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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

This is out of date and incorrect. The latest data shows that the risk of myocarditis in children after two doses vastly exceeds the risk of myocarditis posed by the virus:

https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1437876328640876544

Better breakdowns by age and gender show a risk of myocarditis after two doses as high as 1 in 3000:

https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1437067899089219589

This number has been steadily increasing, as time passes. Current consensus seems to be that one dose is the optimal tradeoff between risk and reward for young children.

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Within that Twitter thread, there’s an interesting article on science based medicine that goes into this topic in detail.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-ant...

That report doesn’t appear to talk about case rates of myocarditis due to COVID at all. It compares COVID hospitalization rates to vaccine-related myocarditis case rates. Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?

Covid hospitalizations are a superset of myocarditis cases. If you broke out Covid-induced myocarditis, the comparison would be even more lop-sided against the vaccines.

> Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?

Yes. It is not an assumption. Myocarditis is not a mild condition, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Hmm. https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccin...

> With or without treatment, the "clinical course appears mild"

> Patients commonly received NSAIDs, steroids, and colchicine for treatment of vaccine-associated myocarditis.

These are.. not comparable to typical COVID hospitalization outcomes, are they?

In children? Yes.

The (very) few kids who end up hospitalized for Covid have serious co-morbidities that are easy to pre-screen (e.g. severe obesity). For these children, a full vaccination is recommended. Nobody is arguing about that. For healthy kids, it's very different.

It's great that most kids with myocarditis don't end up in the ICU, but being put in the hospital to get hooked up to an IV and an MRI scan is not a good outcome for an otherwise healthy kid who would would have -- at most -- a head cold from SARS-CoV2.

Even if we accept this reasoning (It’s not clear to me that the myocarditis cases are more than ‘call your doc, rest up and take ibuprofen’, and I believe that applies to cases among non-hospitalized COVID patients too), but the last I saw the effective reproduction rate for COVID was >1, so every otherwise healthy kid who gets a ‘head cold’ is also going to pass it on to someone else, right?

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