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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

You know, my father in law had some kind of stroke about 2 weeks after his first shot. I thought maybe it was more than coincidence since there were reports of increased occurence of stroke with the virus. Hard to say if it's just coincidence or not, but this paper is making me wonder if it may have been an adverse event.

The really frustrating part is that most doctors don't report things like this to VAERS. How can we have good data to analyze and find correlations if most doctors do only the legal minimum reporting?! They are only requires to report the types of known adverse events listed in the packet insert. This doesn't help identify new types of adverse events. This is the second time in as many years that I've witnessed something that has the potential to be a rare but serious issue related to vaccines not be entered by the doctors. I had to report one myself, and it looks like this other one will simply go unreported.

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There are statistics such as all-cause-mortality that could be correlated to vaccination rollout.

It takes a while for this data to become available, and if it is, health authorities are unlikely to attempt to find such a correlation.

So far, I haven't been able to find a credible analysis, many of the "critical" voices are likely to stay silent due to social pressure.

I am currently as we speak in Nebraska because my mother-in-law who is in her early sixties, suffered cardiac arrest hours after getting her second shot of Pfizer.

She is now in a coma and it doesn't look like she's going to wake up.

To your point the doctors immediately refuse to say a word about the vaccine or even considerate as a potential causal factor. Only after several days of tests where they determine that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her heart, have they now considered that the vaccine may have been a cause.

And additionally no they have not reported this to VAERS. And with the covid protocols in hospitals not allowing most of us in, my wife and her sister aren't very assertive, and therefore haven't pushed.

My mom refuses to be vaccinated because my grandma’s health tanked (and then she died) after taking the vaccine.

She was old, so, you know - who knows. Certainly it was worth the risk at her age. It’s concerning though that if it does come out at a later date that there are more vaccine complications than we think due to how rushed this is... it will really hurt vaccine confidence.

It’s a shame they were politicized. My mother-in-law keeps on asking if I’ve been vaccinated, even though I had a serious case of COVID in December. She also disapproves of my wife, who is pregnant, not getting the vaccine. I’ve seen YouTube put forward videos on their front page trying to convince pregnant women to be vaccinated.

It’s crazy. Chances are it’d be fine, especially with the mRNA vaccines. But my wife was already exposed when I had it, can still work from home, and confirmed cases are in free fall. It’s like people have completely disregarded risk/reward due to their political affiliation, and that goes both ways.

Well said. The value proposition is different for everyone. I've noticed a bunch of false or misapplied statements from both sides too.

I went to dinner with my in-laws. They were supposed to get an outdoor table but ended up getting an indoor one since they are vaccinated (I think in an effort to pressure me). My father-in-law was giving me all sorts of nonsense about not being vaccinated even though I'm low risk in both lifestyle and comorbidities. I WFH, only go to the food store or distanced outdoor events, I use an N95 mask (that I had from woodworking). I plan to hold off on the vaccine until I go back to the office. At that point there should be a few more month of data for me to look at (even though the data quality in VAERS is abysmal due to lack of reporting). He thought my plan of waiting was stupid.

Even after vaccination, he has a .2% chance of fatality based on age and comorbidities. Unvaccinated I have a .03% chance (likely very much lower but can't find the numbers without comorbidities in my age group). How can he criticize someone with vastly lower risk? There is a point of diminishing return too. If I get the vaccine I eliminate .0285% risk, while it eliminates 3.8% for him. Clearly it provides more value to some than others.

I caught it in mid-February and had virtually no symptoms except for loss of sense of smell.

I have very high levels of antibodies and was advised by my doctor to hold off on getting the vaccine. Several coworkers in mine have insisted that I get the vaccine or they will not participate in a picnic where I am present. They are all vaccinated so I don't really understand the reasoning, but I think there's some strong psychology at play just like your mother-in-law.

I'm pretty racked with guilt at this point because I was strongly encouraging my mother-in-law to get the vaccine so she would stop living like a shut-in.

My wife just came home from the hospital and it's official: Her brain activity has continued to deteriorate to a point where she is brain dead.

It turns out that there are several cardiac arrest events for every 100,000 shots administered.

