the influenza vaccine cohort showed new onset cardiac symptoms, such as chest pain, dyspnea, and palpitation, but no case of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis
- informed consent at the time of signing an employment (e.g. military, medical) contract with known career conditions
- new conditions (mandates) being added to existing labor contracts, while there is active litigation on the purpose and legality of those conditions, and re-definition of legal language (e.g. CDC's 2021 redefinition of "vaccine") used in mandates
Very different from mandates being applied to existing jobs previously not subject to mandates.
> It ain't the mandates that are new.
The CDC (re)definition of vaccine is new.
Also the redefinition of pandemic around 2010.
And the CDC wrote zero of these laws. The CDC's rephrasing of an FAQ article on their website may be a good starter for a right wing conspiracy theory article, but it has no bearing on this topic.
Also, we should be doing clinical trials on flu shots as well. New drugs, even if they are only slightly different still require clinical trials. Why is hacking the immune system not subject to the same scrutiny?
Could you help me understand why you think the context is so similar between the two?
What's your opinion on members of the FDA leaving due to widely publicized political pressure to approve the vaccine? Do you think they were wrong for pushing back?
Genuinely hypothesizing, I am not sure of the answer but that’s what came to mind when I read your question.
Was there reliable evidence to the contrary during the initial infection window (2020)? (IE, anything showing that vents don't help)
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2021/non-invasive-ventilat...
https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30181-8
As with most other aspects of pandemic management, people made bad assumptions and jumped to incorrect conclusions based on little real evidence.
No one is claiming that ventilators don't help. They have been an effective salvage therapy in some cases where less aggressive treatments failed. But at the population level the number of patients who actually survived only because they were put on a ventilator is so small that it didn't have a major impact on survival rates.
TLDR It's a matter of degrees.
And according to other posters in this thread, it seems like the Pfizer vaccine is the vaccine recommended broadly over the Moderna vaccine in Europe. Coincidence, I’m sure.
"One of the nation’s top advisers on vaccination says it is unlikely young people under 30 will be approved for fourth doses, as Australia turns its attention to antiviral access to tackle yet another Omicron wave."
"Former ATAGI co-chair and current member Professor Allen Cheng said the increased risk of myocarditis and the lack of notable benefit from additional boosters meant it was likely the recommended vaccine schedule for younger people would remain as is. Some are approaching a year since their booster shot."
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-won-t-get-another-co...
> Approved for:
> Primary series in individuals age 6 months and older, or as a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® COVID-19 vaccine)
> As a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine (Original/Omicron B.1.1.529 (BA.1))
> As a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine (Original/Omicron BA.4/5)
Whether it makes them conspiracy theorists is another matter. If their position is sound, well, sound positions can be embraced for sound or unsound reasons. If their position is unsound, of course it will be for unsound reasons. So whether they're called conspiracy theorists matters much less than their reasons.
What are their reasons? They appear to cite a large relative increase in myocarditis risk in younger men. A statistically literate response would involve asking what the absolute increase is... and the proper place to reckon with relative comparison would be vs the unvaccinated infected:
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
I would absolutely recommend anyone wondering about a specific vaccination consult with a doctor or two (I do this and have had a certain class of vaccines contraindicated). But no red flags from medical pros on this one for me, and personally, even as a man outside the high-risk age groups, I can't remotely see a reason for assuming myocarditis would be a reason for avoiding the vaccine. As far as I can tell, it's almost on the order of your lifetime chance of being struck by lightning, and the chance of developing myocarditis from infection is significantly higher.
Conjecturing about whether or not a particular situation might be explained by a conspiracy does NOT make one into a Conspiracy Theorist.
The term Conspiracy Theorist would accurately describe someone who makes a living at it -- like Alex Jones or David Icke.
- "with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis followingvaccination. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S." I'd say it's worth a mention.
But then it's also quite an unfair comparison if you compare the all the vaccinated against a filtered group of unvaccinated people.
It's also possible I'm not reading it correctly, but I'm not sure how else to square it with the observation that men have higher baseline and post-covid-infection myocarditis risks generally (and covid patients have something like 10-20x elevated risks of myocarditis).
