Myocarditis After Immunization with mRNA Covid-19 Vaccines in US Military
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
Note that 95% of the cases being picked up here are in the military, presumably because they have better physical screening or something. The vaccine doesn't know they are in the military.
Athletes will notice a 10% reduction in heart functionality, the average person won’t.
Big question is, how large is the effect really, and are there 2nd order effects?
I had chest pains a couple weeks after my second shot, had an EKG and asked about this. No myocarditis. I had torn a rib. Can you imagine how many people have phantom pains that don't get an EKG, but post to "confirm" they had symptoms? It's bad enough trying to get all these people to just get a goddamn vaccine without scaring them with shit that has basically no chance of happening, has no major long-term consequences if it does happen, and that practically everyone who eats a subway sandwich will have symptoms of.
The internet is not good for hypochondriacs.
The hard part is matching symptoms with your health history and eliminating the improbable/impossible causes/diseases. Which is really hard, even for trained doctors.
I did look it up. I didn't like what I saw. But I decided to just ignore that information, take my goddamn vax status and go to a fucking bar.
[edit] I'm still here.
Not true. At this point over a billion people on Earth had Covid. (And that's a low estimate.)
There aren't 10 million people with new heart injuries in 2020.
The only way to really know, would have been have worldwide, forced testing of every single person, weekly.
EG billions of test per week.
There were no tests at the start, not enough worldwide testing ability for the first 6 months, and once capacity existed, generally only people who felt sick were tested.
And that's in rich nations.
And you think hospitals would have records of patients testing positive for a disease we had no knowledge of let alone means of testing before either of those came into place...
Second point: Hospitals were recording symptoms of covid even prior to widely available testing, and as soon as the virus spiked their ICU beds were full. This has been the case in every country in the world. They didn't need to test patients. Those patients were dying in the hallway, and on ventilators. The spike was clear and obvious in each country when it arrived.
And in each country, the percentage of people testing positive who had no symptoms was roughly the same. So the argument that there have been 5x as many people as reported who had covid - and had no symptoms - is totally false.
Remember, fully asymptomatic infections aren't the only problem, there are also infections that technically have symptoms but they're too vague, commonplace and non-specific to lead to people getting tested.
Turns out in spite of all asymptomatic cases etc the guesstimates were fairly good.
Now Norway is an extremely rich country and healthcare is (generally) excellent here, but if asymptomatic cases were really widespread we should have seen some non trivial percentage showing up in the antibody tests that we weren't aware of earlier.
No matter the population density, rural or urban, people socialize at roughly the same rate nowadays.
Are you sure about that, and how do you figure? Covid-19 related deaths alone are 4M and that's only tracked deaths. We don't yet know the fallout and long term effects from non-fatal Covid-19. Research on temporary and permanent damage including "Long Covid" has only begun.
But with the data available right now, I have no problem imagining 10M Covid-19 related heart injuries globally.
E.g. there are studies, right now small scale (N=100), that suggest 4/5th of patients had "cardiac involvement" and 3/5th had "ongoing myocardial inflammation" after recovery from Covid-19 [1] (this doesn't yet mean permanent heart damage, nor is the small sample conclusive, but I think it's an indicator that we should pay careful attention to this area).
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
> Are adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine recordable on the OSHA recordkeeping log?
> DOL and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers' vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904's recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency's position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.
[0] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/fda-to-add-warning-on...
Widespread evidence of deadly side effects could not be suppressed.
But, medical people have long struggled to balance what they consider an informed patient, so, they paternalize.
"Paternalism" is only an attitude because doctors have to deal with tons of gullible people who are fed small amounts of truth they're not capable of comprehending, and large amounts of misinformation by people interested in selling them bleach, copper bracelets, and other "holistic cures". Put yourself in a doctor's shoes for a second. Paternalism is the only adequate response to a public stuffed to the gills with conspiracy thinking.
Both of these have improved over time, but I am now on a heart medication (weakish, Concor) that I wasn't before, to address the arrhythmias. I wonder what the long term damage might be and whether Covid actually took a few years off my life expectancy.
I would certainly have preferred getting my shots before contracting Covid.
They had a long-lasting CMV infection a year prior.
Is there evidence that viruses can cause arrhythmias and muscle twitching?
https://www.openaccessjournals.com/articles/neurological-and...
Interestingly, the cardiologist who took care of me had covid too, and he had muscle twitching lingering afterwards just like me.
IIRC, inflammatory response from the immune system causes it, so it can happen with vaccines as well. I am not a physician so I won't write conjectures or anything.
