Heart-disease risk soars after Covid, even with a mild case
nature.com
nature.com
The big question is how quickly and completely can that layer restore itself? If damage accumulates over time and people are catching new variants every 3-4 months it is only a matter of time before mortality from cardiovascular issues in COVID negative formerly infected people goes much higher and much younger. We need studies on the cardiovascular recovery pace after COVID damage in different age groups, and after repeat COVID diagnosis from different variants.
Sweden, though, did not lock down, and I hear (and experience) the same issue as the parent.
The first day back after COVID and I reached my max heart rate in 60s of moderate jogging.
Individual anecdotes (such as my personal friends who did not change behaviour), while unscientific, paint a similar picture to what is being presented as evidence, so it's an additional data point to consider.
So, at least there is some correlation with the sentiment, and by people whom I know have not adjusted their behaviour. (including myself)
Sweden's restrictions were excessively light, by the way, 8pm closing of restaurants and gyms is not exactly a big deal to people going to the gym after work.
My girlfriend is the manager of one of the Malmo branches.
Fitness24/7 in town was so small that it was impossible to get in due to covid retrictions. Something like a maximum of 9 people which meant that it was impossible to get in during popular hours.
This is how the disease will be dismissed. Why bother researching it when you can just blame the victim? It works for ME and endometriosis, and it's far cheaper than diagnosing and treating people.
No citations on that though.
I got COVID early on in February 2020, and while it initially seemed mild, the tail end was severe. Pain that made me worry I might have been having a mini-stroke, and after that lung issues making it painful to take a shallow breath. After a week or so, it was just painful to breathe deeply but otherwise OK.
I started doing low heart-rate running, trying to keep my HR below 132. Initially, this was really hard, and even jogging slightly too fast could cause my HR to spike to 180 and stay there for 5 minutes. But over the next couple of weeks as my lungs improved again, it got better and better. Within a few months, I was doing at least 5km every time I went for a run, and running 3 or 4 times a week. I've got faster and faster as a result, and I've knocked a third off my 5km PB time from pre-COVID.
My health hasn't been better for many years, and that's only because the lockdown conditions meant that I was working from home so could take a long break at lunchtime, we were allowed out for exercise, but otherwise the streets were deserted. I think lockdown was the best thing that's ever happened to me in terms of exercise opportunities.
Wow. Congratulations, that's got to feel good.
If anything, I think I actually got a bit healthier because of lockdown. Eating healthier due to fewer restaurant meals, drinking less due to not being able to go to pubs and parties etc.
Probably got more exercise too because for a while it was one of the few valid excuses to get out of the house!
* increased personal time for workouts for anyone working remotely (or forgoing employment entirely)
* dramatically increased demand & prices for home exercise equipment
* shifts to cooking at home
March / April 2020 seemed to be marked by a lot of people going outside and running. Personally, I shed over 35 lbs of bodyfat in 2020 and have had few comparable periods where I hiked as often or ate as cleanly, and I'm far from alone in my circle of acquaintances.
Anecdotal: I run almost every day. Don't get excited, only 2 to 4 miles :) Early in the pandemic I saw plenty of new faces - often couples - out exercising. Some running, mostly walking. I don't see many of those faces any more.
Neither do open gyms. :)
Though post-holiday covid peaks may have slightly altered the long-running wry observations about January in the gym.
But there were some very cautious times during lockdown. Events like Parkrun were cancelled for months on end. Loads of races were cancelled. Gyms were closed. Indoor fitness activities like dance, yoga, pilates, and aerobics were cancelled (and their online alternatives much more sparsely attended). If the place you were doing swimming/squash/tennis/golf is closed, you're out of luck. Football, hockey and basketball aren't compatible with social distancing. Neither is boxing, judo or MMA. People who commuted by foot or bike started working from home.
Running and cycling were certainly winners, but I'm certain there were a lot of losers as well.
