Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination | Hacker News Reader

Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination

link.springer.com

495 pointsOctokiddie620 comments

I am vaccinated but I am upvoting this post because I believe that it is important to investigate these cases to determine how to improve future vaccines. I really don't like how this topic seems to be treated like some fringe conspiracy theory. Maybe it is just a conspiracy, but we won't ever know until sufficient research has been done.

Currently, I still believe that people should vaccinate, even if vaccines cause mortality/harm in some cases. As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

My position depends on us having a good understanding of the vaccine's effects however, and right now I feel like we don't.

The problem here isn't the study---of course we should study possible vaccine side effects. The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is. As unlikely as it is that an otherwise healthy young person will die from covid, it is even less likely that they'll die from a vaccine side effect. That's just a statistical fact at this point, we have millions of both covid cases and vaccinations to back that up.

This study looked at 25 cases of unexpected death in people aged 46-75 and found 5 cases of myocarditis. Without any control group to compare to, there is literally nothing that can be drawn from this study about the risk presented by the vaccine, and the authors admit as much:

"The nature of our autopsy study necessitates that the data are descriptive in quality and does not allow any epidemiological conclusions in terms of incidence or risk estimation."

> The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is.

In some cases, it may well be true that the vaccine is a greater risk than the virus. For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine, since Australian health officials believe the risk from vaccine side effects (such as myocarditis) in that age group outweighs the risk of COVID-19 itself. [0] Furthermore, for healthy people in the 30-49 age group, the official Australian position on fourth doses is "permitted but not recommended", since it is unclear if the risk of COVID-19 is greater than that of the vaccine. This is different from the recommendations made by a number of other countries (US, UK, Canada, Singapore), but it appears Australian health authorities weigh the risk of vaccination side effects versus the risk of COVID-19 differently than they do.

[0] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-won-t-get-another-co...

Denmark doesn’t recommend COVID vaccines anymore to anyone under 50 who is not at risk or work in health sector [0].

> 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.

———

[0]: https://sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against-cov...

While I think it is certainly fair to talk about the policies of other countries, I don't think just because another country has a different policy necessarily dictates that policy is better or worse.

Additionally, I think it's very easy to see something like "Denmark doesn't recommend the vaccines to anybody under 50" and conflate that it means that Denmark doesn't think vaccines were ever beneficial to people under the age of 50 (which is the leap in logic you often see on anti-vax sites). But that isn't the case. What was good health policy in 2021 is different from good health policy now, because we have way more information about the virus, better and more effective drug to treat it, new variants, etc.

Two things can be true at the same time: The vaccines are (on net) incredibly beneficial to people and the population as a whole, and yet at the present time there are certain specific populations of people whose optimal number of doses might be fewer than others.

> For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine (...)

It should be stressed that this guidance explicitly refers to a fourth dose of a vaccine. I feel it's disingenuous to use this example to try to refute the OP when the problem lies in people taking massive leaps of logic such as going from "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it" to "don't get vaccinated ever because you will die".

> "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it"

That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

In my mind, there are three different positions here:

(1) "Vaccines are perfectly safe, and anyone who even mentions death or serious injury caused by vaccination is just being an alarmist"

(2) "Everyone who took the deadly COVID vax is about to drop dead! Just watch!"

(3) "Vaccines have real safety risks, some people have died from vaccination, and it is certain that more people will die from them in the future. However, sometimes, the risk of death or disability from the disease the vaccine is intended to prevent, is going to be significantly higher than the risk of death or disability from the vaccine. Whether or not that is true in any particular case is going to vary depending on the particular disease, its current prevalence, availability of treatments for it, etc; whether the disease or the vaccine poses the greater health risk will vary across time, place, disease and vaccine; our estimates of those respective risks are always going to be imperfect, evolving, and open to informed disagreement; generally we should trust the public health authorities to make that judgement for us, but they are not infallible, and it can be legitimate to doubt or question their judgement in any particular case"

I see myself as defending (3), whereas what some other people in this conversation are saying seems to me to be closer to (1), and also encouraging the fallacious conflation of (3) with (2).

I’ve been watching the vaccine discussions on HN these years and one can see that too many people are stuck fighting vaccination windmills from days gone by, while downplaying vaccine risks which by now are established and continue to be investigated as this publication shows.

Meanwhile many EU countries have understood that heart problems are a real risk and have adjusted recommendations accordingly. They’ve also stopped obsessing about vaccinating people.

The vaccination crusade’s dead folks, please stand by for the next pandemic.

It’s the paradox of intelligence: smart people are more prone to fight tooth and nail, and do all kinds of mental gymnastics, rather than to admit that they too have been misled. People of average or below average intelligence tend to accept it much more easily.

I don’t know if there’s already a name for this phenomenon…

So you argue that you should increase the risk of death or disability by COVID by not vaccinating. Got it.

Ok, so if you believe your chance of dying of covid is improbably small due to age and overall health, why is it necessary to be vaccinated even if there's only a small chance of side effects? Rare is not zero.

I don't even take OTC pain killers like advil unless I absolutely feel like I have to.

That first part is a mistaken belief.

There's also a useful metric for the "chance of dying" - it's known as a micromort. Each micromort is a one in a million chance of dying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

A fair bit of statistical work has been done on COVID-19 and it is summarized in the wikipedia article.

    AstraZeneca vaccination against COVID-19 – 2.9 micromorts[31]
    COVID-19 infection at age 10 – 20 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 25 – 100 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 55 – 4,000 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 65 – 14,000 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 75 – 46,000 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 85 – 150,000 micromorts [32]

Yes, many people survived - but those are not numbers I want to be betting against on a daily basis.

NYT - Putting the Risk of Covid-19 in Perspective Is the risk of dying from Covid-19 comparable to driving to work every day, skydiving or being a soldier in a war?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris...

> Converting this to micromort language, an individual living in New York City has experienced roughly 50 additional micromorts of risk per day because of Covid-19. That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010, a particularly deadly year.

Rare is not zero - but if you are risk adverse, then avoiding things that are fairly high up on the risk counter would be reasonable. Likewise, if there are two options (driving in a car vs driving in a motor cycle), taking the one that adds the least amount of additional risk is reasonable.

We have to be extremely cautious when considering any of the death-related statistics for this particular situation.

For example, we know that a dubious methodology was used for counting deaths in Toronto (Canada's most populous city, and the fourth most populous city in North America).

This was publicly admitted to by Toronto Public Health itself, as early as June 2020:

"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."

https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...

I can't see how that significant city's death stats could be considered reliable or usable for analytic purposes, after considering how the counting was done. The provincial and national stats would also be affected to some extent.

This makes me quite doubtful about the stats coming out of other regions, too.

> "Converting this to micromort language, an individual living in New York City has experienced roughly 50 additional micromorts of risk per day because of Covid-19. That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010, a particularly deadly year."

This is highly misleading. The average individual may be at such risk, just like humans have ~1.9 legs on average, but that doesn't mean that everyone walks around with their 1.9 legs.

So those statistics are based on the risk to the general population and therefore have approximately zero relevance to any single person.

Almost by definition, the disease will claim those most vulnerable first, so questioning whether vaccination is worth it for those less vulnerable is valid.

What're the risks of vaccination vs covid for a healthy 25 year old who works from home?

How do those numbers change when you adjust for presence or absence of pre-existing conditions such as obesity and type-2 diabetes?

You didn’t stratify vaccination risk by age which immediately calls into question your comparative data. Indeed the myocarditis risk appears to be inversely correlated with age (exactly the opposite of the positive correlation of risk COVID itself has with age).

These numbers are useless going forward if they are based on the original Covid-19 strains and not the Omicron strains, which now account for virtually every case and are tens of times less lethal.

Because a) the risk from covid, while small, is still greater than the risk from the vaccines and b) unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and become a vector for the virus, infecting other people.

Is there any evidence for (b)? My understanding is that you are just as likely to get vaccinated and "shed" the virus for just as long, but are less likely to be severely sick.

> unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and become a vector for the virus, infecting other people.

I'd add to this the fact that it was especially true earlier in the pandemic, and at that time COVID was significantly more likely to be fatal. Even if someone rejects the idea of getting a fourth dose of the vaccine (rightly or wrongly), it's possible to think that the first two doses were an entirely reasonable one-time intervention into an ongoing pandemic that saved many thousands of lives.

> unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and become a vector for the virus

I've read conflicting accounts of whether that's true or false, but even if it is - what difference does it make? We're not going to reach heard immunity here. Everybody's going to get it, several times throughout their lives, no matter what we do at this point.

Because the risk of e.g. dying of myocarditis from the virus still exceeds the risk of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine.

Particularly with the mRNA vaccines there isn't much in the vaccine that isn't in the virus already.

There has to be a name for this fallacy. It is like we're living in the dark ages where contracting covid is just "God's will" and it doesn't count in risk assessments, while no matter how small the risk is of the vaccine that is all that matters.

It's definitely not a standard name, but I call kind of reasoning error "active/passive bias": we're generally much more afraid of risks that manifest from action (mauled by a shark while swimming, getting in a car crash) than inaction (dying of obesity, getting hit by a car on the sidewalk).

In the case of COVID-19: you have to actively get the vaccine, meaning that people overweight its risks relative to the risks latent in not getting it.

> Particularly with the mRNA vaccines there isn't much in the vaccine that isn't in the virus already.

I don’t find this compelling at all. At the very least, the mRNA vaccines have the lipid nanoparticles themselves, and LNPs are quite clearly biologically active.

And the mRNA gets delivered to cells that would not be infected by the actual virus. One might imagine that such cells would be targeted to at some some extent by CD8+ T cells that learn to recognize spike protein. As far as I can tell, there is nothing published examining what actually happens, but you certainly don’t end up with massive death of muscle cells when vaccinated. See, for example, the comments here:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-what...

> Because the risk of e.g. dying of myocarditis from the virus still exceeds the risk of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine.

There's several studies that have shown myocarditis from the virus is indistinguishable from previously-measured myocarditis in the population in general - that the virus isn't actually causing any. At least one of them included vaccine-caused myocarditis and showed it's several times higher.

Because the risk of e.g. dying of myocarditis from the virus still exceeds the risk of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine.

It's good to point that out, but the first term needs to be multiplied by the chance of getting the virus.

That isn't relevant because there is no evidence that the vaccine reduces your risk of suffering from myocarditis after infection. (It isn't even necessarily true, but that is a separate matter).

With all respect, this is terrible logic. You have two probabilities to compare, not one to compare to zero! If and only if the vaccine is more dangerous then your "improbably small chance of dying of covid", you should forego the vaccination.

Is it? No. It is not. Not even for the best protected youngest cohort. Get your shot. You're being misled by politics and tiny, difficult numbers.

> why is it necessary to be vaccinated even if there's only a small chance of side effects? Rare is not zero.

In my case i vaccinated because i knew i was a transmission node in case of being infected and not noticing, potetially endangering multitude of vulnerable people.

[deleted, I retract my statement]

Myocarditis literally has it's own page on the CDC covid vaccine website https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...

