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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Wonder how this change the benefit vs risk trade-offs. I've personally known two people who had myocarditis and ER visits after the vaccine (which seems unlikely for a X in 100,000 event; given I probably only know maybe fifty people tops who might share their adverse reactions with me), but if vaccines provide lasting protection, rare side effects can be justified.

Now, if annual boosters are required (along with the associated risks for myocarditis and other side effects), for young/healthy/fit people, it could very turn out that the harms outweigh the benefits.

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Myocarditis could be caused by wrong application of the vaccines.

From what I understand, people that apply the vaccine should 'aspirate', which basically means:

1) insert vaccine at location where muscle is supposed to be 2) slightly retract to see if blood enters inside the jab 3) if no blood is entering the jab, apply vaccine. Otherwise throw away and retry with new vaccine.

If blood was returned, in that case the vaccine is at a location of an artery and having vaccine applied to arteries seem to have a high correlation to causing myocarditis.

More info in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsACTX0_ihs

many vaccine administrators refuse to aspirate, they say its no longer necessary.

>Otherwise throw away and retry with new vaccine.

Could this be in any way related?

Ah yes, the highly educated CVS parking lot vaccine administrator.

I called my local doctor asking for the vaccine because I wanted it administered by someone used to delivering vaccines and trained in same. They don’t have them and referred me to CVS and Walgreens.

I cannot help but wonder if the administration is correlated in the high number of adverse events.

It could be as many people who have complained of long term issues, also mentioned they felt metallic taste immediately 15 seconds after the administration strongly hinting that vaccine hit the bloodstream.

In Germany the Vaccine commission recommends against aspiration because it may cause discomfort and there's no benefit to the patient. I don't think anybody does it, it's been like this for years and I'm not aware of any changes during the pandemic.

It was certainly not recommended when I got my shot mid 2021 and I had to explicitly ask for it, because I got AstraZeneca, which causes blood clots in the brain and those in turn were suspected to be correlated with a potential accidental intravenous injection.

Not true, in Taiwan all nurses aspirate with this vaccine.

I meant nobody in Germany, I have no idea how it’s done in other countries :-)

100% agree, both of my friends who ended up in the ER mentioned the doctor did not aspirate (one works in healthcare so knows this).

> Myocarditis could be caused by wrong application of the vaccines.

Probably if you hit an artery. Also I saw many nurses disinfecting wrongly, you are supposed to wait a few seconds after applying disinfectants.

Risk of myocarditis from the virus is higher than the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm

And your odds of knowing 2 kids / young adults who both got myocarditis reactions to the vaccine are roughly 1-in-500 if you know 50 people who got the vaccine to the point you would have heard about them getting myocarditis. That isn't winning-the-lottery odds.

It also isn't clear that boosters will be required (the title study is not terribly good and is full of confounding issues), particularly since the older age groups that really need boosters don't overlap with the younger age groups that have the higher rate of myocarditis as a side effect. We also have no data on the side effects of boosters in those younger age groups and if they produce myocarditis at the same rate as the initial dose.

We also don't even have any information on immunological waning of boosters and there's reason to believe that immunity after boosting will be considerably more durable. Some virologists are of the opinion that it always should have been a 3 shot series with a booster after 6 months and then you're done--but we're in the process of discovering the right dosing schedule on the fly.

> And your odds of knowing 2 kids / young adults who both got myocarditis reactions to the vaccine are roughly 1-in-500 if you know 50 people who got the vaccine to the point you would have heard about them getting myocarditis. That isn't winning-the-lottery odds.

That isn't true, if the chance is 1 in 100k and you know 50 then the chance of at least one of them getting it would be about 1 in 2k, this is an overestimate of the chance but it isn't too far off. Similarly for these low probabilities we can just multiply them to get 2, still an overestimate so the probability of 2 of his friends would be less than 1 in 4 millions, which is lottery level.

If it is 10 per 50k, just increase the chance by 100 and you get 1 per 20k, still small.

The chance is 4 in 100k per that article I cited.

With children having a much lower risk profile to start with and the same or similar risk of adverse effects as adults, parents may have some tough choices ahead.

The choice actually isn’t tough at all if you listen to your doctor instead of social media.

The thing is, doctors may have no idea about what the exact risks of those vaccines are. Suggestions coming from the top for most of them are to obviously just give out the vaccines, except for some very minor edge cases.

Considering how much gaslighting reportedly vaccine injured have experienced from not just their relatives, but also doctors and others in medical communities, I do feel that many doctors may not have a good understanding of risk vs benefits on this one.

Especially in the beginning of summer, there may be more awareness now, but plenty of cases where vaccine injured complain about what happened and doctors don't believe them or simply tell them they can't treat them as there's no official protocol for that.

As a clear example of the level of misinformation that persists among doctors, a 2015 Credit Suisse Foundation report found that 40% of nutritionists and 70% of general practitioners falsely believed eating cholesterol-rich food raises blood levels of cholesterol. This is despite it being proven otherwise over 35 years ago and repeatedly re-proven.

https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

You shouldn't believe randos on social media, but doctors are not some magically well informed class. Many of them are persistently misinformed and fail to update their priors.

We're not vaccinating children to protect them. It's to protect adults.

I just scheduled my son's appointment. Yes, his risk is low, but even minor infections have unknown effects on the brain, some referencing as many as 30% of survivors continue to have symptoms.

All of the adults in his life are already vaccinated. I choose to vaccinate him not to protect adults, but because it is a lower risk than covid.

No the risk of the virus to children is also much lower when they're vaccinated than when they're not.