Why do you make assumptions about "everyone"? I'm sure there are as many diverse experiences during 'lockdowns' as there are people who experienced them. Obviously if you include the rare cases where people were actually kept indoors (how long did those actually last?), then healthy exercise might have been more difficult.
In my case, my health has improved immeasurably, as I no longer need to sit in an office all day, eat an unhealthy lunch and eat office-supplied snacks the way I did before.
I eat more healthily, get more fresh air, walk and cycle at lunchtimes - and even get more work done in fewer hours.
And before you come out with the usual "you just need to use more imagination and take your kids with you" - for a start, the situation I described above drained more energy and life than I care to remember. Also, there's only so much a 1 year old will put up with, when I am used to rides of up to 100 miles.
Personally, I am deeply embittered by the whole experience.
But gains from no-commute / remote setups weren't limited to single/childless people. Some of the people I know who were taking rides / runs in the hills were couples with kids working schedules out with their partners, and I can think of families who demonstrated that reproduction doesn't bar one from buying home exercise equipment.
And "it became illegal to have anyone else look after our kids" -- I get that it's frustrating to have a service that you rely on closed. I can see that'd be especially hard with group daycare. I saw that frustration play out. I also saw people continue babysitting or au pair arrangements with whatever behavioral stipulations for epidemic-safety made sense to them, and that got easier as lots of people pulled out of service/retail labor force. Childcare was different but illegal seems like hyperbole.
I'm sure your experience was difficult or stressful; lots of people found adapting difficult in various ways (nor were single/childless people exempt, though the challenges might be different). But the idea that the parent poster forwarded that somehow civil policies generally "broke" people's health/exercise habits is a poor generalization... and whatever the truth about the difficulty of your particular situation, the idea that adapting was just impossible for people with kids and additionally that anyone pushing back on criticism of restrictions just isn't thinking about that doesn't hold up as a generalization either.
I mean what I said. Where I live (Wales, UK), it was illegal to have people in your house (and obviously, that meant you also couldn't go into anyone else's house) until mid-2021. Obviously, we did not follow that law, as it was absurd and would have caused significant harm to me and those close to me.
Do not patronise me, by suggesting I should have "planned better" or "adjusted quicker". Saying such things is incredibly demeaning to the effort we did have to go to, to do our best as a family. Trust me, once I realised that no-one else was looking out for us, I did plenty to ensure that those closest to me would be ok (and mostly, that consisted of breaking newly-passed Covid laws, including the one I already mentioned. It was also illegal for me to go to our nearby woodland, because we were not allowed to leave the county we live in and I live in a city that is its own county.). I am proud to say that my two young kids will probably have no memory of Covid, and am very proud to say that we have also not succumbed to the new parenting norm of allowing kids of almost any age to spend as much time as they like staring at screens. In doing so, selfish pursuits like my cycling and other hobbies have had to take a back seat.
Maybe lead with that specific, then. You know, the idea that people weren't properly accounting for Wales, rather than what you said, which was that people weren't properly accounting for those with children.
Though if we're accounting for Wales, my understanding is that like the rest of the UK (and similar to many other western countries) it had established "alert levels" as described here:
https://gov.wales/covid-19-alert-levels
with restrictions that varied over time. Looking at the alert levels for early 2021 via the wayback machine, it seems like up through Alert Level 3 [0], it's hard to read the restrictions as "illegal to have anyone in your house" so I don't know what to make of that. Even if we're saying Alert Level 4 [1] was simply constant from 2020 onset through mid 2021, the language under that seems to have some wiggle room in it.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210309231028/https://gov.wales...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230652/https://gov.wales...
> Do not patronise me
If acknowledgement that there were genuine struggles alongside examining the shortcomings in generalizations within your comment feels patronizing, I can drop the empathy. Would that be better for you, or would you like us to stick with politely allowing that regrettable difficulty and acceptable adaptation could actually overlap?