My entire issue actually has nothing to do with health, and everything to do with authoritarianism.

Before the vaccine mandates and coercion I had a seething hatred of corrupt and incompetent little tyrants in positions of power, afterward was nothing new, it just confirmed what I already knew about them. I don't care if I would have a statistically better outcome with the vaccine, I took great pleasure in standing up and defying their bullying and coercion. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth and name calling and crocodile tears from these pathetic clowns about people not getting vaccinated really warmed my heart gave me great pleasure and has mentally helped me tremendously in the past few years. I'm actually starting to feel a bit sad they're slithering back into their holes now, I was hoping for a showdown, but these people are nothing if not cowards like all bullies so this is to be expected.

What surprised me more was how many and how quickly people folded, or never even had any concerns in the first place. Obviously a good portion of the population are a meek and subservient type who want to be ruled and protected. After that a good number are flighty and will panic and run with the heard if something spooks them, sadly a trait that's easily exploited. I really should not have been surprised though, I've seen the same dynamic play out time and time again to start wars, invade privacy, take rights, and take money so irrational optimism that it would be different next time is my failing.

> I don't care if I would have a statistically better outcome with the vaccine, I took great pleasure in standing up and defying their bullying and coercion.

I don't understand this line of reasoning.

If one is being bullied and coerced into what you and I both consider to be the correct decision, one ought to a) make the correct decision, and then b) deal with the bullies?

When you admit to making your decision based purely on "seething hatred," can you really blame people for seeing that decision as irrational?

“I drove my car off a cliff to really stick it to society”

What’s warmed my heart is most Covid deaths being from the unvaccinated. Clearing out the weak and stupid even sooner than natural causes.

As someone who is also fully vaccinated, I am not sure how you can say it is overall good simply because most people will not react poorly. That is like saying Russian Roulette is a perfectly fine game to play because only one person is going to die, and that's OK.

Shouldn't people decide that for themselves?

Note, I am not saying you are saying it is not that they should decide for themselves, it is more that yours is the same logic used to defend vaccine mandates.

Since the Musk takeover, conspiracy theorists on $8Chan have talked about Grant Wahl dying suddenly because of the "clot shot".

Then we find out he died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.

Then people still refuse to believe it because it doesn't fit their narrative they're pushing. And anyone who dies suddenly must have died because of the vaccine.

https://twitter.com/DiedSuddenly_/status/1603103342481342465

This killed John Ritter, George C. Scott, Lucille Ball and Albert Einstein. But somehow the vaccine is to blame for anyone who dies of it now...

There is also the "Canadian doctors" story the anti-vax group continue to flog yet it has being proven wrong over and over again.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/11/07/why-wont-a-de...

One of the doctors drowned in a river attempting to save his kids, yet the anti-vax group elect to leverage his tragedy for their narrative.

> One of the doctors drowned in a river attempting to save his kids, yet the anti-vax group elect to leverage his tragedy for their narrative.

One out of how many?

Are you saying that aneuryms are not a potential adverse event associated with MRNA Covid vaccination [1]?

Furthermore, we know hypertension is also associated with dissections, and there are several documented cases of acute and non-acute hypertension after MRNA covid vaccination [2]

I'm saying that to say there are some possibilities there, but I am also going to say the opposite too.

I don't know that we know enough about the adverse events associated with these vaccinations, and whether or not a vaccine is implicated, or if there was a previous medical condition.

Retrospectively speaking, I don't know that an autopsy would give us any novel answers either, because of the gaps we have around passive medical surveillance vs active medical surveillance.

I am sorry that Mr. Wahl died at such a relatively young age

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35646499/

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/epub/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA...

These are at least 4 known causes of aortic aneurysms.

1) Smoking (behavioral)

2) High blood pressure (dietary or genetic)

3) High cholesterol (dietary of genetic)

4) Marfan's syndrome (genetic)

Last I checked, doctors (who know these things) were seriously considering it was #4.

You're a skeptic, right? Why invent new untested possibilities when a there are a series of well known possibilities to be tested first?

People will believe whatever they want to believe, just let them stew.

I think a lot of the resentment comes out of "the experts" changing their narratives a dozen times about the efficacy of the vaccines over the last 3 years while browbeating anyone who voiced any amount of skepticism.

> efficacy of the vaccines over the last 3 years

It's only been 2 years, they were announced at the end of 2020.

No part of this happened. Also, experts are actually experts, so let's lose the quotation marks.

Please cite instances of "browbeating" from Fauci or other prominent public health figures. Please support this wild story in, well, any way at all.

That may be true overall (and it may not btw, only time will tell), but it's certainly not true on a by-indvidual basis. Someone who's, say, 18 with no major health disorders is going to experience a lot more risk of adverse outcome from any of the vaccines than from SARS-CoV-2. That's partially a function of the incredible SARS-CoV-2 outcomes in the "not old" age range but also because vaccination is also a fundamentally different intervention than exposure to the entire SARS-CoV-2 virus. If we're talking about the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/moderna/etc), those are basically spike protein mRNA suspended in lipid nanoparticles. It makes your cells express the spike protein, not the whole SARS-CoV-2 virus. So metaphorically speaking you're getting pure spike protein antigen, and different peoples' genetic predispositions/etc are going to play out differently in that scenario as opposed to contact with the normal virus.

...Like those of the people in the case report we're looking at.

You literally just made the wild leap of logic the parent comment was talking about.

The mRNA vaccines have a modified spike protein, that is non functional compared to natural infection. On top of that, cells naturally infected with covid also express the spike protein [1], and would do so in far greater amounts than what would be caused by the vaccine.

People's different genetic dispositions will change their immune response, and that might maybe change how they respond to the vaccine as opposed to the virus. But there's no way of knowing which way you will fall, and our current evidence suggests that getting the vaccine is probably always the safer alternative.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8941975/

> even less likely that they'll die from a vaccine side effect

My understanding is that there've always been risks associated with vaccines, and they were always relatively small risks. What I can't find any unbiased information about is how the risks of the Covid vaccine compare with the risks of, say, the mumps or rubella vaccines.

Okay, please explain my leap in logic:

- I was curious

- I went to OECD to get datasets for COVID, excess, and all mortality [1]

- I subtracted COVID deaths from excess deaths to get “likely non-COVID excess deaths”

- then I made a chart [2], showing the ratio of COVID to non-COVID; log-2 scale with a black line at zero (equal COVID and non-COVID)

- I expected mostly COVID excess, like during the delta wave near the 2020/2021 boundary

- chart doesn’t look like that

- I would like the FDA to explain more, including serious studies

What is wrong about that process?

[1] - https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676

[2] - https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/relative-mortality.png

Ok, let's see.

Your graph does clearly have a peak at the 2020/2021 boundary, that falls down after the vaccines got widespread, by the middle of 2021 (with most countries going into negative excess deaths). There is another, smaller peak at the end of 2021, that's when omicron got widespread.

What exactly were you expecting to see?

This chart isn’t absolute death: it’s the ratio of two causes of death.

You’re not seeing countries go into negative excess in 2021 and 2022 — you’re seeing non-COVID excess surge.

I was expecting during the omicron wave that we had more than two COVID deaths compared to non-COVID excess deaths — and that more broadly, we’d see more COVID than other excess death

What we see instead is that during the height of omicron, 33% of the excess death was non-COVID — and that for most of 2021 and 2022, 66% of the excess death was non-COVID.

What has been killing as many people as a global pandemic? — and if there’s so many non-COVID excess deaths, did our policies help?

What are the overlapping curves here? Different age groups, different countries, something else?

Each curve is one of the countries from the OECD dataset with partial opacity; the darker regions are overlaps.

why is that logic jump is happening? Mostly because of censorship. If your logic needs censorship to prevent logic jumps, perhaps your logic isn't solid to begin with (or mixed with lies like the vaccine).

For healthy persons in certain age group, COVID risk is almost missing. If they don't want vaccine, regardless of taking 3 doses, I have no right to tell them to take not-thoroughly tested vaccine to help reduce the spread at the potential cost of their own.

The solution is more open studies and acknowledge statistical (in)significance of vax side effects instead of trying to shove it under conspiracy and censorship. Oh, and dont lie about vaccine effectiveness.

> we have millions of both covid cases and vaccinations to back that up.

This study looked at 25 cases of unexpected death in

Fair enough, but where is that data? Why a study of only 25 if there are millions?

It's not a conspiracy theory to say such things simply don't add up. The largest drug test in history and no encompassing and definitive follow up? Why?

Not trolling. Serious question (i.e., why).

Without spending much time you could determine why by reading the paper. Most likely it is because they could only find 25 out of millions.

Many other people have replied with great information, but I'm going to respectfully disagree with:

I believe the problem is that we were so convinced that our solution to covid was infallible that we removed a basic human right: the ability to make informed choice about your medical care.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I believe that most people involved did this out of a genuine desire to save lives and help people.

The issue is the hubris.

The idea that "I know better than you do what's good for you and for society, so I'm going to force you to do a thing".

This is where we went wrong. The forcing.

If we'd presented vaccination as informed choice, had recommendations but not coercion, I think there would have been a lot less resistance.

We decided that public health was a trump card that allowed us to ignore almost every civil liberty the U.S. was founded on.

We actively limited speech and debate, going to far as to silence and destroy the lives and careers of qualified physicians who dissented.

We restricted freedom of assembly.

We seized property through forced business closing without compensation.

We restricted free movement.

We coerced vaccination in the strongest possible ways shy of physical force.

The list goes on.

We did this out of a hubris that "we know better than you".

It doesn't really matter whether this is true or not, it's fundamentally anti-liberal.

It's made worse by the unfortunate fact that in most cases we were wrong.

Asymptomatic spread wasn't a thing. The initial studies that said it was were based on flawed methodology. Even China isn't counting asymptomatic cases anymore.

Pretty much every model that we based policy off of, predicting extreme fatality rates and recommending extraordinary interventions, were dead wrong.

As others have pointed out, mortality counts were wildly off due to many factors, including how death certificates were filled out (died with covid v/s died from covid).

The vulnerable populations were identified fairly early on, but we chose to implement draconian restrictions for everyone, regardless of their individual risk.

This was the problem.

Hubris.

I couldnt have written that any better. And THIS is why thousands of people showed up in downtown Ottawa and stayed for three weeks. Because we were disgusted and DEEPLY offended by the hubris.

And what was the gov's response? An even greater swing toward authoritarianism - the Canadian government literally locked people out of their own bank accounts, seized property and arrested and charged hundreds.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. The anger is still palpable. And its going to simmer til our current gov is replaced.

> If we'd presented vaccination as informed choice, had recommendations but not coercion, I think there would have been a lot less resistance.

Honestly, I seriously doubt it. I think the resistance would have been about the same; even the most gentle "recommendation" would have been cast as coercive by those who oppose the vaccine now. All a more "gentle" approach would have done is to dissuade those on the fence.

> We coerced vaccination in the strongest possible ways shy of physical force.

Totally.

Yep.

Fuck authoritarians!

Never forget.