Vaccination side-effects tend toward the immediate, not the long-term. You can bet a close eye is being kept on paediatric adverse reactions — no one is going to look good if children die. It really shouldn’t be a tough choice for very long: no more than several weeks. Meanwhile we know the virus wreaks havoc in a lot of bodies and we have no idea of its long-term effects… like with chickpox => shingles, getting it as a kid may be misery in old age.

Yeah, there have been couples together getting heart issues.

E.g. Daniel Shep who had it with his partner and then he decided to call around his social circle to urge anyone feeling chest pain after vaccine to go get it checked out and his cousin got this as well.

Given 1 out of 100,000 chance for it, having any couple in the world to have both these side effects would be 10% if there were 1 billion couples.

And according to anecdotal reports, heart issues are only on 3rd spot with frequency, with fatigue and brain fog being before it, which are quite impossible to link back to the vaccine based on anecdotal reports.

> Given 1 out of 100,000 ...

I do wonder how many people can even recognise the warning signs of myocarditis. There are probably a surprising number of young people who don't know exactly where their heart sits. It'd be quite easy to be off by 3-4 inches.

The chance of getting myocarditis from Corona is still higher and more severe. And don't forget the higher risks for blood clots, strokes etc. And we know that some viruses like HPV have long term effects like raising the probability of certain kinds of cancer. It's a risky bet. You can stop getting vaccinated if yearly shot should be necessary but you can't stop being infected once.

The question would seem to be out of the x million people in those (young/healthy/fit) categories, how many have died from the vaccine, compared to how many have died from Covid.

Looking at a breakdown of Covid deaths in the US by age https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... we see 4288 deaths in the 18-29 category, which AFAIK is still a lot higher than the numbers of deaths being reported proximate to vaccination, in that age group. So, at the moment, it seems like (assuming you trust the figures of course) it's still better to get the vaccine.

I really don't understand where this idea of "annual boosters" is coming from. SARS-CoV2 is clearly on the trajectory to become one of the many viruses that are endemic in humans. This means that everyone will occasionally get exposed to it which updates the immune memory. The question is how to get there while minimizing the damage to the population. The mRNA vaccines were originally tested with two doses which appears to provide a strong and relatively long lasting protection against severe disease. Now it turned out that giving a third dose after a few months improves the protection even more, which is particularly relevant for high-risk patients.

> I really don't understand where this idea of "annual boosters" is coming from.

There has beena political firestorm where people are being forced from their jobs for not being vaccinated, ostensibly due to the risk of transmission. Now we discover that vaccinated people become unvaccinated over time (as far as transmissiblity is concerned).

The logical conclusion is to start sacking/ostracising people who do not get regular (likely annual) booster shots.

I think that the vaccine mandates were primarily a reaction to the large increase in hospitalizations and deaths at the time. This was primarily driven by unvaccinated people due to their higher risk of transmitting and contracting the disease and the much higher risk of getting seriously ill. In an endemic situation with widespread immunity this kind of surge should not be a problem.

That sounds like a reasonable line of thinking that I'd be happy to let slide. But there is quite a lot of evidence that the pro-mandate crowd are unreasonable and don't think that way - which is why mandates were a tool being deployed in the first place.

If it was necessary to mandate vaccines in 2020 then it will still be necessary in 2022 and beyond. The changes are all marginal.

I find it infuriating how anyone who dared to question vaccines and their side effects profile were immediately ostracized, censored, hated and gaslighted.

Now it's coming out more and more how there are many adverse effects and much more frequent than what was originally claimed which in addition with how fast they lose their efficacy changes risk rewards profile very much.

In my life I have never seen something that you aren't allowed to question as much as those vaccines. For me, I'm by nature going to feel that something's off and it only makes me dig deeper, increasing distrust.

The press. "Israel Is Preparing for Possible Fourth Covid Vaccine Dose".

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

Because “eradicating covid” apparently is still among some politicians’ and public health authorities’ wish list. Never mind that it’s another pipe dream like “covid zero” policy.

Waning immunity seems to affect only the probability of getting infected. Vaccine effectiveness against serious disease, hospitalization, and death are still very high. So, maybe boosters won't be for everyone

Israel has boosted 2.8 million people as of Sept 2021, a little more than half the vaccinated population. Total vax eligible population is 7 million, but some of them are not vaxed, thus can't take the 3rd booster.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

I'm not downplaying the seriousness of myocarditis, but that's just the swelling of the heart. Swelling happen all the time on all organs of the body, and it can be triggered by a simple flu too, in fact all diseases trigger some form of swelling.

Myocarditis is also a spectrum, some can have it and not even realize it and some will end up at the ER.

That's why I hope the global community shifts the focus from periodic vaccination to finding an efficient and safe cure.

Cures generally don't exist

I don't understand what you mean. While it's true that the traditional approach to virus diseases was "rest and wait until the immune system does its job", these days are long gone and we have many viral diseases well controlled by medicine. Sometimes you diminish the viral load to the level you can function normally, sometimes you prevent the replication so that the virus is no longer detectable etc. Yes, there are many viral diseases we have no cure for, but wouldn't it make sense if we treated it as a challenge - and one of the most urgent for the whole humanity?

Why do you think a cure is even possible (within any reasonable amount of time)? For many years people have been trying to come up with cures for AIDS, various cancers, and even simple colds. While we can manage those better now, we still don't have true cures for them.

I can give you many counter examples, such as hepatitis C, that were previously incurable or hard to cure. For some diseases we have managed to get a sterilizing (=complete) cure, for some others (like HIV) a functional cure (=you live long and healthy even though the virus is still in your body). In part, it is a function of cost allocation.

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