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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

The paper authors note that, statistically, the prevalence of this non-fatal side effect is very small, relative to the sometimes-fatal disease they're being vaccinated against:

> It is estimated that COVID-19 vaccination in males aged 12 to 29 years can prevent 11000 COVID-19 cases, 560 hospitalizations, 138 intensive care unit admissions, and 6 deaths compared with 39 to 47 expected myocarditis cases.

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I don't know if the situation in the US is that bad to justify general vaccination of children, but at least in Europe it's explicitly not recommended by the appropriate decision body in several countries. Both the STIKO (German vaccine advisory board) and UK JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) only advise certain children between 12-18 to get the vaccine.

Here's JCVI's statement on myocarditis for example: "There are emerging reports from the UK and other countries of rare but serious adverse events, including myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart), following the use of Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 and Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccines in younger adults. [...] Data on the incidence of these events in children and young people are currently limited, and the longer-term health effects from the myocarditis events reported are not yet well understood" Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccinat...

Initially I posted that your range of 12-29 doesn't match the 12-18 range of the patients in this study, but it seems to be a direct quote. I can't understand why they mix up things so badly, because obviously there's different patterns of behaviour, risks and benefits for 12-18 and 19-29. They even say "Despite the risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination, the benefits of vaccination likely outweigh risks in children and adolescents" right before giving an age range which includes adults to justify their statement.

Thank you for the b.l.u.f.- I think reading the vaccine inserts and freaking out is a bit like looking at the MSDS for your household cleaners and having a panic attack.

As soon as my kids are old enough they are getting the shot just like the wife and I- better than the death I have seen in my area from this delta variant. Our city had a 8 year old who had to get a heart transplant locally due to delta.

> Our city had a 8 year old who had to get a heart transplant locally due to delta.

Could it be possible he had to get a heart transplant because of potential Myocarditis...?

No, since the child is 8.

Myocarditis. Rare enough to find it ways onto the fact sheet. https://www.fda.gov/media/144413/download -- The CDC has published clinical considerations relevant to myocarditis and pericarditis associated with administration of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/clinicalconsiderations...).

As for the vaccine insert. There isn't one. Please find it, and not just the fact sheet that's being offered. I'll save you some time and tell you why you can't find it. Clinical trial practitioners don't need to place inserts in packages for trials or EUA. Its called double blind. And anyone taking this is in the trials. If the FDA approves this poison, you can be sure that that is intentional genocide.

I received a safety insert when I got the vaccine. It was pretty thick, actually, and covered potential side effects and risks. This was at a Walgreens pharmacy so I assume that's a broad corporate policy, not just a single pharmacy location.

But is that risk beneficial relative to infection for those with existing infection immunity? That’s what doesn’t seem to be concluded.

If population immunity was 50%, it would still be worth the myocarditis risk, since half the numbers are still vast and terrible. I imagine the inflection is up around 70-80% immunity, and there's the "no more deaths from corona" point to consider as well. But we don't know what the end of crowd development and transmission of variants is yet, so it's hard to predict the earliest point in time we might usefully reevaluate the balance of risk-of-covid versus risk-of-myocarditis. That sounds like an excellent problem to have, relative to today.

> If population immunity was 50%, it would still be worth the myocarditis risk, since half the numbers are still vast and terrible.

Would you believe me if I said you are essentially using the same argument a eugenicist would make?

Would you believe me if I said you are essentially using the same argument an anti-vaxxer would make?

Get over yourself haha.

No, because it's not. You're saying that word "eugenicist" -- it does not mean what you think it means.

Is the mRNA vaccine not a gene therapy drug which essentially carries instructions on how to make the spike protein?

You haven’t factored in how much immunity improvement is conferred by vaccine over infection. If Covid infection + vaccine is 0% improvement over Covid infection, then no matter the population immunity, any risk outweighs the benefit.

You are assuming testing before vaccination, your parent is assuming no testing before vaccination.

There is not data that compares effectiveness of immunity so this is probably pure speculation.

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