I appreciate that I have lived through a particularly draconian and frankly absurd set of restrictions since 2020. However, my comments on being a parent over this time are still valid. It has been especially tough, and I doubt that anyone I referenced in my original comment has kids of their own.
I have a good deal of empathy for those who don't get to work from home, but I'm the opposite of "healthy habits got worse."
One was a runner a Marathon was nothing for him and now almost a year later he can do a half Marathon.
The other one was a natural body builder. They know the weights they can push. He told me that 8 Months after Covid he was down 20% in weights.
Anecdote: I'm an avid runner and cyclist, but after I had dengue fever, it took me months to regain my fitness. I used to run 10K's before breakfast, but the first time I attempted a 5 km walk afterwards, I was basically comatose for the rest of the day.
I noticed a huge difference in performance before and after getting sick with Epstein Barr in 2017. Even years later I've never returned to the same performance. Maybe related, maybe not, but that's how it looks to me with my sample size of one.
And how would they know, really?
If I had a cold it would set me back a day or two sometimes not at all but I didn't go to the gym when sick. If I had the flu even with a flu shot it knocked me off my weight routine for months. The effects of having the flu was very noticeable on me it set me back six months. I can't imagine what covid would be like.
I wish you a good recovery (as much as possible)
I don't think there's any tissue that takes longer than a year to regenerate.
Nerves, for instance[0].
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/peripheral-ne...
From what I remember from a family members heart attack ... the heart doesn't really heal.
Hence pace makers for a lifetime.
>The heart is unable to regenerate heart muscle after a heart attack and lost cardiac muscle is replaced by scar tissue.
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
Except that you got a year older.
Two examples that might help frame things:
1) Chemo. It's toxic.
2) A couple of yrs ago a family member was hospitalized from a stroke. They needed to be put on assisted breathing. Well that helped, but it also led to a lung infection. And then that required treatment. Fair enough, it prevented death.
The point is, not every treatment is without sidside effects. But with Covid, evidently there are no longer comorbidies, and the treatments have no side effects.
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/
Mechanical ventilation was overused early in the pandemic and likely killed quite a few patients. Now less invasive therapies are preferred and ventilators are only used as a salvage therapy when all else has failed.
Sure there are outliers (i.e., people in very good health getting long Covid) and the media is great in highlighting them. It makes for profitable "news." But the typical American doesn't exercise enough, and doesn't eat particularly well. These things impact health. They impact recovery (from any illness or injury). Yet we continue to be stuck with leadership and a narrative that is afraid to discuss such things.
That's all I'm questioning.
Problem is plenty of people were still getting delta and they still worked, with lesser efficacy, against omicron
And the antivirals they're handing, you're better off fighting covid without them
remdesivir is a garbage drug
The fact is, this is the first time in a long time that we've had a substantial sample size of infected humans, as well as a spotlight on the topic. The point being, there could be previous history with regard to treatment / solutions used for Covid and we've never bothered to look and see. That's not being critical. We had no reason to look. People survived and that we moved on.
But now we have a significant amount of data, yet we seem to be presuming - again, without proof - that the cause of "long Covid" is exclusively due to the virus. Simply put, that assumption isn't supported with science. It's based on assumption and narrative.
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
See my comment above on why that paper tells us nothing about unvaccinated myocarditis rates.
So I read through it and in fact, it doesn't say what you assert to say it does. This is comparing vaccinated Vs vaccinated+COVID. See the comments from vepe for full explanation.
Do we have data on specifically unvaccinated infections?
Otherwise we can only speculate on whether the long side effects of infection are less severe with vaccines than without. Considering the general hospitalization rate between unvaccinated vs vaccinated, I know what my guess would be.
> The free-floating Spike proteins synthetized by cells targeted by vaccine and destroyed by the immune response circulate in the blood and systematically interact with angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors expressed by a variety of cells including platelets, thereby promoting ACE2 internalization and degradation. These reactions may ultimately lead to platelet aggregation, thrombosis and inflammation mediated by several mechanisms including platelet ACE2 receptors. Whereas Phase III vaccine trials generally excluded participants with previous immunization, vaccination of huge populations in the real life will inevitably include individuals with preexisting immunity. This might lead to excessively enhanced inflammatory and thrombotic reactions in occasional subjects. Further research is urgently needed in this area.