> As others have pointed out, mortality counts were wildly off due to many factors, including how death certificates were filled out (died with covid v/s died from covid).

This has never really been shown to be that accurate considering the excess deaths from the averages every year. You’re ignoring an inconvenient fact.

There is a lot of evidence that the system to report vaccine injuries is largely ignored and people that report issues are ostracized for doing so. It also begs to question how often injuries would go unreported or misreported because of the difficulties of being linked to the actual cause, and many doctors may be unwilling to claim a vaccine caused an injury just due to the stigma around vaccine injuries, especially in regards to COVID-19.

They are making these leaps of logic because people have refused to look into it…

This paper doesn't claim that mRNA vaccines are dangerous, it investigates through autopsy 35 people in a region of Germany who died within 20 days of vaccination and only 5 of the deaths are found to show myocarditis of which only 3 somewhat might be attributed to the vaccine.

This is not an expose of big Pharma or anything like that, I don't know why the HN comments are acting as if this is some kind of research supporting the anti vaxxer claims.

If you look into the statistics, it actually might be the case that those 35 deaths were attributed to the vaccine. They found for fact that 10 of those died actually died of something else.

This is also why it takes an expert in a field to evaluate the content and make conclusions. Despite the tone in the HN comments, this actually might suggest that the deaths attributed to the vaccine side effect might be significantly higher than the reality but it would take a research to say of this is the case.

Yeah, I also currently believe that the statistics work out in favor of the vaccine. I am curious though, on how those 3 people died.

My biggest concern is in long-term effects. I understand that it is difficult to study them but that is why I am advocating for continued research.

So basically:

- I understand that in a pandemic situation, you can't wait for research into long-term effects to come out.

- Hence, in a pandemic situation, immediate vaccination should still be recommended.

- Research into long-term effects should continue after the pandemic.

Is there anything make you believe that the research doesn't continue?

I am worried how the discussion around the vaccine has turned political and how there are a lot of strong opinions around it. I worry it might affect funding and also "politically taint" people who publish research about it.

Fair enough, but everyone was compelled to get the vaccine (regardless of age or risk factors). Given that, the vaccine makers and proponents leave themselves open to such criticisms that would not be valid if the vaccine was not compelled on my 7 year old.

Where do you live that COVID vaccination is compulsory for a seven year old?

In the US, the 5-11 age range has only 38% having had even the first dose. https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...

If everyone was compelled how the vaccination rates are so low?

Tell that to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34004500

He is acting like it's support of anti-vaxxer claims. And it is why these articles get shared. Because they contain a very slight, practically negligible affirmation of the smallest portion of their claims. And that, in their eyes, is enough to proclaim victory.

If I'm going to read anti vaxxer content I need to be paid, I'm so done finding misrepresentations and statistical hackery in propaganda articles. They cherry pick data, resort in fallacies and all kinds of trickery. They give you a shocking graph where you can see that young people are dying en masse only to find out that this graph is achieved through visual or statistical BS. Hours spend to dig out lies, completely avoidable by avoiding that content.

I'm a little confused here. I'm not trying to convince you of the anti-vaxxer side.

You said:

> "I don't know why the HN comments are acting as if this is some kind of research supporting the anti vaxxer claims."

To which I posted a link of a guy who is acting as if this is some kind of research supporting the anti-vaxxer claims. The comments were trying to head off the exact thing that happened. Because those users know the pattern. They know why this was posted. It was posted specifically as "vindication" for anti-vaxxers. Those comments to point out that this study does not in any way vindicate anti-vaxxers are needed and the people who made them were right to make those comments.

You're inferring a lot from a someone's brief summary of the paper under discussion.

If you disagree with the summary, maybe address it?

I despise anti-vaxxer lunatics, I still found that comment interesting.

It's not one comment. The guy has a string of them across multiple threads.

And you are going to critique me for "inferring a lot" while ignoring his comment is not only sprinkled with evidence he's a conclusion looking for justification ("lethal jab-associated myocarditis"), but is nothing but inference itself.

It's not interesting, it's just old.

This has bugged me since the beginning of this mess. It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that "The SARS-Cov-2 vaccines occasionally cause health problems" and "Almost everyone should get vaccinated/boosted" are both entirely true statements.

The issue is that there were coercive government mandates.

"Almost everyone should get vaccinated" does not mean the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.

Absent a very compelling reason, people should be free to go against medical advice. People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. People have the right to make the wrong choice.

In this case, the reason given for overriding that freedom was a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk. That argument did not pass the smell test from the very beginning.

> ...does not mean the government should coerce everyone...

Here you're presuming that the government's role in a pandemic is to wring their hands and issue PSA's. That might be what some folks want them to do these days, but when the legal foundations of public health policy were laid the government was expected to do quite a bit more.

> People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies.

This might be your opinion, but the majority of your fellow citizens disagree with you. Try asking them about drug use, abortion, suicide, and other "purely personal" matters.

> People have the right to make the wrong choice.

Many wrong choices come with severe state-imposed consequences. We in the US long ago delegated to our elected representatives the authority to force some choices onto individuals, including in a health emergency. We are of course vigorously debating whether they used that authority wisely this time, but it was theirs to use.

> a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk.

The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

> the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.

But... the government has been doing that for decades and decades, since the very invention of the vaccine! Why is that "The Issue" when there's suddenly a pandemic and it's important, vs. when you needed to show your vaccination records to join the military or go to school in the 90's or whatever?

You see that the concern you're showing seems, to those of us on the other side, maybe a little insincere?

You don't get to dismiss an argument by just declaring that it "didn't pass the smell test." That guidance was exactly in line with every counter-pathogen campaign since, Idk, before germ theory?

> It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

That's one in a billion. No, it's not possible to reason about a weird effect affecting less than one person in all of EU + US combined.

But we do actually know what happens when there is a legit safety concern with the vaccines affecting a slice of the population, since it has happened. The AZ vaccine turned out to have rare (but not one in a billion rare), serious and even lethal, complications for young women. The public health authorities picked up on this within a month, and acted to stop the use of that vaccine first for that at-risk group and later for everyone.

That was all fairly low drama.

Yeah, it sure ought to be.

But the same people who believe that evolution and climate change are hoaxes are also convinced that COVID is a hoax. (The disease is a hoax, the vaccine is a hoax, the hoax disease that doesn't need to be cured by the hoax vaccine is an attack by China -- and the coverup is a hoax.)

And those people are ~40% of the US population, with an outsized thumb on the scale of elections due to accidents of geography and history. So instead of talking cogently about tradeoffs, we're barely fending off turning conspiracy theories into policy. And by "barely" I mean "succeeding slightly more often than we fail".

Yeah, we ought to be able to discuss things cogently. That ship sailed a long time ago.

> I am vaccinated but I am upvoting this post because I believe that it is important to investigate these cases to determine how to improve future vaccines.

The fact that people feel the need to say that for any criticism of an intervention says that we have long left the realm of science and entered the realm of religion.

Every intervention has benefits and harms.

Not talking about harms makes it impossible to assess the cost-benefit tradeoffs of the intervention.

I agree with you, there’s a weirdly political zealotry when it comes to such things.

I took the Sinopharm vac as I felt hesitant to take what I considered to be brand new tech in the MRNA vaccines (I ended up taking the MRNA one as well but that was for travel reasons where I live). And people online acted like I was a conspiracy theorist, for preferring the tried and tested tech of the traditional vaccine.

I keep hearing vaccination being promoted, but the last major study I saw showed no statistically significant difference in natural immunity + vaccination versus simple natural immunity. This also seems to be a topic treated as a fringe conspiracy theory instead of an extremely serious health issue worthy of a large amount of resources dedicated to giving us an answer. One certainly could be forgiven for thinking the vaccine has become a larger political issue than health issue for both sides.

that's certainly an age dependent thing, right?

> As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

No.

This is the wrong criteria to judge by. Right now it takes ~30,000 injections to prevent one hospitalization from COVID, according to recent studies.

So the real criteria is, if there are severe side effects in more than 1/30k they should be pulled.

In Pfizer's own RCT more people died in the vaccinated cohort. They had ~4x the amount of cardiac arrest. There was no proven effect on all-cause mortality from the start. Anyone paying attention and not blindly listening to politicians and the sycophantic media knew this long ago.

Wife got shot. Few days later her arm swelled up. 2 years later it still is. Her and I had already had Covid from before the vaccine. Absolutely refused to get it because of that. She now regrets it. She still gets Covid with every outbreak anyway. So doesn’t seem to have helped.

I know a couple of kids that got it and have clots in their brains now. Less sure on timeline on these. But I’ve not seen this before.

Sure it could all be coincidence.

then there’s all the assholes who decided that get the vaccine or become unemployed.

> Few days later her arm swelled up. 2 years later it still is.

I am not a doctor, but that's weird. I almost wonder if it got infected. You had a doctor check it out, right?

Another thing that hasn't gotten enough research is the effectiveness of the latest booster for someone who was vaccinated earlier and got omicron (this is a pretty big cohort). It's genuinely hard to make a recommendation one way or another on it because it's not clear how effective it is after four prior exposure events, and it has to be weighed against the risk of side effects like this.

Same. The impact rate of myocarditis might be extremely small, but if it's caused by the vaccine, it should be investigated, while at the same time, people should get vaccinated. Luckily, the scientific community understands that. Unluckily, the non-scientific community doesn't on both ends. The supporters of the vaccine think you're attacking the vaccine. The detractors think you're suddenly supporting them. No. EVERYONE should be vaccinated. The vaccine has been given to billions, it is exceedingly safe. Can we do better? Yes. Is it marginal? Also yes, but I don't wish miocarditis on anyone.

I agree it is good we keep funding studies to try to better understand and predict the effects of the vaccines. What would it mean to feel like we have a good understanding though? How would we quantify "god"? We have observed that the side-effects have minimal deviation from the normal variations observed in the population for those effects. And we also know it is highly dependent on individual characteristics as to who exhibits the worst side-effects or best antibody response.

> What would it mean to feel like we have a good understanding though? How would we quantify "god"?

That is a hard question and honestly I don't have the knowledge to answer it.

> We have observed that the side-effects have minimal deviation from the normal variations observed in the population for those effects. And we also know it is highly dependent on individual characteristics as to who exhibits the worst side-effects or best antibody response.

Yeah, I get that the vaccine can cause side effects for a very small minority of the population. I think what I want is for vaccine side-effects to be treated more like plane crashes. I get that bad things happen, but if it isn't cost-prohibitive, I would like to know why these things happened, even if they happen extremely rarely.

> As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

That's not how medicine works. What would be your opinion if you were the one that was going to die? Would you still stick by your statement?

The issue is NO ONE told anyone this data. It was "suppressed" to PREVENT "vaccination hesitancy", that's the issue.

I'm pretty sure that's how medicine works. Obviously, if I knew the vaccine would kill me, I would not take it. But it's the same deal with literally any medication.

When I was prescribed Accutane for my acne, I was told that it could cause kidney damage. If I knew it would cause kidney damage to me would I have taken it? Of course not. But I hedged my bets and gambled that it wouldn't.

