Myopericarditis rates in young men after Covid-19 vaccine second dose [pdf]

Compare heart complications to heart complications. They are higher in COVID than the vaccine for any age group.

There is a higher risk to dying from a covid infection (at least with delta) than from the vaccine as far as we can see in the short term.

But there is still a risk from the vaccine.

If there was a train hurtling down the tracks about to kill five people many think they’d be able to push the switch to make it only kill one different person, yet I wouldn’t be able to do even that let alone the more intense situations from that scenario.

Thinking of people as numbers is what allows for someone to think it is ok to coerce people into getting vaccines.

From my personal experience and what I've heard online, that seems like wishful thinking. I know two people who had bad heart reactions to the vaccine whose doctors insisted it couldn't be from the vaccine and wouldn't speak of it being connected. And it seems like I've heard similar stories online dozens of times. My guess is the VAERS data dramatically undercounts incidents.

The Pfizer whistleblower paper claimed that even in the early days of the vaccine, internal Pfizer incidents weren't even reported. And given how hostile the entire internet is to discussions of vaccine safety, the idea that people are extremely reluctant to report vaccine injuries seems believable.

First the original study did not stratify based on age and sex - a huge failure because potential issue among young men was well known problem.

This preprint tries to fix this but as the original study compared also other cardiac adverse events like pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmias, the preprint does not. It is important because the rate of other complications was not elevated among vaccinated.

This study uses self-controlled case series. This means that they compare against previous incidence rates in the study group (vaccinated, covid-19). This would be possibly more or less fine if they compared two treatments but even then there is big potential for selection bias (the choice of treatment is based on preexisting conditions) but is even higher when you compare treatment and disease - covid-19 is harder for people with comorbidities, when you make a comparison within this group, you can most likely expect higher preexisting prevalence of heart conditions and therefor lower IRR.

This preprint and the orginal paper do not contain any mentioning of unvaccinated. It very likely means that the covid-19 group also contains patients who were vaccinated and had lower rate of AE.

Finally, this study design includes people with previous incidence. Hearth problems are very often recurrent. While it is important to know if vaccination of covid-19 will reintroduce the condition, it is not very interesting for most of the people because incidence rate of these conditions is very low. What is real interest here is how prevalent it is among people who did not have it previously.

Now I am really interested to find out the truth here. This preprint and the orginal study does not help me in this unfortunately.

It's milder when measured by overall hospitalization rates (covering vaccinated + unvaccinated + past infection), but is there evidence that it is milder for unvaccinated individuals specifically? Genuine question, happy to learn.

You don’t understand what people mean when they say that. The premise of everyone getting covid is based on the continued mutation and evolutionary pressure to more contagious and less deadly variants. The emergence of an Omicron-like variant is exactly what people meant when they said “everyone will get covid”.

P(covid | no_vaccine) * covid_myocarditus_risk(no_vaccine)

vs

P(covid | vaccine) * covid_myocarditus_risk(vaccine) + vaccine_myocarditus_risk