The level of inflammation no doubt varies on a case by case / individual basis, but is it possible that nobody gets out of the pandemic without some level of stress on their pulmonary and circulatory systems?
To state this succinctly, did Covid (whether infected or vaccinated) shave a few days off of all of our lives?
As far as I can tell they’re just citing this one paper about the ACE2 degradation, and the study doesn’t directly address SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination at all.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4231883/?r...
In reality, even if you get Omicron now it's so mild it's unlikely to cause any more heart damage than any other common cold. The danger has passed. Except that, almost everyone decided to massively expose themselves to spike protein over and over. So if spikes cause heart damage and they do, especially when the vaccine gets into the bloodstream, then the vaccines will do more damage than the virus could ever do simply because nobody has pre-existing immunity to it.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(21)00571-3/ful...
Many patients who are exposed to SARS-CoV-2 quickly fight off the infection with an innate immune response before the adaptive immune response really engages. That can happen with no pre-existing immunity. Some people just have better immune systems.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
That is quite the assertive statement in the light of all these public cases of vaccinated athletes keeling over. Is this flamebait?
Well, not intentionally, but people are a bit crazy these days apparently.
Could be linked, probably not.
Like you say, a single data point is useless.
The possibility, albeit incredibly unlikely, of as adverse affect has been accepted by the public as ok.
In her case she actually has some other health concerns that may well turn out to be the cause.
The vaccine appears to cause minor damage, but more likely from the spike protein than from the immune response. C.f. this article:
https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-cases-coronavir...
"She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations."
The clotting issues would presumably come from the spike protein binding with your ACE2 receptors and downregulating them. Of course it's kind of moot, since empirically we know that getting the vaccine has a hugely positive expected value.
I don't believe that we empirically know the positives either and it is the only way to reliably test. There is no alternative to this and it should have been done before any mandates came up in my opinion.
There are already studies comparing the mortality risk of those who got the vaccines against those who didn't, among only people who didn't get COVID. If you're worried about the vaccines, just take them 8 weeks apart instead of 3, and/or take an ACE inhibitor first to up-regulate your ACE2 receptors.
But I ended up googling it and sort of wish I didn’t ask the question.
https://www.theawl.com/2016/04/if-you-give-a-mouse-a-heart-a...
It is incorrect and irresponsible to extrapolate these two papers to the entire world.
It could take years for some autoimmune issues to arise. It would be quite concerning if this affects nearly everyone infected, including asymptomatic or mild infections following vaccination.
From CDC website: "Studies have shown that flu illness is associated with an increase in heart attacks and stroke. A 2018 study found that the risk of having a heart attack was 6 times higher within a week of a confirmed flu infection."
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
I guess there are others, I just didn't randomly stumbled across them.
I have had post-viral symptoms after flu a few years ago and long-covid now. Recovery after flu was about 6 months, I'm coming up to two years with long-covid.
My guess is that the reason why we've seen a drop in cases of Flu during the Covid pandemic is strictly related to lockdowns and Flu being less infectious than Covid. In other words, the lockdowns were very effective against Flu.
If you've already had the flu, your body might have some level of preparedness against a Covid variant, but it's nowhere near the same level. Plenty of people who died from Covid had already experienced the flu at some point in their life. Covid variants compete with each other far more than they do with flu variants.
The Flu is caused by the "influenza virus".
So even though they are both contagious respiratory illnesses, they are caused by completely different viruses.
The reason we've seen far fewer influenza cases these past 2 years isn't related to the 2 viruses out competing eachother.
It's much more likely that the pandemic measures we've had in place, over most of the world, like social distancing, mask wearing, lockdowns, closed borders, etc., has had a greater impact on the flu, because it isn't as contagious as covid.