As far as the suppression of information goes, obviously that is totally unacceptable. That's also partially why I upvoted this post right?

Has there been any plan to compensate victims of the vaccines? either deaths or heart inflammation or other side effects? Any plan to approve and understand vaccine's effects should also come with proper system to compensate and acknowledge the risks.. But I feel that this has been avoided from the start to remove any liability.

Yes, it’s never either or. For one good example of the complexity, see this video [1] where Paul Offit notes the problems with the current bivalve that vaccines.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-v_vXMI91nw

The association between heart problems and mRNA vaccines is a settled matter - outside social media at least.

The Paul Ehrlich institute which is monitoring vaccine side-effects has a nice detailed report on vaccine safety with details on heart problems and all sorts of other things.

Most affected are men and male teens between 12-17 and Moderna’s causing more problems than Biontech. This was the main reason why the German vaccination committee recommended that men under 30 get Biontech.

I missed “settled matter” in the scientific method handbook. The reality is that this experiment is still unfolding and will continue for the rest of my life. It will take decades of research and observations to have real answers.

Settled matter? No.

In that sense nothing is ever a settled matter.

The same kind of technical gotcha like “there’s no evidence masks prevent infection”.

> As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

Assuming the vaccine prevents or lessens the effects of infection, this is logical. A common belief is that the vaccine is virtually useless. If this belief is true or close to true, then taking the vaccine would result in an increase in risk.

Utilitarian ideas like this are the basis of every story of the rogue AI that locks up humanity for its own safety.

> Standardized autopsies were performed on 25 persons who had died unexpectedly and within 20 days after anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. In four patients who received a mRNA vaccination, we identified acute (epi-)myocarditis without detection of another significant disease or health constellation that may have caused an unexpected death.

Myocarditis was found in 4 out of 25 people who had received the vaccine and died within 25 days of it, and none had showed any sign of related disease.

What are the odds of any 4 out 25 people in the age range of the group with no record of any related illness having acute myocarditis?

It is so typical of HN that your vapid comment should rise to the top.

> Currently, I still believe that people should vaccinate, even if vaccines cause mortality/harm in some cases. As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

Where is the evidence of this, given that many governments have withdrawn the vaccines or even banned for them for young people, a category you probably fall into?

> What are the odds of any 4 out 25 people with no record of any related illness dying of myocarditis.

Note that I'm not saying vaccines do not cause myocarditis, I'm saying that even if vaccines may cause myocarditis but cause fewer myocarditis cases than COVID deaths, then it is still worth vaccinating.

> Where is the evidence of this, given that many governments have withdrawn the vaccines or even banned for them for young people, a category you probably fall into?

Hence my next sentence right?

> My position depends on us having a good understanding of the vaccine's effects however, and right now I feel like we don't.

That said, although I didn't mention it in my comment, my current understanding of the statistics does make me believe that the vaccine causes less cases of myocarditis than COVID deaths.

There is a lot of studies on this topic. Somehow not covered in media. Which makes me even more curious.

Gill J.R. et al: Autopsy Histopathologic Cardiac Findings in 2 Adolescents Following the Second COVID-19 Vaccine Dose, Arch Pathol Lab Med (2022) 146 (8):925-929 https://meridian.allenpress.com/aplm/article/146/8/925/47778...

Risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias associated with COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infectionhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0#Aff1

Vaccine-Associated Myo/Pericarditis in Adolescents: A Stratified Risk-Benefit Analysis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13759

Schauer J. et al: Persistent Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Finfings in a Cohort of Adolescents with Post-Coronavirus Disease 2019 mRNA Vaccine Myopericarditis, The Journal of Pediatrics, March 25, 2022 https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(22)00282-7/fulltext

Chua G.T.et al: Epidemiology of Acute Myocarditis/Pericarditis in Hong Kong Adolescents Following Comirnaty Vaccination, Clin Infect Dis 2022, Sep 10. 75(4):673-681 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

Le Vu S.et al: Age and sex-specific risks of myokarditis and pericarditis following Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines, Nat Commun, 2022, 13:3633, 25 Jun 2022 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9233673/

Goddard K.et al: Risk of myokarditis and pericarditis following BT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccination, Vaccine 2022, Aug 19, 40(35): 5153-5159 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9273527/

https://www.sst.dk/en/english/corona-eng/vaccination-against...

Bardosh K.et al: COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities, 12 Sep 2022, preprint https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070

Oster M.E. et al: Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021, JAMA 2022,327(4):331-340, 25 Jan 2022 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

Lai F.T. et al: Carditis After COVID-19 Vaccination With a Messenger RNA Vaccine and an Inactivated Virus Vaccine, Ann Int Med, March 2022 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3700?rfr_da...

Massari M. et al: Postmarketing active surveillance of myokarditis and pericarditis following vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in persons aged 12 to 39 years in Italy: A multi-database, self-controlled case series study, Plos Medicine, July 2022 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and Myocarditis in a Nordic Cohort Study of 23 Million Residents https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

Age and sex-specific risks of myocarditis and pericarditis following Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31401-5

What does "not covered in media" mean to you?

While this topic doesn't dominate the news cycle, I've seen plenty of reporting on it.

In commercial mass media?

In Czechia, quite respected medium blame inflation and high prices for energy the reason of higher heart failures. No words about possibly side effect of vaccines.

https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/prvni-priznaky-akutni-infa...

https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/srdecni-selhani/r~9214c0b4...

But it's not surprise when gonverment bought 20 milion doses for 10 milion nation in spring 2022 for 7,5 bilion CZK when most are done with vaccination for covid. In 2023 they plan buy even more for another 5,5 bilion CZK. Thats how corrupted our gonverment is.

https://www.prolibertate.cz/2022/03/zatimco-sledujeme-valku-...

I had a bad reaction to an mRNA vaccine that I’m still dealing with, and feel exactly the same as you do. This technology is too important to politicise. We need to look at it scientifically, make it better, and continue to deploy it in situations where the risk profile makes sense.

If you're over 80, you should probably get vaccinated.

If you're over 80 you've probably got enough experience to make your own decisions.

>I am vaccinated but

Funny how this sounds like you have some special kind of keycard to be allowed to say what you said.

Because many people fallaciously assume that someone who is not vaccinated must be an idiot and hence should not be listened to.

Well your feeling is wrong. The data gathering to establish the risks is why we don't just update the mRNA monthly based on the latest viral RNA.

The last paragraph in the article literally indicates there is no causal relationship or proof of any direct link between the vaccination and myocarditis.

> "Finally, we cannot provide a definitive functional proof or a direct causal link between vaccination and myocarditis."

It's also important to note that although they looked at 35 autopsies for people who died in the period after vaccination, only 4 of them had signs of myocarditis. 10 of them had very clearly unrelated causes of death (e.g. pre-existing conditions, easily identifiable external causes). I don't think people realize just how frequent death, including unexplained death, can be when you're looking at population-level sample sizes:

> In four patients who received a mRNA vaccination, we identified acute (epi-)myocarditis without detection of another significant disease or health constellation that may have caused an unexpected death.

They found some interesting clues that suggest it might be related to accidental intravascular injection:

> Interestingly, we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive.

The study also states:

> In general, a causal link between myocarditis and anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination is supported by several considerations: (A) a close temporal relation to vaccination; all cases were found dead within one week after vaccination, (B) absence of any other significant pre-existing heart disease, especially ischaemic heart disease or cardiomyopathy, (C) negative testing for potential myocarditis-causing infectious agents, (D) presence of a peculiar CD4 predominant T-cell infiltrate, suggesting an immune mediated mechanism

> Standardized autopsies were performed on 25 persons who had died unexpectedly and within 20 days after anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

This is a weird way of demonstrating a link. They picked them specifically for that, it can't be evidence of something. If they selected 25 people who died of myocarditis regardless of vaccination status or recency, and all 25 turned out to have been recently vaccinated, that would be scary data.

>This is a weird way of demonstrating a link. They picked them specifically for that, it can't be evidence of something. If they selected 25 people who died of myocarditis regardless of vaccination status or recency, and all 25 turned out to have been recently vaccinated, that would be scary data.

It's perfectly valid as an idea, although a lot of statistical work would need to be done to show that it wasn't just happenstance and/or rule out other causes. But a link, sure.

Consider a depoliticized example: you do 30 autopsies on people who had recently been to a particular location, let's say a certain grocery store in town. Enough people go to this grocery store that it's not uncommon for way more than 30 recent visitors to be dead unexpectedly by random chance. Further, let's say in the general population, a tiny fraction of people die of a certain food-borne illness. You have a pretty good guess what that fraction is.

You do these autopsies and you find that 5 of the people died of this food-borne illness. Much higher than the proportion in the population. Now, you have a lot of additional work to do before you prove that something at the store is causing high rates of the illness: check on comorbidities, other correlated factors, plenty still to be done. But, have you established a potential link? Sure. And you picked them specifically because they died after going to this store.

Also, your idea can work too, also with appropriate statistical work, experimental design, all that. Yours is perhaps a bit better suited to answering a question like: of those who die of myocarditis, what proportion have been recently vaccinated? While a proper study the way the authors did is more like: of those who are recently vaccinated and die unexpectedly, what proportion have myocarditis? Both are valid questions and both certainly get at aspects of the link between the vaccine and myocarditis.

The two things that stand out to me.

From published articles in the JAMA; vaccination related myocarditis in young men has much lower mortality and morbidity than from other causes. So were really talking about two different things here.

The second is rates of myocarditis after vaccination and the population base rate aren't the same thing either. The base rate one assumes includes cases triggered by something. So the base rate incorporates the rate of triggering events. So these rates are also not the same thing.

It states that they cannot provide a definitive proof or a causal link, not that there isn't one.

As we say in epidemiology (and other fields), absence of evidence, isn't evidence of absence.

but it is somewhat suggestive of absence.

The study does suggest there might be a causal relationship. It is not able to provide definitive proof however.

The causal link (direct or otherwise, does it really matter to most people) between vaccination and myocarditis has been established elsewhere and acknowledged by the CDC.

But in the intro: >> Thus, myocarditis can be a potentially lethal complication following mRNA-based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

I would assume that means there is something going on.

To your point, medical researchers are IMHO kind of bad at accepting reality if they don't have a complete understanding. So if data show death by specific cause after vaccination, they will reject that conclusion if there is no proven mechanism for it. Rather than critique the study, they simply demand more information than anyone has.

"we cannot provide" is very different from "there is no"

It is extremely important, the distinction between these two.

Claiming something doesn't exist requires careful extensive statistics, this study didn't do that, they're saying it out loud.

Very few of the instant commenters read the study first it seems.

Haters will say it’s GPT-3ed.

But we know for certain that they were all very safe drivers /s

Just curious, but are you referring to the recent Canadian study that showed people who self-selected for vaccination may also be associated with being safer drivers? https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(22)00822-1/fulltex...

There's a good take on this study here: https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/the-unvaccinated-had-more-...

That's not what it says. I will give you an example. Before the 1980s or so when the first serious studies on second-hand smoke exposure were conducted, anybody could have also written that "we cannot provide a definitive causal link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer." Today, it is common sense.

