Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

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> The vaccine is safer than infection

Not for everyone, sadly:

Boys more at risk from Pfizer jab side-effect than Covid, suggests study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

> US researchers say teenagers are more likely to get vaccine-related myocarditis than end up in hospital with Covid

Why COVID-19 Vaccines Should Not Be Required for All Americans https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/why-covid-19-vacci...

> Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and editor in chief of MedPage Today, argues that mandating vaccines for "every living, walking American" is, as of now, not well-supported by science. ... The risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 in kids ages 5 to 17 is 0.3 per million for the week ending July 24, 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We also know that the risk of hospitalization after the second vaccine dose due to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is about 50 per million in that same age group.

> Boys more at risk from Pfizer jab side-effect than Covid, suggests study

That study (which was still a pre-print, not reviewed) was retracted.

It didn’t make any sense for the authors to compare the risk of myocarditis (most of which is benign) after receiving the vaccine to the risk of hospitalization from a COVID infection. Comparing two different outcomes against each other is deliberately misleading.

COVID infection is also well-known to cause myocarditis at high rates, but the study conveniently ignored that.

> That study (which was still a pre-print, not reviewed) was retracted.

That study wasn't retracted. It's still here:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

Maybe you're confusing it with another one. There was a Canadian preprint on myocarditis (sample size: 32) that got retracted by its authors:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/university-of-ottawa-he...

To make the confusion complete, there is a study on myocarditis that got peer reviewed and accepted for publication in an Elsevier cardiology journal, only to be "temporarily removed":

> The Publisher regrets that this article has been temporarily removed. A replacement will appear as soon as possible in which the reason for the removal of the article will be specified, or the article will be reinstated.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014628062...

The study was not retracted:

SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17: A Stratified National Database Analysis https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

and the CDC itself supports an even more "radical" conclusion:

Why COVID-19 Vaccines Should Not Be Required for All Americans https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/why-covid-19-vacci...

> Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and editor in chief of MedPage Today, argues that mandating vaccines for "every living, walking American" is, as of now, not well-supported by science. ... The risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 in kids ages 5 to 17 is 0.3 per million for the week ending July 24, 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We also know that the risk of hospitalization after the second vaccine dose due to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is about 50 per million in that same age group.

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that pediatric study. In hindsight it’s not surprising that children might need a different quantity of vaccine than adults to tilt the balance further away from the harms caused by rare reactions.

> it’s not surprising that children might need a different quantity of vaccine

Or perhaps none at all, given that the survival rate for unvaccinated children ages 0 to 19 is 99.9973%:

Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in community-dwelling populations with emphasis on the elderly: An overview https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.08.21260210v...

Yea but children live among the rest of us.

And they are no different in relation to risks of transmission than what we know are between 40% and 60% of vaccinated susceptible to asymptomatic breakthrough cases.

Are you saying we should hurt the young to protect the old nevertheless, which would be the result of such a policy ?

It’s not clear to me what your position is. We are talking rare harms, perhaps dozens per million, and no deaths that I know of. So I’m unconcerned. As more data comes out maybe my mind will change and I’ll agree with you. But you seem to be nipping for a fight and I don’t really care to engage.

You don't know of any deaths because most physicians and the media steadfastly refuse to attribute any to the vaccine. There are thousands of reports in VAERS, many of them of deaths in very young, healthy people hours or days after getting the vaccine.

It's not the Pfizer vaccine, but the AstraZeneca vaccine has been publicly acknowledged as the cause of BBC presenter Lisa Shaw's death.

If you even want to cite VAERS as a reliable source of _anything_ it means you don't even know the first thing about the topic.

It is not reliable, for sure, and we don't know by what factor or which way the error goes.

It might show ten times the real number, or half the real number. That would be either 1'700 people or 34'000 dead in the US alone.

I wouldn't discount the lower limit either, 1'700 is still a lot and far from a small risk.

You've essentially admitted it's an unreliable source that can be complete fiction for all we know. It's not validated by any medical institution, no one has jumped to defend it, none of the claims can be independently validated. I might as well just take my pandemic advice from a radio talk show host.

You're just robotically repeating fact-check talking points. Lots of young healthy people have been killed by the Covid vaccine and, for all its problems, the reason they're waving gigantic "DO NOT LOOK HERE" signs around VAERS is to give people like you an excuse to keep your heads firmly planted in the sand.

> Lots of young healthy people have been killed by the Covid vaccine

Cite your sources, you have a wildly outlandish claim that is beyond the expert consensus on the topic.

> It’s not clear to me what your position is. [...] As more data comes out maybe my mind will change and I’ll agree with you. But you seem to be nipping for a fight and I don’t really care to engage.

I am a big proponent of the precautionary principle when the health of the young is concerned. I also believe that such things ought to be held sacred (whether you are religious or not).

While precautions must of course be taken to protect those at risk, one of the consequences of my positions would be that yes, even as childless as I am, I'd rather lose vaccinated > 40 y.o. people to a breakthrough infection than risk hurting a child in the short or long terms.

This is why I'd rather wait for data to come in before vaccinating the young than the other way round.

Survival rate is not the only measure. COVID survivors exhibit numerous lingering problems including myocarditis. The aim of the vaccine is more than just keeping people from dying.

There are similar studies for adults.

The reality is, nobody knows how dangerous the vaccines are relative to COVID because the trials weren't sufficiently reliable or well powered to show it, the data on COVID is corrupted by people being reported as died of/with COVID or hospitalized with COVID when the true causes were different, and all data on vaccines then is horribly corrupted by swivel-eyed hatred of "anti vaxxers". meaning reports of people being seriously injured or killed by the vaccines are constantly being swept under the carpet.

Anyone who thinks they have a clear picture of this, or that they understand the tradeoffs, just isn't aware of how useless the data has been (deliberately) made.

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