When we remove the pandemic measures, we're probably going to see the usual flu numbers again.
Maybe even worse than normal, for the first couple of seasons. Since we haven't been as exposed to the flu for 2 years.
This isn't a true statement. It depends on the age group. Flu is far more deadly to young children whereas COVID rarely even results in a cold in younger children.
But to your point, basically any infection that causes systemic inflammation can increase heart disease risk. Even the common cold is dangerous for people at high risk of heart disease.
Johns Hopkins University reports covid-19 has 278.89 deaths per 100,000 - a 1.2% mortality rate in the US [1].
That would put covid-19 at 278.89/16.3 = ~17 times more deadly than the flu. Just because the numbers don't hold for a particular age group doesn't make the aggregate statement false. In fact, it would be misleading to categorize "17 times more deadly" as anything other than "more deadly."
Edit: I made a mistake dividing the percentages the first go around, reporting covid-19 as 73 times more deadly than influenza. I have updated the 3rd paragraph to show the calculations directly.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
It’s also not estimating case under-reporting like CDC is
I think jumping straight to misinformation is a bit strong here, but it’s important to make fair comparisons and discuss the context of the stats along with the raw numbers
Same goes in the other direction, the sniffles can also cause myocarditis.
Within a week seems trivially small to the point of irrelevance. That would be when they are still sick with the flu, no?
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1062160/v1 Long Covid after Breakthrough COVID-19: the post-acute sequelae of breakthrough COVID-19 by Ziyad Al-Aly, Benjamin Bowe, Yan Xie
Figure 5 is "Risk and 6-month excess burden of post-acute sequelae by organ system in people who were hospitalized during the acute phase of breakthrough COVID-19 compared to those hospitalized with seasonal influenza "
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3 h/t to @greenyoda for posting elsewhere in this thread.
The people in the "hospitalized" cohort, in particular, were quite old and sick prior to the disease.
I also didn't see them compare the contemporary control group to 2017. The majority of the contemporary control group probably were infected with Covid. If there were a significant impact they should have different outcomes than the 2017 group.
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Mean age of the Covid-19 cohort: 61.42
Percent with BMI over 30: 53.84%
Percent with chronic kidney disease: 19.52%
Lung disease: 15.26%
Diabetes: 32.13%
Hyperlipidemia: 33.97%
Hypertension: 26.7%
Almost all of these factors are significantly elevated over the control groups, and their attempts to normalize the data (ST2) do not eliminate the problem. We're talking about tiny differences in small numbers, and their population is biased toward the sick and the old. It's already clear from the main paper that most of the signal comes from the oldest, sickest cohort, but once you know that pretty much everyone in the study was old and sick, it's clearly difficult to generalize from this.
This thread is awash with 20-somethings pontificating about heart damage based on a paper about elderly veterans. Simply irresponsible reporting.
This means that for every million people who got COVID-19, we would expect 4,000 more strokes. Using a lower-bound estimate that 50% of the population will get COVID-19 at some point, this would mean roughly 650,000 more cases in the US alone (~330 million people), and this is in addition to baseline. A totally devastating pandemic.
Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.
When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland.
In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection.
What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
But isn’t this exactly the level of control the government wants to maintain indefinitely?
Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail.
Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case.
The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports.
Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening.
So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
I speak Chinese and know lots of people in China. That's how I know what's going on. I'm not reliant on Reddit threads. My friends in China have been doing normal things throughout the pandemic, like going to restaurants with their elderly relatives or going to crowded tourist venues (inside China). They can't easily travel internationally, because they will have to quarantine on returning to China, but they can live a pretty normal life inside the country.
A few months ago, a Shenzhen friend said she had to go on a business trip to Shanghai, and was a little worried because there had been 2 reported Covid cases in the last few weeks. Another friend, earlier in the pandemic, would mockingly send me US statistics of million of Americans getting Covid, and that it's nearly eradicated China.