No, it's not common sense. It's science, proven over decades and presented to people in an understandable way so that were willing to adopt it as a belief they hold.

Common sense nonsense: You can fall off the edge of the world You should put ice on burns We only use 10% of our brain

"Interestingly, we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive."

Does this indicate that the authors believe aspirating the vaccine during administration would reduce the risk of myocarditis? I don't have a biological background so I would be interested in hearing someone else's take on this but that sentence seems to indicate that the authors think ensuring correct administration would lower the risk of post-vaccine complications (which from what I've seen, remains low but non-zero). If that's the case, then perhaps the issue isn't as much with the vaccine itself as how it's being administered.

Yes. Complication from jab administration is something that has been widely discussed (not widely reported though). The clinical trials were supposed to show that the jab (and therefore the mRNA, and the resultant spike protein generated, which is known to be toxic) stayed in the muscle local to the injection site.

What is widely speculated is that on some not-insubstantial portion of injections, the jab makes it into the bloodstream. This would explain why we see spike protein collecting in the heart, reproductive organs and other parts of the body.

And because of how the jab works - inducing spike protein genesis as well as an immune response - when the immune system finds spike protein on the cells that are creating it (supposed to be just your arm muscle but ends up being your heart and other things), it starts attacking those cells. Which leads to inflammation, blood clots, etc.

A nurse friend of mine raised this as a concern. The protocol for intramuscular injections used to be (and in some places still is) to draw the plunger back a bit first to verify that you're in muscle, and haven't hit a small vein. If you pull blood, you find new spot.

In practice this doesn't happen for covid vaccines, and her personal hypothesis was that many of the adverse reactions (myocarditis, or just being hit hard) were due to the vaccine partially being administered into a vein.

> The clinical trials were supposed to show that the jab (and therefore the mRNA, and the resultant spike protein generated, which is known to be toxic) stayed in the muscle local to the injection site.

They didn't. The data Pfizer released to the Japanese government showed that the lipid nanoparticle could be found all over the bodies of the test rats in hours. It's a small proportion of the overall shot, but the data only goes to 48 hours and in most areas (particularly the ovaries, which is what people kept calling out from this) it was still increasing.

This is extremely fascinating to me as a layperson. Can you explain how this effect would be unique to mRNA? Like, could you get a flu shot and end up with some of the inactivated flu virus spreading around the body and sticking to other organs? Or is the spike protein collecting in other organs solely because the mRNA is telling those cells to produce it, whereas with a typical vaccine the dead virus could get into the bloodstream but it would simply float around the body without piling up anywhere til it's taken out by the immune system?

The difference between the covid jab and the flu vax has to do with the combination of a) mRNA turns your body into a "factory" to pump out a somewhat-unknowable and individually variable quantity of spike protein, and b) the spike protein "sticks to organs" as you put it (or more generally, is harmful), which is not something that e.g. a deactivated virion does

Thank you, I didn't really understand the distinction there re: the spike protein!

I wonder if a similar mechanism is responsible for the blood clotting risk with the J&J shot, which uses a viral delivery mechanism.

I wonder if having larger arm muscles reduces this risk. Great workout motivation if so.

Or, maybe that leads to more vasculature and more chance of hitting a vein? It's interesting that it was more prevalent in young men than other demographics.

For a long time this theory always made the most sense to me, and frankly I assume I must just be missing something since it’s so obviously criminal if there was a chance this was true that it wasn’t blasted from the rooftops from the CDC (for the public to help correct it when they got their vaccine.)

One mouse study found that not aspirating when injecting the vaccine did increase the risk of myocarditis.

https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab707

That research hasn't been reproduced in humans but it's worth further study. Currently the CDC recommends against aspiration, primarily due to pain.

Key takeaway:

>>The reported incidence of (epi-)myocarditis after vaccination is low and the risks of hospitalization and death associated with COVID-19 are stated to be greater than the recorded risk associated with COVID-19 vaccination [29].

the more interesting unaddressed question is, for whom? i am a young-ish healthy person, i have basically no risk of ending up in the hospital for covid. what is the risk tradeoff for people similar to me, rather than an abstraction of the entire population? what is the risk tradeoff for a young child, who effectively has zero risk of serious covid?

> what is the risk tradeoff for a young child, who effectively has zero risk of serious covid?

This is only true if you consider death the only "serious" outcome. Around 25% of children and adolescents who get COVID-19 will get "long COVID", with long-term effects we've just begun to understand. Plenty of "young-ish healthy people" have suffered debilitating effects.

That's not even the complete question though -- because by all accounts, Covid actually results in a higher incidence of myocarditis than the vaccine does.. Given the tenor of the conspiracy theories here, the landscape of questions is too nuanced for HN I guess. Ideally, the vaccine recommendation would weigh:

Incidence and seriousness of myocarditis (ISM) naturally / in absence of covid or vaccine, ISM following vaccine, ISM following Covid, ISM after being vaccinated but later catching Covid, relative risk of death / or the other litany of problems following unvaccinated covid infection, same but with vaccinated covid infection and the increased chances of avoiding infection after being vaccinated.

It's possible that vaccines are leading to more myocarditis, covid is certainly leading to more myocarditis, most cases of myocarditis are undetected and resolve on their own with no health impact at all.. as expected, weird antivaxxers are harping on point 1 to the detriment of anyone actually interested in public health.

Why do people keep thinking young people have no risk of ending up in the hospital for Covid? So many people have, and so many have died?

"stated" is an interesting choice there, especially when using "recorded" a few words later. It reads as being a bit untrusting of the COVID death numbers.

Are the covid death numbers trustworthy? (honest Q)

It's actually a non sequitur because you can still get Covid after getting the vaccine. It's not an either/or at all, and in fact most people who got the vaccine did get Covid.

But had lower incidence of hospitalization.

Why is it so hard to find data showing how often people are dying, no matter the cause, broken down by vaccination status and age? Surely that would help clear things up. Lots of countries publish COVID-19 mortality rates which show benefits for vaccinated but that's really not helpful for understanding overall risk of vaccines. The UK is the only country I could find that publishes this data and unless I'm missing something things look really bad. Table 2 in [1] shows a 2-3x higher mortality rate for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated in almost all groups this year. Perhaps the unvaccinated are healthier on average, maybe, but 2-3x healthier? Yeah, don't think so. What's going on?

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde....

That is showing the raw numbers - they aren't adjusted for vaccinated/unvaccinated population sizes. ~53 million people have had at least one shot, and there are around 6 million children under 10 (so not counted in the figures you linked). With a population of about 68 million total, the unvaccinated all causes figures should be about 16% of the ever vaccinated.

The ratio should skew further in older age ranges, as a higher proportion of those were vaccinated.

It also shows mortality rates per 100,000. That's what I was referring to. For example, here are the rates of all-cause mortality for the most last month they released, May 2022, for the 40-49 group:

- Unvaccinated: 64.1

- One dose: 171.5

- Two doses: 106.4

- Three doses: 83.7

Lest someone draw the statistically unsound but temping surface level conclusion from this, consider that people with pre-existing conditions and especially severe ones would have more incentive to have three doses. There is self selection on these groups, they are not random samples.

A question for vaccine skeptics:

For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?

There seems to be a lot of "aha I knew it" whenever any side-effect of the vaccine is found, but aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?

According to my governments stats, the COVID-19 hospitalization rate for my age + health cohort, when modestly adjusted for their known undercount of cases, is less than 1 in 3000.

Also by their stats, more than 1 in 2000 4-dose mRNA vaccine series have resulted in a serious adverse event reported by a health professional.

Then, factoring in the additional risk of acquiescing bodily autonomy to an opaque bureaucracy — considering what herding behaviors have been blatantly manufactured over the last few years, and the conflicting interests involved.

I think declining is a very reasonable choice.

Don't forget natural/recovered immunity, which people seem to finally be considering again. For a lot of people any vaccination was unnecessary risk for no reward.

What constitutes a 'serious adverse event' in this data? Do you mind linking the source? Having a 1 in 3000 chance of getting so sick you need to be hospitalized seems quite bad.

> For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?

Reasonable is subjective. I got the covid vaccine and had no concern for side effects. But I, like most people, don't bother getting the flu shot every year and I think that's perfectly reasonable despite me having no qualms about side effects. I simply don't care about the flu. Not getting the flu shot is one less reoccurring chore in my life that I don't have to bother with.

Seat belts are a daily chore too?

Every person I've asked (here in Sweden) who opted out of COVID-19 vaccination made their decision based on one year of case data covering the two first waves, which to them concluded that statistically they were at no risk based on their age and health status. Despite taking e.g. tetanus boosters, TBC vaccine etc., they are still being referred to as "antivaxxers".

At no risk for what?

> to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid

No.

Reasonable people make choices all the time that don't bear out under a cost-risk-benefit analysis like you propose. Those choices are still reasonable, despite perhaps not being strictly rational.

And certainly not as a matter of public policy. The value of individual freedom of choice is inherent unless there's an overwhelming and compelling reason to violate it.

There is far, far greater danger in society forcing issues of bodily autonomy to a vote than there is in someone eating too much sugar.

The comment you replied to didn't mention mandates of any sort. It started with:

> For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine

"Basically everyone should get the vaccine" is a meaningfully different statement from "we should force people to get the vaccine".

Also, whether a person can be reasonable while making unreasonable choices isn't really the point either. The most reasonable option on this particular choice for the overwhelming majority pretty clearly seems to be to get the vaccine. It is similarly disingenuous to move the goal posts from "the most reasonable decision is to get the vaccine" to "you are an unreasonable person to not get the vaccine".

The choices are acceptable, not reasonable. At least by the strict definition of reasonable -- we seem to be changing that definition similar to the world "literally."

> The value of individual freedom of choice is inherent unless there's an overwhelming and compelling reason to violate it.

This is a slippery slope easily. People should be given the choice.

And as people we have also the choice to judge people on their choice's results.

Especially if it causes other people to die. Right now we have failed as humanity at least 6,637,512 people and counting.

My question wasn't about public policy or mandates, I'm asking what data an individual is looking at to come to the conclusion that not getting vaccinated is the right choice.

>For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?

a huge chunk of the population already got covid during the entire year no vaccine existed and have natural immunity, so that's not really a factor at this point. The risk of getting covid for them is already baked into the calculation because they got it when there was no other option. They can now decide whether the additional risk of the vaccine is worth it

you can't even make the case for mandates based on "stopping the spread" anymore because the vaccines failed at that as well, so it's no longer a public health issue and becomes a personal health decision. Or at least it should be

> a huge chunk of the population already got covid during the entire year no vaccine existed and have natural immunity, so that's not really a factor at this point.

The new variants are effective at evading immunity from earlier variants so, no, that's not moot. Even without evasion you'd still need to consider how quickly immunity wanes, too. The vaccines are holding up well for avoiding hospitalization but you're still looking at multiple per year given how much COVID has been mutating.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-new-covid-wave

> during the entire year no vaccine existed and have natural immunity,

That's not true anymore. Recent variants dont induce a lot of immunity that s why reinfections are common. In fact the opposite is true in some cases

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1841

That said, the vaccines don't prevent infection either

> A question for vaccine skeptics:

I don't think it's the correct question to ask.

