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Comment by ppaattrriicckk | Hacker News Reader

This probably sounds harsh, but are all vaccine-bashing readers deliberately selectively-illiterate? In the abstract (academic for "TL;DR") it literally states that Covid is between 7 and 40 times more likely to cause Myocarditis.

And a lot of you write about palpitations, which can also be caused by stress and anxiety. I'm 30, in good physical shape, and used to have weekly episodes with irregular heartbeats due to severe stress. Now I'm vaccinated (which is for 99.999% of us obviously completely irrelevant to experiencing this, but a lot of commenters draw that conclusion) and the palpitations are gone. Let's not base conclusion on anecdotal evidence, please. For the same reason that my grandpa lived until 85 while smoking since he was 13.

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>it literally states that Covid is between 7 and 40 times more likely to cause Myocarditis.

There is no control group for unvaccinated people in this study. Everyone who got myocarditis from COVID had at least one dose of the vaccine. So the correct statement is "COVID is between 7 and 40 times more likely to cause myocarditis IF you have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine"

That's a very fair point. Hard to do anything about right now, since they unfortunately didn't include those.

However, while very hand-wavy on my part, I believe there's plenty of evidence that Covid on its own wreaks havoc on our cardiovascular system, so I'm definitely leaning towards it being the biggest sole risk here.

From what I've read it's more so the current state of cardiovascular health that leads to problems relating to COVID, e.g. comorbidities.

The study is “self-control” which means patients are compared before and after the exposure (vaccine or covid) for the outcome (myocarditis). So there is a control - the control for each person is their pre-exposure selves.

If you want to argue against the article I suggest considering the bias of being 1 year older after the exposure than before it. For a large population that might matter for myocarditis incidence. I suspect they have corrected for this however.

I think the point here is that the article should have said that Covid is between 7 and 40 times more likely to cause Myocarditis _for vaccinated people_ because unvaccinated people weren't studied.

No, because this study doesn't exist in a vacuum. The contribution is to quantify the relative risk between Covid and vaccines. We already know that Covid has a significant myocarditis risk on its own (as has any viral infection). On the other hand, the authors explicitly state they see no indication for an interaction after 28 days.

You are free to challenge the latter part, but so far there is no evidence that the vaccines "stay in your body" or something similar.

I think you might have misread the paper. Here is the relevant section about SARS-CoV-2 infections:

Amongst those with at least one dose, there were 3,028,867 (7.8%) individuals who had a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. Of these, 2,315,669 (6.0%) individuals tested positive before vaccination; while 713,198 (1.8%) and 298,315 (0.7%) tested positive after the first and second vaccine doses, respectively.

Nit, the 1 year is more noteworthy as time since vaccination, not age.

If these effects take 1 year to manifest, then it’s hard to identify the causal factor with this setup

> Now I'm vaccinated (which is for 99.999% of us obviously completely irrelevant to experiencing this, but a lot of commenters draw that conclusion) and the palpitations are gone. Let's not base conclusion on anecdotal evidence, please.

I am not claiming anything either way (neither pro-vax nor anti-vax) but your statement is a tad ironic since you literally draw a conclusion from your own, singular, anecdotal evidence.

That was the joke

So it was a joke? Sorry, they fly over my head when it comes to Covid. Everyone is so outraged about anything about it these days regardless in which they camp they fall.

Read it again. They implied that the vaccine cured their palpitations, to demonstrate the absurdity.

Exactly that - apologies for not elaborating myself. At least I couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks for being good sports about it, both :-)

> are all vaccine-bashing readers deliberately selectively-illiterate?

Yes, that's how discourse is done these days: text is a corpus from which you select the statements that support your position and discard the rest.

You are not immune. I promise you

I’ve had palpitations before from having too much caffeine regularly (yes, while stressed).

> used to have weekly episodes with irregular heartbeats due to severe

Off topic, but this happened to me as well. I was having up to 20,000 PVCs a day, and I believe they were brought on by stress. What did you end up doing to reduce them? Or did they slowly resolve on their own?

Try a good Magnesium supplement, this will bring down your general anxiety and also regulate heart contractions:

> In the heart, magnesium plays a key role in modulating neuronal excitation, intracardiac conduction, and myocardial contraction by regulating a number of ion transporters, including potassium and calcium channels.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29793664/

The abstract says that for all older than 16, but look at he data per age group.

If you already had Covid, should you get vaccinated?

Yes. See https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...

"Cases of reinfection with COVID-19 have been reported, but remain rare . "

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe...

They can't be that rare. I heard about multiple from my social circle.

Curious enough, almost everyone I know who had COVID once at least thinks they got it at least one more time. Obviously anecdata etc., I’m not substantiating any argument at all with this, but this fact of my personal experience didn’t occur to me until reading your comment!

Nice. We have reached the point where hearing from your social circle is equivalent to data.

It's not. However if somebody claims that something almost never happens and you, being completely average person, know few people that claim it has happned to them then something might be up.