I also wonder how to square it with the rest of their claimsc Seems that you can't take any publication headline of any instance on any side of the argument on face value when stuff gets politicized like this.
"But the risk of myocarditis associated with the vaccine was lower than the risk associated with COVID-19 infection before or after vaccination – with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis following vaccination. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S."
>Ladapo claims his analysis was based on a Florida Department of Health study showing an 84 percent increase in cardiac related deaths among men aged 18 to 39 years old within 28 days of becoming vaccinated through mRNA vaccines. Yet the medical community rejected the analysis Ladapo promoted.
…
> “I just cannot fathom a group of epidemiologists who would perform an investigation, looking at the risks of vaccination, and not also have performed an analysis that looked at the risks associated with the infection itself,” Salemi said.
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/10/11/medical-experts...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode...
> Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its use.
https://www.fox19.com/2021/10/07/some-european-countries-sus...
> All three countries based their decision on an unpublished study with Sweden’s Public Health Agency saying that it signals “an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium” — the double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the main vessels. It added: “The risk of being affected is very small.”
For example, from the second link above (Denmark):
> Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?
> The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.
Anyone over 12 can get vaccinated and get a booster, but it will be the Pfizer vaccine.
Moderna did reduce its dose for the booster, but its original dose was also 3x that of Pfizer.
That something so obvious was enough to get you labeled a conspiracy theorist and banned off all major social media for close to two years has set back trust in science by decades.
Norway: 70% Boosted
Denmark: 63% Boosted
Australia:56% Boosted
Sweden: 71% Boosted
Finland: 74% Boosted
USA: 34% Boosted
SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
Yes it is counting any booster after primary 2 doses - which policy changes specifically? Most of these countries have been relatively consistent in their approach to boosters.
Which country(s) specifically changed their guidance about boosters after the 1st booster was released? Again I'm not aware of large swings in policy in most of these countries. Some aren't recommending 4th doses yet but I don't think any have changed policies about boosters after the fact.
> Adults
> For adults aged 18–64, the recommendation for three doses of the vaccinate remains in force. But anyone who wants to receive an additional booster dose, dose 4, may do so in the autumn of 2022. 65 plus and risk groups
> An additional booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine is recommended for the autumn and winter 2022/23 for adults aged 65 years or over, as well as people aged 18 or over who are in an at-risk group. This recommendation is valid from 1 September 2022 and covers everyone who is at an increased risk of serious Covid -19 disease.
[1] https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster...
+1.6% in the past month seems reasonable to me
Surely you are not adding 3rd + 4th dose together? You can't do that. They are the same group of people. If everyone who got the 3rd shot got the 4th today, 108% of Finnish population would be boosted?
But this is across the board. Prior to covid, for example, the ground zero for anti-vaccination movements was Marin County, California -- one of the most liberal counties in the nation, where only 50% of students in some schools were given smallpox/measles vaccines and there were outbreaks as a result.
Given this environment, American public health authorities should recognize their credibility gaps and embark on a program of transparency, consistency, accountability, and humility.
Unfortunately this is the exact opposite of their behavior. There remains deep ties between public health agencies and large pharmaceutical companies, public health officials continue to invest in and hold patents owned by companies that fall under their purview, there is still a revolving door between the two, there is very little transparency, no accountability for funding research in foreign labs to skirt US safety rules and congressional restrictions, public health officials were widely photographed in meetings without wearing masks (surrounded by masked servants), and they adopt imperious tones demanding draconian punishments for deviations from policy as well as calling for censorship of their critics. Fauci's declaration that "I am the science" is an example of this imperious attitude, which is frankly disastrous.
Until there is real reform, the U.S. is going to maintain a huge credibility gap vis-a-vis other nations, which will make public health efforts that much harder here, and will also lower long term public health outcomes.
My sister is vegan and is in many vegan, all-natural, etc Facebook groups. She told me there's a lot of overlap of people there and people who chose not take the COVID vaccine.
One of her best friends is a teacher in Canada from Trinidad; she grew up without vaccines and similarly never gave her child the COVID vaccine
These two examples just seemed very different than the typical "antivaxxer" I hear about. Although it still seems premature to call someone who only doesn't take the first mainstream mRNA vaccine an antivaxxer.