I've got two Pfizer shots but I know many vaccine skeptics who refused to take the shots and they aren't skeptics because of the risk/reward ratio of the vaccine vs covid. They're skeptics because the politicians and the media have repeated a great many different lies during this entire fiasco.

For a start if people were allowed to discuss the lab leak hypothesis without being called moon-landing deniers then maybe there'd have been way less skeptics.

It's the attitude of the politicians and the mainstream media that created the skeptics.

To me what the mainstream media were publishing about the Covid-19 during the outbreak and the first lockdown was approximately as correct as what they were publishing about SBF/FTX before his ponzi was exposed: a narrative they were fed.

That would not be a correct comparison, because the vaccine does not prevent you from getting covid. The risks to balance are:

A) The risk of myocarditis and other fatal and non-fatal side-effects from the vaccine, TIMES how many times you get the vaccine, PLUS the cumulative risks of COVID infections over time (which you can get despite being "vaccinated"). B) Just the risks of COVID infections over time.

A is strictly more dangerous than B no matter what the risks of COVID are. Every comment saying, "oh but COVID can cause X risk of death and Y risk of myocarditis and blah blah blah" is completely irrelevant, because all of these risks accrue just as much to the vaccinated. Even if the vaccine is, say, 15% effective, which is very generous given the evidence, then that means that if the risks of the vaccine are 15% as much as the risks of COVID, then (A) is still more dangerous. The risks of the vaccine are more than 15% the risks of COVID, as the evidence is piling up.

Then there's the little fact that the vaccinated are slightly more likely to be reinfected with COVID than the unvaccinated. But the studies on this are still being suppressed, so you can do the math without it and still come up with vaccination being more dangerous for much of the population.

No I don’t need to balance anything based on your criteria. I and I alone decide what goes into my body. Anyone who is scared to walk outside and face hundreds of thousands of pathogens on a daily basis should remain at home. If you want a vaccine, go ahead and get one.

Thankfully your attitude wasn't prevalent in previous generations or polio and smallpox would still be rampant.

> but aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?

You forgot to account for the risk of getting the virus. If you choose to get the vaccine, the probability is 1. But what's the probability of getting Covid? Definitely less than 1.

For certain age groups (young men), the risk of complications * probability of getting the vaccine (1) was more than the risk of complications from COVID * the probability of getting it (let's say 0.25 or so).

Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...

> Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...

Having seen the impact of covid on young family members and others in my extended social circles, I believe that there's a long tail of effects that we won't be able to see the full picture of for years to come. There's a lot more that should be considered in the decision than just risk of death.

From OC:

> wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?

For certain demographics the probability of getting infected might be that low, but at least in every social young adult I know, the risk is averaged to well over 1.0. I've been infected twice, before and after the jab, and in both cases the infection was worse (months of recovery, VO2Max reduction) than the acute vaccine side effects (weekend of feeling shitty). Pre-vaccine I'd say it took around 5 months to fully feel recovered, e.g. able to run a 4-miler without feeling like passing out, where-as post-vaccine and prior infection I was well recovered at the 6-week mark.

It's been only 3 years and basically everyone I know has had COVID, some more than once. I don't think it's significantly less than 1.

COVID is much less dangerous to younger people but there are still very real risks involved, especially non-lethal ones. Assuming a 25% probability of catching it, how are you coming to the conclusion that the risk of the vaccine is higher?

> COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...

In the short term yes, in the long term, that is not known.

You forgot to add in the risks of getting COVID and being vaccinated. Every time anyone "does the math" on this somehow they count the vaccine as having 100% efficacy, which is an obvious lie.

Also, if you choose to get the vaccine, then the multiplier for vaccine risks isn't 1, it's 2, or 4, or 6, however many times you get the vaccine.

Yes and it shouldn't just be risk of getting the virus, as it looks like the ability of the virus to migrate to the heart also matters.

With environmental infections, it's possible that most people fight the virus within other parts of the body, with the vaccine it looks like the immune response occurred in the heart for many in this study, specifically right heart, possibly due to proximity or accidental intravascular injection:

>we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive

> let's say 0.25 or so

Where did you get this data?

> Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...

What are the top 3 leading causes of health-related deaths in your choice of demographic (15-24? 25-49?) in your choice of 2020 or 2021?

> Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...

I have friends in their early 30s who still haven't recovered their sense of smell. Knoew a 25-year-old who spent 4 weeks with terrible symptoms. I'm a marathon runner and lift and in my early 30s and this disease kicked the shit out of me and had 4 with reduced physical function.

It is very obviously worse than the worst flus almost everyone had and the flu is sufficiently dangerous that it has a nontrivial effect in human quality of life.

> If you choose to get the vaccine, the probability is 1

Curiously, probability of what specifically is 1 in that case? I am assuming by 1 you mean 100%, right?

> Aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?

There is no doubt that we'd have a lot more deaths without the vaccines. I suspect that is true for at least some of the lockdowns too.

In my experience, people aren't very good at assessing risks. Actively doing something that comes with a certain risk is often perceived as being more dangerous than passively hoping to avoid what is objectively known to be the greater risk.

If those risks are then contested or associated with a high degree of uncertainty, making an active choice often becomes a question of deferring the decision to someone you really trust. If you don't trust anyone, you're not likely to do anything.

An anecdote - I know a few people who didn't get the vaccine, or got it a lot later than everyone else, and more often than not they have had bad health care experiences in the past. When you've been on the receiving end of one or more mistakes of that kind, it isn't difficult to understand how waiting to see what happens seems like the smarter choice.

I took 3 doses of vaccine but it is no longer effective at preventing infections. Studies that keep coming out show that Covid can have a lot of damaging consequences every time you get infected and they accumulate (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3). I have a job and lifestyle that allows me to limit crowded spaces by a lot during wintertime. I will try to avoid getting covid ever again as much as possible, and the vaccine doesn't help much in that. I think the danger from vaccine is very small, but , as in everything, i want to wait a few years before i can trust it.

But to those that plan to get immunized by simply getting Covid again I 'd say "good luck" because they are going to need it

Honest question: why does this matter to you? The vaccine doesn't stop transmission, that's widely acknowledged now, and can't establish herd immunity (unless you plan to vaccinate deer).

It doesn't affect you at all so why waste time thinking about others' cost-benefit analysis?

We all have our reasons. They're all unique and inevitably personal. For my part, standing my ground and resisting the pressure to get jabbed is one of my proudest achievements.

>but aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?

No they are not well COVID in my view. To me the complications that are supposedly attributed to covid are those of respiratory illnesses that have existed long before COVID came on the scene. In fact I have my doubts whether the whole COVID thing is a brand new disease.

As someone pointed out there are bigger issues: like trust in pharmaceutical companies and current science medical science. In my current view medical science is very primitive, while putting up a front of sophistication and accuracy, while being very crude.

And just so that you know that I'm not a perpetual skeptic, I will go along with Einstein's quotes:

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

> multiplied by the risk of getting covid

Wouldn't you actually multiply by (the risk of getting covid without the vaccine, minus the risk of getting covid with the vaccine)?

Depends on who and when. The idea of vaccinating my young kids in late 2022 is an absurd proposition to me personally - and if the state mandated it, we would leave. This will change once we understand what is happening with these fatalities and correct it.

yeah that's reasonable, and a perfect way to do it is to go by age groups

covid is hurting/killing people who are weak, elderly, and immunocompromised. So covid is the bigger worry here, they should get vaccinated

young kids mostly don't even notice they have covid, and young people in general, ~<30 y/o, don't have any issues from covid. So the vaccine is a bigger risk, and the natural immunity they gain from getting the disease is more advantageous than the vaccine ever would be for their demographic

Im not a skeptic but has to do with the mandate. Has to do with distrust in government, corporations, etc. not fully honest conversations about vaccine etc ..

control group here: I'm doing fine, and have been doing fine all along, just like every single other person I know who is also in the control group. I'm profoundly uninterested in publicly debating my internal decision-making process. though I am interested in hearing from anyone else in the control group to see how they're doing.

Everyone got the vaccine and everyone still got covid. you have to get the vaccine and then covid and then more vaccine and then more Covid and you’re saying it’s clear to you what the benefit risk is in this jumble of vaccinations and Covid vaccines really you know what it is you’re sure you read the paper of the research it’s out there for everyone to just look at?

The risk: benefit analysis that supports vaccination is considering the earliest standards of care we had which were criminally misguided - no steroids allowed, plug patient respiration up with a machine to not spread the virus ,

These protocols are what killed people mostly and ultimately they are what is being used to justify universal recommendations for a vaccine.

We coerced young, low-risk people into receiving these treatments despite known side effects on pain of losing their education or employment or being able to enter privately-owned establishments (irrespective of the wishes of the owners of those privately-owned establishments).

We justified it with the specious argument that they were putting other people at undue risk by remaining unvaccinated. We claimed that vaccinated people would not spread the virus.

And we gave the companies producing these vaccines blanket legal immunity from any potential liability.

We require young people to get vaccinated as a rule in order to obtain education. Every medical intervention involves risks. So does taking a shower or taking the bus to school. We all have to take risks and some of them are mandated for the good of society.

There were very good indications that the vaccine would prevent spread.

Public policy decisions which cost lives are not unusual and although tragic, are often necessary. For instance should we use the entire yearly budget of a hospital to cure one child, or let that child die in order to fund daily operations? These questions have no 'right' answer and no matter what was decided there is going to be criticism and errors which result in less than optimal or even tragic outcomes.

Looking back in hindsight and using the knowledge we now have, I would say that the biggest errors made during the pandemic by public policymakers (besides disbanding the pandemic team and having a leader who was looking at everything in the lens of a what was personally good for him at that moment) was in messaging.

If we can use this to craft a better way to handle public messaging in the future then perhaps we can avoid a lot of the negative societal effects which we are now dealing with -- specifically lack of trust in scientific institutions, division based on ideology and not evidence, and the spread and enabling of conspiratorial thinking.

>We all have to take risks and some of them are mandated for the good of society.

What are some other risky and irreversible interventions mandated upon the individual for the good of society?

>There were very good indications that the vaccine would prevent spread.

Now that we know that to be not true, do you support removing the covid jab from the schedule required in school?

You know what also causes myocarditis? COVID-19 [1].

So the choices were:

1. Don't pressure young people to get vaccinated. Nearly everyone who's unvaccinated eventually catches COVID-19. Some of them would have severe reactions and die; or spend time in a hospital, taking up space and delaying care for others, causing those other people to die. Nearly all of them would pass COVID-19 on to other people, many of whom would be older and die. Some of them would develop myocarditis and die.

2. Pressure young people to be vaccinated for COVID-19. Some of them would develop myocarditis and die.

#2 is strictly better than #1.

Sometimes in life there are no good options; only not-so-great options and very bad options.

[1] https://www.beaumont.org/health-wellness/blogs/myocarditis-r...