It frightens me to think of what means they took to get these ends, but I really do believe they have it under control.
Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over.
There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal.
2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns.
They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
Cities do not go into full-on lockdown over a single case. The first reaction is to rapidly do contact tracing, and to quarantine and PCR test all close contacts of the infected person. This is done within hours. The building or neighborhood in which the person lives might be locked down, and there will be testing in the neighborhood.
After doing this contract-tracing work, it sometimes becomes clear that there is a larger outbreak that has gone unnoticed. If the public health authorities think they can't control the outbreak with contact-tracing alone, that's when larger-scale lockdowns occur.
The recent outbreak in Baise is a good example of this: one person tested positive, but it became clear that they had been infected for a week or more, and that they had gone to all sorts of mass gatherings. That's why the city locked down.
On the other end of the scale, Shanghai had some Omicron cases recently, but they were extremely targeted in their response, like shutting down individual buildings. They were able to end the outbreak without shutting down the city.
So does the NSA, but for completely different reasons...
> how little freedom the people could have should the government wish it.
In some ways, yes, but even the Chinese government is subject to pressure from public opinion. A major reason why the government continues the zero-CoVID policy is that it's popular. There are also scandals that force a change in policy: for example, changes to how the Xi'an lockdown was implemented after a number of highly publicized stories of individuals who suffered because of rigidly enforced rules.
Omicron is sufficiently immune-escaping that it changed that, but I continue to be surprised how many people don't realise that the vaccines were actually very effective at preventing infection and transmission for pre-omicron variants.
Edit: I don't mean they prevented infection and transmission 100%, obviously. But for two doses the total reduction in transmission was like 80%, and higher still for three doses. This is more than most people (other than Australians and NZers who watched vaccination bend the curves in real time) realise, from the way people talk you'd think the vaccines barely reduced infection and transmission at all.
What was very dishonest in the way this whole thing has been handled and portrayed is that Coronavirus vaccine escape-variants were completely foreseeable and therefore no surprise.
You know what might, perhaps have prevented omicron? The whole world going "China" January/February/March 2020. But only perhaps, because OG SarsCov2 was so capable of jumping between species that it would have likely just held out across any length of lockdown in animal populations. Try putting squirrels on lockdown...
Speaking of species, I'd love to see numbers about cross-species infection about delta and omicron: are they still jack of trades or did they lose that capability while acing human microbiology?
This is false and shows you don't understand how the covid vaccines work, and you don't know what happened in Australia.
I live in Australia and we suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Cases were kept low because states closed their borders, not allowing anyone in. People were locked down in their homes, not allowing anyone out.
This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.
We had strict curfews; we had 5km travel limits enforced by cops and "ring of steel" checkpoints. It was illegal to go the beach; it was illegal to take your kids to the park; it was lawful for cops to chase and attack people for not wearing masks outside. We had overzealous state premiers granting themselves new powers. We had propaganda campaigns of fear - our government hired young actors to die slowly on ventilators... (https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4)... when the rest of world chose constructive public health messaging, we went for "shock and awe" to scare people into not going outside.
Yet, here you are claiming we had "herd immunity"! Do you realise that not everyone takes the vaccine at the same time, and that only a small proportion of vaccinated people at any given time have the full protection offered before the vaccine fades? That window of time being as little as 4 months? Herd immunity was never more than wishful thinking.
But I'm not sure what you're talking about. Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination. Yes they were long, because for most of the pandemic we didn't have vaccines.
> This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.
That's not the case. There have been a few short and localised lockdowns since vaccination levels were high, but still mostly in specific locations where vaccination levels were lower. Certainly not anything for hundreds of days. It hasn't even been 100 days since the country got to 90% of 12+ double-dosed - it's been 57 days. The lockdowns in VIC and NSW ended around 80% double-dose coverage.
You're just repeating the Vic government's explanation for their unreasonably long lockdowns. If I wanted that, I'd go to the Vic gov website, or turn on commercial TV news.