Non-mRNA COVID vaccines do exist.
Covid was politicized, and so it became a right wing stereotype to not want the vaccine. But specifically the covid vaccine. I don't think most right wing anti-covid-vaxxers are anti vax in general.
Other examples abound if you just look a little bit. Infowars has been running anti-MMR content for years. And for decades, polls have shown that anti-vax views are independent of the political spectrum.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-arent-new-t...
You konw... If there is push, you'll pushed to find another way.
Vaccinated twice without booster, you are still considered unvaccinated
I was waiting in the cold with covid symptoms for over an hour in the line, just to be told that I was not eligible for the Bürgertest, even though my partner was confirmed PCR-positive, but rapid tests did not detect my and my partner's covid.
It was already known at that time that rapid tests had poor detection rates for omicron.
I then found a doctor who was willing to do the test, which turned out to be positive. I only went through this instead of just recovering at home, because I really wanted to have the certificate, because I suspected already that it would later serve as certificate for "full immunization", because that's what science already suggested at that point.
The STIKO at that time clearly advised against getting booster shots within three months after infection, but without certificates there was no way to prove prior infection and people were cut off from 2G, even though they were technically entitled to the exemptions. The BMG and RKI basically bullied people into taking boosters. Enhanced myocarditis risk was known too already at that point. The BMG and RKI constantly changed the rules in hand-wavy last-minute decisions to make it extra confusing for everyone.
Exxon has an interest in minimizing (disregarding) the harmful effects of their products and same goes for Pfizer & friends who's got every govt funneling money to them seemingly without limit.
They rank higher than Tesla on ESG ratings.
Yes, Exxon.
But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.
It's not that I am bending over backwards to defend Pharma. It's that people are bending over backwards to find shitty things in the silver linings of these companies, instead of just complaining about the thunderclouds themselves like the rest of us.
Corporations are big. Companies can be capable of doing shitty things and good things at the same time. If you wanna complain about Opioids, I'm happy to have a conversation about how terrible pharma is.
I'm sorry.. but wasn't it the US Government make significant investments in both companies producing this therapy? Wasn't the the US Military that drove much of the initial interest into mRNA therapies in the first place?
Why do we continue to consider these companies as anything other than conduits of government research and funding? When then is it a surprise when these companies don't recognize this that people become offended?
That sounds about right. I could believe that the only good thing to come out of these companies is the result of the Gov't makes them do things for the people. Profit is not a good motive for a company investing in making people healthy.
Yeah, all fine and good when you have informed consent. I took my life in my own hands by not getting vaccinated for covid after I looked at the mortality age graph, and knew I was fit and healthy and didn't need to worry.
Society at large, however, castigated me, threw me in the same box as a conspiracy theorist, denied me my rights. People acted goddamn stupidly about this subject. I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.
Where your decisions don't affect people around you, you're absolutely correct. But infectious diseases are not one of those cases.
The risk of myocarditis is an existential risk to my being, and one that only a fool would take.
Me neither. They attempted an unconstitutional mandate even after promising they wouldn't do it during the election.
I'll never forgive that or forget the social cruelty, scapegoating and illegal breach of limited governance.
I decided not to get the vaccine based on the data. Took me 2.5 years to finally get covid. It was 4 days of fever and feeling lame. I now have immunity based on the entire virus rather than a subunit of a protein that doesn't even exist anymore.
I also (rightly) assumed masks are not effective just observing the spread being very clearly seasonal. And that just being in open air would be far better than any mask could do. Completely disrupting normal life would cause far greater health consequences for general healthy people than covid itself. We ended up not saving the vulnerable and inflicting very real, unnecessary harm on the healthy - the worst of both worlds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
In either case, people are taking the vaccines because of the physical benefits the vaccines provide, not because of how they feel about the corporate history of the companies producing them.
I'm sure there's a cohort of people that fit your description, but a whole lot of people took it because they were forced to. I think at this point it's safe to say that some others took it willingly but were lied to and told it would make others safe when that was never tested before it was repeated thousands of times, and turns out to be completely false.
In all of these cases however it was not informed consent.
Just a waste of money. The Science is settled.
https://archive.org/details/b2136140x
https://archive.org/details/confessions-of-a-medical-heretic...