That's not necessarily the case, if fact it might be the exact opposite.

1. Don't pressure young people to get the vaccine, some will end up in hospital, some will die.

2. Pressure young people to get the vaccine and 6 times as many of them end up in hospital from the vaccine, taking up more space, and putting more pressure on the system [0], some of them will die [1][2]

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

[1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/tragedy...

[2] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/death-boy-14-three-...

One of the cruxes of the issue is what constitutes "pressure". Should we block children from going to school in order to "pressure" them forcing the risk of #1 on them rather than allowing parents to make their own choices?

You still get Covid after you are vaccinated. Fun fact if you are vaccinated before you catch Covid you cannot develop an immunity to the nucleocapsid is this good is this bad I don’t know tune in in 10 years when we know more

As we also coerce babies into screening for various diseaaes and for vax against the diseases that afflict societies without this science. That is how it works. That is why we mostly don't die from infectious diseases for the first time since we built cities.

Not for an emergency use drug that doesn’t maintain herd immunity for a disease that is minimally harmful to children and is under immense selective pressure to break out of the vaccine.

Maybe you’ve got a bad mental model because of the word “vaccine.” This is not a vaccine of the kind we give children, in terms of what it prevents and the extent of data and knowledge we have of its side effects.

it’s not entirely likely the dead were at a low-risk of death by the actual virus

> We claimed that vaccinated people would not spread the virus.

Who is "we", I have never seen anything other the claims that there were claims. Can you point me to an epidemiologist that made this claim.

> And we gave the companies producing these vaccines blanket legal immunity from any potential liability.

We have ALWAYS given vaccine companies blanket legal immunity. This isn't a new thing and there are good reasons for it.

>Who is "we", I have never seen anything other the claims that there were claims. Can you point me to an epidemiologist that made this claim.

https://twitter.com/guccibase/status/1488297386208378889

Included in the video: Rochelle Walensky, Monica Gandhi

Do you truly not remember? That was exactly the claim made at the start of vaccination. From December 2020:

Fauci Predicts U.S. Could See Signs Of Herd Immunity By Late March Or Early April

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1...

> "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."

Months later, May 2021:

Masks off? Fauci confirms ‘extremely low’ risk of transmission, infection for vaccinated

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-confirms-extreme...

Why should the companies be held liable? This was a government project enforced by the gun; the companies didn't force anyone to take their vaccines, and there's not a way they could have made them meaningfully safer given the timelines.

My employer wouldn't let me go to the office or even any offsites or outdoor actives (i.e. a picnic) until very recently. (Despite my approved religious exemption and "requiring" all employees to work in the office).

If that isn't coercion to take an experimental vaccine i don't know what is.

Then why did most of them sell it for profit?

> Standardized autopsies were performed on 25 persons who had died unexpectedly and within 20 days after anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

Sample size of 25 out of a population of... how many tens of millions of young (EDIT: not actually young) men? Seems quite small, and perhaps not sufficient to draw any conclusions. I wonder what the results will show...

> myocarditis is another manifestation reported during SARS-CoV-2-infection [24]. It is under debate whether myocarditis in COVID-19 is primarily caused by the viral infection or whether it occurs secondary as a consequence of the host´s immune response, in particular by T-lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity or as a consequence of the cytokine storm observed during COVID-19 [25].

Interesting!

> Finally, we cannot provide a definitive functional proof or a direct causal link between vaccination and myocarditis. Further studies and extended registry are needed to identify persons at risk for this potentially fatal AEFI and may be aided by detailed clinical, serological, and molecular analyses which were beyond the scope of this study.

So in total, out of 25 young men, 20 showed signs of cardiac damage. It's suggestive and merits more research. On the other hand, the authors offer no real ideas about how the damage could have happened, other than to observe that since similar damage happens as a result of COVID-19, maybe the immune response is the culprit (provoked by the vaccine, similarly as by the disease).

Far from any sort of smoking gun. It's important to keep that in mind.

>the authors offer no real ideas about how the damage could have happened

They do, though. In fact that's the entirely novel value that this study brings. It's in the title: "histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination." That's a lot of words that means "we can now tell you exactly what microscopic tissue looks like following lethal jab-associated myocarditis.”

And the scientists discuss how it happens. For your benefit, I'll describe it here.

These mRNA-vaccinated patients suffered from heart damage because their hearts were attacked by their own immune cells. The mRNA is injected into your muscle cells, turning the cell into a factory producing COVID-19 spike proteins. As a result of the mRNA immunization, your body generates an immune response against COVID-19 spike proteins. Since your own muscle cells were used to make the COVID-19 spike proteins and may have them on the cell surface, your newly-weaponized immune cells targeting the spike protein may start attacking your own healthy muscle cells. This autoimmune attack on their own heart cells then leads to their damaged hearts beating so many times per second that, once the tachycardia unexpectedly started, they died in minutes.

This new German study shows photographic evidence that this happens and has killed people

The actual wording of the study includes this...

> Finally, we cannot provide a definitive functional proof or a direct causal link between vaccination and myocarditis.

... which is a much, much more cautious conclusion than you're pretending.

You've paraphrased into "jab-associated" which is dishonest at best.

> And the scientists discuss how it happens. For your benefit, I'll describe it here.

Condescension noted :)

You've described what I understand to be a common(-ly presented online) hypothesis about how an mRNA vaccine might injure heart tissue. The study authors, on the other hand, don't claim that this is how any of the study subjects died. Indeed they explicitly disclaim any causal link between an mRNA vaccine and incidences of myocarditis.

Allow me to rephrase, then - "the authors offer no real ideas about how the Covid vaccines could have caused this damage".

Fascinating. Without a detailed knowledge of biology, it seems like this could affect any cell type, why would heart muscle cells specifically be targeted? Are the spike proteins just more likely to get stuck to the surface of certain types of cell?

> out of 25 young men

These were not young men

> Three of the deceased persons were women, two men. Median age at death was 58 years (range 46–75 years).

My mistake; I misread something somewhere, and thought that the population was 30-and-younger men.

As someone who did choose to get the latest booster despite being a young male (highest risk group for myocarditis I believe), we should always be questioning what we put in our bodies.

>...we should always be questioning...

I partially agree, or at least think we shouldn't be discouraged from questioning, but there's only so many hours in a day, and a person can digest a finite amount of information.

I choose to trust US health authorities. Flawed as they may be, I think it would be worse to somehow try to verify every claim, or come to my own conclusions on every single question. I won't judge you for making a choice different from my own, but for me, and I suspect many (most?) people, having a doctor who you trust, following their recommendations, and getting on with your life might be the best strategy.

I thought it wasn’t the highest risk group for myocarditis, just the lowest risk for covid which makes it the highest relative risk?

Given the information i had at the time, I am fine with my unforced decision to get the first two doses, but I will not be getting a third barring some surprising new information, new variant, etc.

> we should always be questioning what we put in our bodies

If we did a better job of that, health problems associated with obesity, smoking, drinking, etc... would be reduced and that would have a pretty big impact on cardiovascular health too.

Some are talking about the risk of myocarditis after vaccination as being way less than the risk of dying from COVID. I would say this is just one thing popping up about the vaccines. There no long-term studies of the vaccination even if there are millions and millions of administered vaccines. It's only been three years since the first vaccination was given only 2 years ago, and the control group was burned by giving the placebo group of the control group the vaccine. We don't, and will not know the long-term effects of the vaccine for another 2 to 5 years. The NYT article cited using micromorts to compare this to a soldier in Afghanistan in 2010 is very disingenuous or just bad journalism. It's 12 years after 2010. Let's see where COVID vaccination studies lead to in 2032 for equivalence. Obesity, diabetes, and hypertension were THE amplifiers of COVID deaths, not just COVID. Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable deaths in the US. I contracted COVID pre-vaccine, and having natural immunity ignored completely by the CDC and ruling party, was socially irresponsible. I am speaking of the millions of Americans who had COVID before the vaccine, not people trying to get COVID to get natural immunity. My older children, who also had COVID, were forced by the universities they attended to get vaccinated and boosted. I really hope no long-term effects are found from the vaccine, but I have great distrust of Big Pharma, especially Pfizer. They even burned their control group for a long-term study under the argument they wanted to be humane and vaccinate the placebo group. Yeah, right. Stage 1 for the vaccine's EUA were supposed to include animal biodistribution studies, but even after looking through redacted documents released by Pfizer per the FOIA request to get them, it is not clear. Remember they said it is local to the injection site and breaks down quickly? Let's be prepared to adjust the micromort of the vaccine vs. non-vaccine for people who are not obese, diabetic, or suffer from hypertension and contract COVID in the next 3 to 7 years.

Multiple US universities still mandate the shots for young students in total opposition to Europe, for example: Harvard [0], Yale [1], Tufts University [2], University of California [3], New York University [4], University of Notre Dame [5], Boston University [6]

[0] https://www.harvard.edu/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-informa...

[1] https://yalecollege.yale.edu/get-know-yale-college/office-de...

[2] https://coronavirus.tufts.edu/healthy-at-tufts/covid-19-vacc...

[3] https://campusready.ucdavis.edu/covid-vaccination

[4] https://www.nyu.edu/life/safety-health-wellness/coronavirus-...

[5] https://ndsmcobserver.com/2022/11/university-announces-addit...

[6] https://www.bu.edu/hr/hr-covid-19-resources/vaccine-required...

Is biology/science different in the US than in Europe?

Both seem mainly corrupted by finance, the later less than the former.

Key takeaway:

I hope the research continues to make it even more safe.

When I got second dose of covid pfizer, I remember feeling really strange. My heart was beating really irregularly and I felt like I was struggling to breathe. My vision also started to gray out in a really weird way. I thought I was going to die in that pharmacy for a few minutes. When I snapped out of it, I was covered in sweat

To this day, I don't know if it was a panic attack or a heart attack. Regardless, probably never getting another vaccine after this because just seeing a needle is enough to freak me out

I had the same experience. I will never get a booster. Besides the ten minutes of thinking I was going to die, I ended up getting a severe case of COVID within 60 days of the "vaccine".

These are very low numbers with only 5 vaccine+death cases found in an area with 8mio citizens.

But they convincingly argue that accidentally injecting the vaccination into the bloodstream towards the heart may cause a heart infection similar to those seen in people who got sick with Covid.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425/rr-31

Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science

"Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, quotes an infection fatality rate (IFR) for Covid of 0.00-0.57% (0.05% for under 70s), far lower than originally feared and no different to severe flu" -March 2020

The bigger scandal is how covid case:fatality rate was so much higher in some places than the global average. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/why-some-doctors-...

The fatality rate for a disease that is very often asymptomatic highly depends on testing. The rate will go way down in places where lots of people are required to or just do get treated frequently.

Most asymptomatic cases will go unnoticed in places with less testing so the fatality rate will go way up.

Also how you count whether or not a death gets tagged with covid matters. Lots of people had Covid and plenty of deaths will just coincidentally happen while a person has a minor infection which didn’t affect the outcome. How or when do you count that?