Sounds like you fully support the harsh lockdown policies, and believe the explanation for the lockdowns comes from irrefutable scientific reasoning. But even the federal government was telling Victoria to back off with lockdowns. Not all experts agree with each other.
But the "united front" is important for public perception, so they did a lot of work to make sure the message was consistent, even if outdated. Consistency trumps validity in Australian politics.
Here's the problem: transmission remained high, even in highly vaccinated countries before Omicron. Then when Omicron landed, transmission went up again, making a mockery of advice that insisted transmission was reduced.
Reduction of severe illness is how the vaccines earn their green tick, not transmission reduction.
The Vic chief health officer is still insisting transmission can be "stopped" (he used that word the other day). That was his justification for why children still need to wear masks at school until they're vaccinated!
The reasoning is about "vaccine perception" not public health. Perhaps they're wanting to prepare people for a life of repeated, mandated jabs and checking in everywhere. The "vaccinated economy".
When Novak was booted out, it wasn't because he was a health risk. It was because "perception". Are you talking about the role perception plays in covid rules and regulations on your subreddit? Or is it just "anti-vaxxers bad, lockdowns good" kind of thing?
> "Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination."
No. The lockdowns ended because those making the rules decided to end the lockdowns. If it were because of vaccination, we'd be locked down again because double-dose vaccination is no longer considered good protection.
Underscoring the hypocrisy of the rules, your old and waned double vax from last year still gets you into hairdressers and restaurants, yet unvaccinated people are banned from those places. There would be zero risk difference, but because the government wants everyone vaccinated to the amount they dictate, the rules remain in place. Not because of science, but because of perception and behavioral control over the population.
Politicians and their side-kick health officers use blunt instruments like mandates because they don't know what else to do, so they throw kitchen sink and tell people it's science and "keeping people safe".
That is why we see so many people saying that the vaccines don't prevent you from spreading it.
However, if you're vaccinated, you're less likely to get it in the first place, so from a standing start, you're less likely to transmit it. And since at some point everyone was covid-free, this is the important scenario.
Nobody who knows they have the virus should knowingly go near another person except in an emergency. Nothing you do will protect that other person.
> I've seen reports that say that if you have Covid, you transmit it as easily as anyone else, regardless of vaccination status.
While you're indeed infected, yes. If that duration for vaccinated persons is shorter than the duration for unvaccinated persons, then the obvious deduction would be that the shortened duration results in a lowered overall chance of spread - even if (indeed, especially if) the viral loads are equal (as vaccine-skeptics like to assert as if it's some sort of "gotcha"). Transmission is a function of viral load × time, so shorter time = shorter window of transmission = less risk of transmission.
Factor in the reduced chance of being infected in the first place (as you point out), and it becomes obvious on both fronts that vaccination reduces the spread of COVID, Omicron included.
Technically correct, but definitely not the best kind of correct.
It doesn't mean vaccination isn't required as it's proven to significantly reduce mortality especially among the older population.
That doesn't prevent it from being misleading. Both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can get and transmit the virus in the same sense that both I and Sidney Crosby can play hockey.
That failure to acknowledge anything besides "complete prevention" v. "not complete prevention", as if to imply that vaccination is entirely useless for preventing infection and transmission, is why people - myself included - are downvoting the above comment. To assert that vaccinated people can transmit COVID without providing the necessary context re: actual probability of that happening relative to unvaccinated persons is to lie by omission.
In other words, if both the infected person and the household member were boosted, the likelihood of a household member becoming infected was reduced by 74% compared to if both were unvaccinated. (This number is for Omicron, for Delta the reduction is even higher at 92%.)
In other words, while you are technically correct that the vaccines do not completely prevent infection or transmission, they do, in fact, significantly reduce the likelihood.
It seems to be that the spike protein is responsible for this, which is present in both the virus and the vaccine.