Somebody's might be mistaken. Probably those few people but I'd like to see stronger evidence for the general claim as well.

Especially if claim is extraordinary. We know very few illnesses where being sick once gives you immunity for life.

"Updated Aug. 6, 2021"

You can post something from last century, it will be as wrong as this link. Omicron has shown extremely increased reinfection risk compared to all the other variants. So the correct answer is:

yes, you absolutely do need to get a vaccine after the infection if you want to lower your reinfection chances.

Most likely yes. Look at the chart at the last page of this PDF.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...

If I'm reading the charts correctly, the incidence of infection after recovering from Covid is around 13-15 per 100k after 6-8 months, and after recovering from Covid + Vaccination is around 10-14 per 100k after 6-8 months.

So it seems like vaccination does not present a clear benefit for someone that recovered from Covid? (The confidence intervals overlap)

I think the main benefit is that taking vaccine re-sets the timer on your dimnishing immunity from prior infection.

So if you had covid 8 months ago, but took the vaccine last month you have significantly better immunity than if you didn't.

While a person that took vaccine 8 months ago and was also sick even further back (for example 12 months ago), has roughly the same immunity as a person who was sick 8 months ago and didn't vaccinate.

>does not present a clear benefit

It sounds like youre operating from a premise of unnecessary doses being slightly bad, vs slightly good. Is there a clear benefit to not taking pascals wager?

The premise that injecting experimental substances in my body is not necessarily a good thing.

With over 6 billion doses taken worldwide it's currently about as experimental as aspirin.

We know how and why aspirin works, and we've had it for decades. I don't want to live through class actions and apologies for long term vaccine effects.

lets say you have 40 years of life left. are you going to wait 40 years for data? is the 10 they have not enough? 1 more year? 5?

the premise that long term effects exist is also quite a leap.

i think a premise of "this is bad until i know it is good" will be one youll never satisfactorily escape.

I'm not interested in vaccines and it's not my job to be. There are scientists who dedicate their lives, and I'm waiting for results. Asking when I'm satisfied is asking a Las Vegas algorithm when its satisfied - it's irrelevant.

This is the result. After 10+ years they deemed it safe and gave it to 60% of the planet.

Youre saying youre waiting for some "results". The scientists say they are satisfied, but you say you cant hear them say they are satisfied. It's not that they arent, its your, in as polite of french as i have, fingers in your ears.

Youve decided they arent satisfied, despite their statements to the contrary.

I do take aspirin. I love it. Amd I'll take one/two/three/four covid shots in 10+ years when they're deemed safe. Right now, though, I'm wondering why so many athletes are getting injured all of a sudden, and why I hear people complaining of shortness of breath and such.

No, do not do it. Not worth the risk, while your natural immunity is way more effective than even 3 shots of vaccine. If you are above 60 years old, get the vaccine.

No. Ask yourself if the low chance of getting covid again (lower than if you were only vaccinated) is worth the complications from unforeseen issues.

Without taking the vaccine you introduce none of the potential risks of the vaccine. If there are any you simply can't get them if you don't take it.

Anecdotal evidence is some of the strongest evidence because it's real, personally observed data. It's easy to convince someone of something when they see it, and you don't have to trust anyone but your senses.

That's a perfect example of how the public has no idea how science works.

Anecdotal evidence is the bases of witchcraft, homeopathy and a host of other confused dogmas. They're built on taking one coincidence and creating a castle of speculation, all the while thinking "I have figured out something those scientists have missed!"

It takes a host of data to create information. On spec of data is largely useless for illuminating any complex subject.

To quote baseball umpires, "It ain't bothin' till I call it." If something works, I want to see why. If something doesn't work, I want to see why.

You want people to believe in global warming, coronavirus, and healthy foods, make global warming, coronavirus, and healthy food test kits. I hate to burst your bubble, but when the rubber hits the road, science journals are just text on paper, disconnected from reality. Gravity, radiation, magnetism, etc were discovered through experimentation and demonstrations. We live in a dark age of irreproducibility.

Take health industry and cybersecurity industry for example. The former publishes controversial results every weekend, and the latter has us trust closed source systems due to appeal to authority.

Anecdotal data isn't much but it's your data, and that sure is better than wrong data.

It's pretty much identical to wrong data. One data point is nothing. It's a comprehensive mistake to give it any weight.

At least for complex subjects like health, weather etc. "I saw a snowflake! Global warming has to be wrong!" is not any kind of conclusion.

What's the alternative? "5% of crops died in a country halfway around the world, that's used to dead crops. You should buy a Tesla now." "Humans have been eating saturated fats for 2 million years but half rancid PUFA are healthier."

No, I can look at and trace the proofs in any mathematical publication. I can look at and trace any open source code. If something works, I should be able to test it. And it's your flaw to assume people will play along with the onus.

Strange, right? So much focus on edge cases.

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