As a 26 yo, I got vaccinated anyway, here are my reasons if that can help others decide: I think the risks are still low, and I preffer a controlled, well-known (as millions take the same) injection to getting infected with some random pathogen. Moreover, it's not only my personal risk factor that I need to weight against, but the one of every other person I interact with. It's also a bit of duty towards society, and not wanting to actively participate in the epidemic as a viral carrier.
What kind of proximate cause would lead to this effect?
Or are you doubting the causality? I had a slightly elevated blood pressure, so I had EKGs every 6 months since approx. 2001. Never did I have any extra systoles. Zero.
But on the second day of my Covid infection, I started feeling strong palpitations that I never experienced before, and a subsequent EKG holter showed a shit-ton of arrhythmia episodes, fortunately not of the really serious kind. I had the luck to be examined at the best Czech cardio center (IKEM) and they told me that they have a load of post-Covid patients with similar manifestations, and that they put them on Concor first as a protocol. Helped me as well.
As for muscle twitching, the timing was the same and it is not a symptom you can miss. Pretty strong at some times, too. It is getting better, fortunately. Exercise helps a lot, though training hard can make it worse again for a day or so.
It's a fact that hospitilization and comorbidities go up almost exponentially with age
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
I think they meant that being a military man usually means a daily heavy load on the heart while strong and healthy. A hundred push-ups after a cross-country run may or may not be worse for ones heart than getting up from a chair too quickly at the age of 70. Also, one of power training rules is to skip days with inflammation. These 0.002% of guys could simply ignore this rule for some reason and face pretty known consequences. So it’s apples-to-oranges, but with a huge offset.
(probablilty of contracting COVID) * (probablity of heart injury in the military from COVID if someone contracts COVID)
The vaccine/viral infection -> exercise -> myocarditis link is a well known (to the medical community) link in other vaccines/viruses, including flu.
Therefore the "burden of proof" should not be to show that there is a link here too, but to show that there isn't despite it being a common thing in so many other viruses.
Therefore, the fact that people are not given advice not to exercise heavily following vaccination, especially in professions where daily heavy exercise is the norm like in the military, is causing unnecessary morbidity.
To come and say "yeah but it's still small" is not "putting things in perspective", since this is morbidity that is likely entirely preventable and unnecessary.
I wonder if anyone has considered the ethical implications of the gamification of vaccination in light of this, and if governments should be held responsible if someone took the vaccine to win a lottery but instead wound up injured.
"For all but 3 patients, the second dose of vaccine preceded their myocarditis presentations. Among the 3 patients presenting after an initial vaccine dose, all had confirmed COVID-19 infection more than 2 months prior to vaccination."
That naturally leads to a speculation - the long lasting post-covid myocarditis as a side-effect/manifestation of the acquired immunity (instead of say the direct viral damage during the actual illness period). Similar to when chronic fatigue syndrome was associated with something like post-flu increase of B-cells hanging around for months and was successfully treated with immunosuppressants ( https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/are-b-cells-to-blame... )
It is kind of fascinating to me from a generic systems POV that a lot of damage is kind of "self-inflicted", like the most deaths in the Spanish flu, especially in the 2nd wave, resulted from the immune system [over]reaction (and thus killed a lot of otherwise healthy adult individuals, not just the "weak"/children/elderly who would typically be the direct virus victims), not the virus itself. To me it parallels for example another large complex system - society - which similarly self-inflicts a lot of damage in order to fight societal ills.
I didn't feel anything about the whole ordeal though, apart from some sore muscles in the first days. Crazy interesting to quantify the amount of stuff going on in the background without you being aware of it.
EDIT: Specifically, during these 5 nights my stress level was reportedly _unmeasurable_ for about 50% of the time. Unmeasurable is common when you are physically active (making the PPG data too noisy to properly calculate normalized RR intervals) but very rare during sleep, so this probably indicated a very high amount of irregular/ectopic heartbeats.
Interestingly, we both actually had mild Covid in December and her Garmin didn't show such a "body battery" dip back then.
similar advice in Russia is to avoid alcohol - main Russian heart/health stressor :) - post-vaccine, originally for 42 days, later, after massive outpour of public displeasure to say the least, the recommended period was decreased to 6 days.
Obviously my antibodies were doing its job and everything now it’s back to normal. I did not suffer any other side effects like fever, headache, chest pain or tiredness.
Is this an uncommon reaction of the body during an immune response?
It's part of a normal immune response. Don't you notice your heart rate increase when you catch a flu?
I am curious how many of these individuals may have been exposed to Covid-19 before, even if they were asymptomatic and had never been tested. This may never be known.
If they were exposed to Covid-19, and still had viral particles in the heart, the vaccine could cause a major immune system ramp to go after those remnants.
And that could lead to myocarditis.
Does anyone have an official stats on the the common sequelae of long COVID and their likeliness, each?