Hacker News Reader

Comment by orangebeet | Hacker News Reader

About 7 days after the first mRNA shot, I got really bad chest pain. I went to see my doctor and my EKG was okay. It only got worse from there, and eventually I was sent to the hospital and diagnosed with pericarditis.

The pericarditis wasn't registered as "caused by the vaccine", since it took three weeks before I finally got a hospital appointment, and by then it was too late to prove. I'm 31 years old and relatively fit and I've never had any issues until 7 days after the vaccine. So when this wasn't attributed to the vaccine, here in Denmark, what percentage of issues will be attributed to the vaccine in a country with a greater population density, like India?

As a consequence of this, I find the "~23 in a million" get heart complications highly questionable.

View on HN

I've seen 2 people on my Facebook feed have issues. One is pretty big in the skydiving community. He had a Moderna booster and it all went downhill. He's doing better now. He initially thought the vaccine was to blame but then it seemed that there were issues for a while but it kind of put him over the edge. Again all anecdotal.

It would make sense that pre-existing heart issues would be worsened by vaccine that has heart complications. Similar to how covid itself is much more deadly with pre-existing comorbidities while being mostly harmless for healthy young people.

Imagine having preexisting heart conditions and getting COVID, which is known to have much higher rates of heart complications.

Same. It's got so bad it keeps me awake at night, and prevents me from taking naps. Heart thumping harder than when I go for a run, but just while laying down on the couch.

I've noticed my omega3 supplements help a lot though, as in, almost instantly. It comes back if I forget to take them for a few days too, so that's a possible cause as well. Just sucks to have that in the back of my mind.

Damn, when you put it that way about thumping heart while laying down, I am now starting to worry.

age 18-24, 537 per million

age 12-17, 377 per million

This should be compared to death rates from COVID.

How come?

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.

A person susceptible to heart conditions from the vaccine would probably also be susceptible to the same (or worse) from the disease itself. Your hapless groups of people on the tracks, the five and the one, aren't independent. It may well be flipping the switch only saves lives.

I am absolutely pro vaccine despite my heart problems, but this kind of argumentation basically means that regardless of how bad the vaccine is, it gets away free because "covid would probably be worse".

Covid is dramatically, consistently and provably worse.

Its not even in the same ballpark.

really? I know many people who "got omicron" shortly after Christmas... by which I mean, they self-tested daily and eventually the test came up positive, with symptoms ranging from literally nonexistent to that of the mildest of colds—a far cry from my mom's ten-day absolute misery (and very real fear for her life given her immunosuppressed state) back in early 2020 that I personally witnessed & took care of her during. if that's what we're dealing with now, I don't see any reason why someone like myself who hasn't taken any of these vaccines or boosters or whatever to start doing so now. what part of my own personal risk assessment here is misguided?

Because the unvaccinated death rate from COVID is 13x higher than the vaccinated death rate in the US. It's simple. Get vaccinated.

what compels you to phrase it as a command rather than a suggestion or recommendation? given that you lack authority over me, I don't appreciate it.

How this does help anyone in particular to decide for themselves, unless you include some other factors like pre-existing conditions, sex, or age to the comparison?

People are not averages of the whole population. We would not need doctors if medical advice was this simple.

Does not apply to kids, for example.

Specifically when it comes to myocarditis (which is even an issue for <40 apparently): https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...

The preprint discussed in that post specifically calls out that there weren’t enough myocarditis events in the 13-17 age group to reliably estimate the relative risk, so I don’t see where that conclusion is coming from

Also, note the higher relative risk only applies to the full moderna dose

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...

There have been similar reports from Ontario and some country I can't recall at the moment.

Similar reports of what?

I’m not saying that I don’t think myocarditis is a risk factor for kids and teens, just that this paper isn’t giving a quantitative assessment of its relative risk vs Covid. If you have seen research that does provide quantitative insight, I would be interested to read it; I have two kids under 5 and I’m still evaluating things.

> Similar reports of what?

Of myocarditis in kids (especially boys).

This is the pre-print I was thinking of: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.21267156v...

I have a pre-teen daughter myself and while she's not directly in a "risk-group" (like boys are) I wouldn't feel comfortable shoving jabs and boosters after boosters into her, when the benefits are dubious.

This is why many countries are holding off on vaccinating kids still, even though some countries like the US seem to be hellbent on vaccinating 100% at any cost.

Edit: The above study has risks broken up by which vaccines were administered as 1st/2nd (page 12). Interestingly Moderna+Pfizer seems to have no(!?) risk, whereas myocarditis is very high among Pfizer+Moderna. Not sure what to make of it.

Edit2: Keep in mind we haven't vaccinated <12 year olds extensively yet, but the data on young children is already worrisome (to the point where risks of myocarditis seem to outweigh risks of Covid).