So it is a rare event but not as rare as many people think. Obviously the media isn't going to report, because it would cause millions to not get vaccinated. It's understandable, but yeah, my head is exploding right now.....

Sorry hear that.

I don't see how it is understandable for the media not to report the full story. The point of a free press in a democracy is supposed to be for the people to be informed of the issues and decide for themselves.

I'm sorry to hear that.

I'm pretty sure they are legally required to report it if there was a death or near death issue. I'm not sure what the timeframe is for when it stops being required to be reported (I would think same day would be a no brainer).

https://vaers.hhs.gov/faq.html

this paper is discussing mechanisms limited to the J&J and Astrazeneca vaccines

Are the mechanisms limited to those, or did they only investigate the proteins specific to those vaccines? My understanding is that they only looked at the spike proteins for those vaccines and did not evaluate the others. My understanding is that the proteins in the others have the potential to interact similarly with the ACE2 mechanism but were not evaluated.

The issue seems to be with the DNA -> mRNA transcription required by the adenovirus vector of the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, leading to mutated spike proteins which can cause clots. The Pfizer/Moderna shots don't use this mechanism so weren't the subject of the paper.

(This is not my specialty at all, just summarizing the abstract & what other commenters wrote since nobody replied to you yet)

I'm sorry about your father-in-law.

Oh, I see. So similar mutations don't occur with straight mRNA. I think that makes sense. But also I thought the exact spike protein structure could vary with mRNA vaccines too based on the patient's genetic make up because the mRNA only encodes a portion of the spike and the rest of the spike is generated by the host cell.

I don't know, that not my area either. My main two points are that if covid itself can increase risk of stroke and now some covid vaccines can too, then I wonder if other covid vaccines might have contributed to this anecdotal one. The second point plays into the first. I would be less likely to question it if we had better reporting in the VAERS system.

He actually seems fine now, so he recovered quickly.

A stroke within 2 weeks of the shot should be reportable. The CDC would then compare that event to the background rate to see if it is significant.

Docs are seeing heart inflammation too with the vaccines where a couple of people have died. There were reports out of Israel and then the US military has documented it. The US military has an extremely robust vaccine monitoring program that are the primary evidence. Apparently they had issues in the past with the smallpox vaccine which lead to the new process.

They can report it. The thing is, most simply don't report it because it's not required. (The emergency approval requires it, but doesn't define how long after vaccination it is required)

My kid had an SVT 2 days after receiving 4 simultaneous vaccines. No prior issues, no family history, no cause determined by the doctors. They said that couldn't possibly be related, but when asked for any data/explanation on that theory they had none. (Later doctors said there could be some sort of connection) So they're telling me that they don't know what the cause is, but that it's definitely not the vaccines, even though there's no evidence to rule that out... yeah, ok. There's the possibility of coincidence, but it's astronomically small. The only way to tell one way or the other is to have the data from the larger population, which isn't happening because it's not being reported. I had to submit the report myself in that case.

I wanted to crunch the numbers myself, but the major issue is that even a small number of unreported cases will greatly skew the results when dealing with rare issues. You basically need anonymized medical records (I know, those don't really exist) so that you have a known population size and any medical treatment would have been recorded even if not reported.

We wouldn't have much of an issue of doctors being hush hush if they didn't have to be worried about being sued all the time. If doctors could just do their jobs and not worry, I could see them not caring as much as opposed to when their ass is on the line basically.

In general I agree. The VEARS system shields a lot of the liability for vaccines. There's really no legal reason not to report. In fact, they are required by law to report some types of reactions.

I think the main driver is a lack of understanding and education of how the system should be used.

> How can we have good data to analyze and find correlations if most doctors do only the legal minimum reporting?

We can't, that's the point. It's not like you, random person on the internet, have thought of something the industry and regulators haven't. With all the modern technology at our disposal, the industry has simply chosen not to do this.

Reminds me of the 2008 housing crisis. The regulators have to be right and Cornwell are just a bunch of kids.

Also it's important to remember that Physicians are the mechanics of the healthcare industry.

Scientists are the ones that advance healthcare.

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