Professor ioannidis forecasted 10,000 deaths in the US as a mid range guess of what to expect. He’s not exactly a good appeal to authority.

Ioannidis did a antigen survey and found the vast majority of cases were mild; https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/340124

A survey by the most cited epidemiologist alive is not a forecast for one. It is the best appeal to authority one can make. I've seen it shown that h1n1 in england in 2009 had a IFR of 0.05% which is greater than the revised figure for covid.

Amazing how all the proof in the world makes such little difference to the average Luddite who will just defer to authority regardless. Stanley Milgram was clearly right about everything he said.

Note: the ages in this study ranged from 46 to 75 for those who died.

This meta analysis cited in the OP is good for context: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9000914/

>"The overall incidence of myopericarditis from 22 studies (405 272 721 vaccine doses) was 33·3 cases (95% CI 15·3–72·6) per million vaccine doses, and did not differ significantly between people who received COVID-19 vaccines (18·2 [10·9–30·3], 11 studies [395 361 933 doses], high certainty) and those who received non-COVID-19 vaccines (56·0 [10·7–293·7], 11 studies [9 910 788 doses], moderate certainty, p=0·20). Compared with COVID-19 vaccination, the incidence of myopericarditis was significantly higher following smallpox vaccinations (132·1 [81·3–214·6], p<0·0001) but was not significantly different after influenza vaccinations (1·3 [0·0–884·1], p=0·43) or in studies reporting on various other non-smallpox vaccinations (57·0 [1·1–3036·6], p=0·58). Among people who received COVID-19 vaccines, the incidence of myopericarditis was significantly higher in males (vs females), in people younger than 30 years (vs 30 years or older), after receiving an mRNA vaccine (vs non-mRNA vaccine), and after a second dose of vaccine (vs a first or third dose)."

Regardless of any possible danger of vaccination, one has to also consider that vaccination doesnt prevent infection, which is important. As more studies come to light it s becoming evident that Covid damages our bodies in many ways, even with mild infections, it weakens our immune systems and the damage is cumulative every time we catch it. We should be preventing infections , with measures that are appropriate, instead of trying to mitigate the symptoms as we do with vaccines.

> Of note, it has been recently reported that intravenous injection of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine is able to induce an acute (epi-) myocarditis in a preclinical model

There have been lots of vaccinations shown in various TV reports over the last years. Watching carefully, there's two different variants: a) jab, aspirate, inject, b) jab, inject. Maybe it is just stock footage and not from covid shots, and everyone has been checking carefully for not finding blood?

It feels like 2021 again.

Small sample size (n = 25), small number of incidents of myocarditis, no causal link found between myocarditis and adverse events (including, but not limited to, death) and no causal link found between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis.

But do you what does cause myocarditis? Getting Covid [1].

Covid and the (highly effective) vaccines are the most clearcut case of evolution in action [2] I've seen in my lifetime.

This isn't really worth worrying about this point. Countries (barring China) have largely decided they're over Covid. Get a vaccine, don't get a vaccine. Nobody cares. Looking for justification for not getting a vaccine however reminds me of creationists trying to equate "intelligent design" as "science".

[1]: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...

[2]: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1800059-larry-niven-think-of-it...

We knew this over a year ago, but it's called "acceptable risk" by the CDC. The thing is they never told us that. But it was on that document you signed when you took your jab.

You read the fine print right?

Moderna had "This is an EXPERIMENTAL VACCINE" on all thier media until not that long ago, and then they just removed that warning. We don't even have clinical trials any more.

Those Moderna shareholders are rough, once a week jab was the goal. That booster. Much upset there, when that did not go through.

They tried to push "your dog, cats, all your pets WILL need a shot!" That did not get much traction, remember that news?

Shareholders bailed. Lets all short TSLA was their next move. How markets work.

Remember that time when everyone called you a conspiracy theorist if you mentioned that mRNA vaccines were inducing myocarditis in some individuals.

Remember how they've been wrong about everything. Trust your instincts. Ignore propagandabots.

What most of you still supporting "vaccine" failed to understand is that a jab cannot be developed in less that 1 year. It was a huge experiment and many people paid with either their lives or have suffered severe damage. All for a virus that kill less that common influenza, which a much more dangerous corona virus than covid.

Actually, the vaccine was developed relatively quickly. The testing and ramp-up is what took the vast majority of time.

You're sort of following the pre operation warp speed statements that the press and "experts" were spouting before they actually did it.

But now there are vaccines for covid that are made in the standard fashion. It took them longer to get out of the gate, but they're around. Not sure if they're in the US, though.

Multiple statements you made are just wrong.

There is no law of nature that says a vaccine cannot be made in a year, in the same way that there is no law of nature forbidding any of our technological artifacts that we use every day.

Influenza is not a coronavirus.

Influenza does not kill anywhere near as much as the original SARS-CoV-2 strain.

And mortality was not the only concern regarding the pandemic.

It never had before, because a commercial mRNA vaccine had never been the right trade off of immunity vs development time.

Until COVID-19 there had not been a pandemic we needed to address with a vaccine since mRNA vaccination tech became widespread several decades ago. If we had enough time to develop a vaccine, why sell a new one that doesn’t work as well as the old kind?

The discussion here is absolutely rancid. So here are the actual the salient points from the study:

Out of 25 people that died post-vaccination, four patients had signs of myocarditis. That's a fraction of a fraction of people.

> Myocarditis is another manifestation reported during SARS-CoV-2-infection [24]. It is under debate whether myocarditis in COVID-19 is primarily caused by the viral infection or whether it occurs secondary as a consequence of the host´s immune response, in particular by T-lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity or as a consequence of the cytokine storm observed during COVID-19

We don't know whether or not Myocarditis is a result of the infection or the immune response; in either scenario people who are predisposed to myocarditis would likely have similar reactions during either infection or vaccine.

> However, the vaccine against smallpox, based on a vaccinia virus, is reported to cause (epi-)myocarditis in rare cases

Smallpox vaccines can also trigger myocarditis despite being a more 'traditional' vaccine.

> The reported incidence of (epi-)myocarditis after vaccination is low and the risks of hospitalization and death associated with COVID-19 are stated to be greater than the recorded risk associated with COVID-19 vaccination [29]. Importantly, infectious agents may also cause lymphocytic myocarditis with a similar immunophenotype, thus meticulous molecular analyses is required in all cases of potentially vaccination-associated myocarditis.

The risk factor is low and the chances of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 in even otherwise healthy people is higher versus the risk from vaccination, similar to other vaccinations.

This is not a definitive link between the two, but rather a call for further investigation and to ensure that at-risk individuals are caught earlier and monitored.

This is the most straightforward conclusion. Some people’s hearts don’t like the immune response to Covid. Since everyone is going to get it eventually, avoiding the vax seems based on myocarditis seems illogical.

It seems obvious at this point that there is a mechanism of action of the drug in the vaccine that can harm the heart and it’s highly likely this can lead to death. It’s time to stop mandating it for kids.

Obvious according to who? I literally directly addressed that claim, so I'll quote it again for you:

If myocarditis is a result of the immune system response to the spike protein then infection by COVID and/or vaccination can potentially trigger a response, with COVID likely triggering an even worse response with what we know and how it travels through the body. Additionally, as I also mentioned and will quote:

> However, the vaccine against smallpox, based on a vaccinia virus, is reported to cause (epi-)myocarditis in rare cases

Smallpox vaccines can also trigger myocarditis despite being a more 'traditional' vaccine.

We distributed smallpox vaccines and managed to eradicate smallpox thanks to being thorough.

Yes, thank you. Also, important to call out ages here:

> Median age at death was 58 years (range 46–75 years).

I keep seeing "young men" over and over in the comments. These are not the people being studied here.

N is too small (but that's fine). The study is surely opening up an interesting window for future research.

Could it be a side effect of (accidental) intravenous injections, leading to a more pronounced immune reaction?

I will just leave it here for everyone able to read between the lines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJ20spGymE

Believe your own eyes and ears. The raw data became completely useless once the federal government gave hospitals a blank check for particular codes and treatments.

I was reading it open-mindedly but the use of "jab" is pretty suspicious. Anyone found using this term can be pretty much dismissed outright, right?

Yes. Especially when they put it in quotation marks and pretend that others said it, when they didn't.

Overall, autopsy findings indicated death due to acute arrhythmogenic cardiac failure.

Arrhythmia can be an indicator you need zinc.

Proatherogenic factors, released during Zn deficiency, increase the incidence of arrhythmias, strokes, CM, and many other CV system pathologies

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.68607...

Prior discussion with a researcher points to zinc as significant wrt covid.

Oh boy. The massive leaps in logic that this study will create on HN will be the greats leaps in leap history.

People will believe whatever they want to believe.

They only found 5 deaths that had no other real issue besides the vaccine. At that level more people died from shower accidents than vacccine-induced myocarditis (assuming that there was a causal link, which the authors are careful to say they didn't do that analysis).

Interesting, but I'd need far more medical knowledge than I have to put this into context. Does this mean people with existing heart conditions should avoid these vaccinations? Does it mean those at otherwise very low risk for severe COVID-19 shouldn't bother? I sure dunno.

Tiny sample size, and seemingly zero effort to determine whether the myocarditis was already present prior to vaccination.

As usual, this fails to be the smoking gun antivaxxers want it to be.

"Graphical abstract"... lol why?

That caught me off guard too. 'Did he ... did he hand draw this' ?

I'm surprised this sort of post is even allowed to be discussed

Myocarditis is rare and has been a part of the discussion from even before the vaccines were released, or at least the professional discussion. They were why the vaccines were not recommended for all ages to begin with.

> Myocarditis is rare

In absolute terms, yes. But relative to other vaccines, it's much more common.

I also read that the chances are like 1 in a million per dose (not the right number, you get the point) but since its per dose your chances are actually like 1 in 40,000 after 3-4 doses.

The vaccines were and still are mandated for people not at risk of severe disease, and myocarditis has been framed as a side effect not worth worrying about despite the fact that it literally can kill you. Not to mention without understanding the mechanism of action, we cannot estimate the number of true deaths that occurred without a myocarditis diagnosis.

That's because we're at the Big Unmasking Eve right now.

So many comments I see here today would be instantly [flagged] back in 2020/2021.

Clearly HN and its moderators are dancing to the tune of the global agenda.

Eventually there aren't enough fingers to plug all the holes in the dike.

I agree, it'll probably be scrubbed from the frontpage shortly. It's sad that this is the case, especially since it's published in a scientific journal.

The thread spent 11 hours on HN's front page.

What this article does describe, is how the fatal "adverse events" take place. It's useful to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms of action for undesireable outcomes. And of course it's one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Some seem to be interpreting this article as a confirmation that vaccines are inherently not safe. The thing is, every therapy, whether preventative or curative carries an element of risk. This paper is not weighing on the relative safety of the immunization.

To someone uncomfortable with the vaccine, this is of course unsettling to discuss, as it reinforces a fear. It's akin to discussing how exactly people's organs got smashed when they got killed by getting ran over by a bus. People who distrust busses will further cement their fears about them.

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