Edit3: I'm myself double-jabbed, so not an antivaxxer per se, even though I'm classified as one as per "modern definition".

Thanks for the link, it’s interesting that they have similar findings to other studies based on passive reporting systems like VAERS in the US.

I don’t think the forever-recurring boosters are going to be a thing, it seems like cellular immunity is holding, and from the apparent drop off in myocarditis with greater spacing between doses one and two in this paper, that seems like evidence that 3-6 months would have been a better spacing than 3-4 weeks

> Interestingly Moderna+Pfizer seems to have no(!?) risk, whereas myocarditis is very high among Pfizer+Moderna. Not sure what to make of it.

I wouldn’t pay this much heed at all (based on this data at least). There were under 10k people in that first group (and zero cases of myocarditis), and the confidence intervals of the poisson regression overlap. You can even see from the figure how the model predicts a non-zero rate even though there were no actual cases!

That's kind of how relative risk works. I mean, no COVID would be nice, but we left that world behind two years ago. What do you mean "get away free" anyway? There's no morality here. The vaccine didn't "do" anything wrong. It is either efficacious or it isn't, and the side effects are either worth it or they aren't. From what we can tell, the risk of heart problems from the vaccine is so much lower than from COVID. What more would you like people to do?

The trolley problem analogy breaks down when you consider that Covid is an infectious disease. Getting vaccinated doesn't just protect you; it protects everyone else you might have spread the disease to.

The effectiveness against infection is limited, and omicron mainly spreads in vaccinated populations in Denmark, Island and the UK

Both technically true statements (though I think you mean Iceland), but presented in a completely misleading way. Yes, breakthrough infections exist and nothing is 100%; you should still get the vaccine, obviously. Yes, when the population is highly vaccinated, a lot of infections will be in the vaccinated; that's just how denominators work.

I'll bite. Why is it not ok to coerce people into getting vaccines? Is it specifically the covid vaccine you object to, or all vaccines?

Medical advice should be provided by doctors, not politicians, activists, or bureacrats. Doctors have specific ethical training and guidelines by which they're qualified to make judgments about safety and relative risks for individuals.

Consider that polio vaccination was never framed and exploited by political parties playing despicable red vs blue games with the public. The results, driven by information campaigns devoid of partisan politics, were a nearly universal state of vaccination, driving the disease more or less extinct. Trust in doctors and medical institutions was high and relatively untrammeled by partisan games.

The second that coronavirus vaccination became a political shibboleth for team blue, the current state of vaccine resistance became inevitable. Both parties are responsible for a lot of unnecessary death and suffering because of their willingness to never let a good crisis go to waste.

Throw in the general decline and corruption of institutions, lack of trust in public health agencies and even doctors in general, and you've got a mess of hyperpartisan unvaccinated conservative folks being shrieked at by the clueless but vaccinated team blue, and nobody credible or trusted able to bring the situation back to something resembling sanity.

Well what if there is a side effect that kills them? What if that person already got covid and was barely affected by it?

Forcing them to get the vaccine is crazy, especially when it doesn’t behave how the other vaccines do, and vaccinated people are both getting it and spreading it, albeit with far less severe symptoms than the unvaccinated person on average.

I think vaccines are amazing, these new covid ones, look to be reducing the symptoms of covid.

The idea of forcing it on folks when even vaccinated people are spreading it is absurd.

I wouldn’t be surprised if vaccinated people go out more because they feel safer. I went on a cross-US road trip right after I got my vaccine and now I’ve been to 4 different countries.

I wouldn’t have done any of that if I wasn’t vaccinated.

Why would you compare heart complications to deaths?

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

Just out of curiosity, would your bad chest pain get registered as some part of the data collected by the CDC?

In the US, it would be required that the doctors report it to the VAERS database. There is no need to prove any causal relationship, since that is basically impossible anyway. It doesn't really make sense that Denmark would require you to prove it either, since the data gathering is really the only tool to get evidence of causation.

"In the US, it would be required that the doctors report it to the VAERS database."

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.

Legally it IS still required that they report. Doctors and hospitals are simply ignoring the law.

But this would explain why the US has lower rates of myocarditis vaccine injuries reported than the big Israel study or similar studies in Europe.

Anyone can report to VAERS. Evidenced by the reports if you care to peruse them. There are a lot of gems like, "he got the vax and then just died" and "my baby died a few weeks after I received the vaccine" and my favorite, "my cat died a few days after I got vaccinated". Considering the infinitely higher level of publicity that VAERS has received for this vaccine vs all previous vaccines, my guess is that it is over-reported.

In Denmark you need to have objective evidence of inflammation to register it into the VAERS database.

VAERS is an American system. What's the Danish equivalent?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com