I think increase in myocarditis in young males could be fully explained by how they changed their (social) behavior after getting their second dose after a year of lockdowns. Exposing themselves to additional risks including covid which we know the vaccine doesn't protect completely against.
The rates are low, but I’m pretty sure it can have this effect.
Probably prior infection to covid put you at greater risk of getting miocarditis for any reason.
I hope it'll get better for you in the long run. Take care.
An Israeli study showed an incidence rate of 2.13 cases/100k people [1] - the common incidence rate for myocarditis in the US is ~22/100k [2].
COVID-19 itself has a 146/100k incidence of myocarditis, in contrast [3].
So please, stop spreading that "vaccines increase the rate of myocarditis", there is no evidence that supports this. And especially, get vaccinated because the complications from COVID-19 are way worse both in severity and rate.
[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073510971...
So according to this study, if you're under 40 and have taken the Moderna vaccine, you are more likely to develop Myocarditis than after a Covid infection.
Please stop trying to silence people because you don’t want what they suggest to be true.
I am not at all an anti vaccine person but after I had some inflammation in one of my eyes hours after my second dose, I won’t be getting any more without significant evidence addressing safety concerns.
I am also not a statistic because I did not make an appointment with an ophthalmologist, I didn’t feel like waiting weeks or paying thousands of dollars unless my symptoms persisted (they didn’t).
It is not that implausible that the vaccine is triggering autoimmune damage to some organs, often at initially subclinical extents. It is also not implausible that vaccine morality is making researchers and doctors overly conservative about researching and sharing information about this.
Most of the western world has free health care and people report any small sign of unexpected side effects and they do count in this statistic. An especially during this pandemic people have been very good at contacting their doctor with adverse side effects.
So if they don’t have an increase in heart problems, it would strongly suggest the virus is the primary/significant culprit, not the vaccine.
Early 50's, caught original (& symptomatic) Rona early on. Heart seems fine.
Son (also control group) caught COVID recently, recovered, heart seems fine.
Wife had a vaccine so not in the control group - had an adverse reaction to it and stopped at jab #1.
You could of course argue that in all respects that matter for the risk of heart disease, people who take vaccines are the same as people who don't. I would disagree, and only a bet could settle the difference.
Because the vaccinated are not immune to the virus, some of them must have gotten covid. The overall risk of this sample still falls with-in the normal range for myocarditis.
So in the end the most interesting data is still how many vaccinated get serious health problems or die versus how many unvaccinated get serious health problems or die in a time and place where both groups are likely to be exposed to the virus. If the group is large enough and randomly selected, then this should be fairly indicative. Of course, the meaning of "serious" needs to be defined and quantified.
AFAIK, myocarditis can be treated very well when its diagnosed, that alone makes the focus on it strange. Maybe the lesson to draw from the debate is that patients should be informed better so they can identify symptoms of myocarditis and seek medical help early. Just an idea...
I think most people just mean that it is now established and won't go away. That it will be a constant presence in our lives.
I believe epidemiologists also require that infection rates remain roughly constant and don't exhibit wild swings in infection numbers.
I guess we're still in an epidemic.
There is no sane universe where COVID-19 is endemic from an epidemiological standpoint.
It also doesn't imply that we should stop doing things.
I'd add that endemic also doesn't mean mild.
Essentially everyone that survives the next couple of years will catch covid.
It does?? Where does it say this?
I'm not saying your point is invalid, I'm just saying it's not addressed in the article in question. Please be more careful. It's OK to just admit you we're wrong. It's not OK to twist quotations to support your position not matter how valid or righteous you believe it to be.
What are you basing this on? There was a recent UK study (preprint, last I checked) of 40 million people that showed that the risk of myocarditis was definitively higher compared to Covid in the Moderna sample and higher (albeit statistically insignificant) in the Pfizer sampler for young men.
> So indirectly getting vaccine will lower your risk since of heart disease as everyone will eventually get covid.
This is a separate claim about the conditional probability, which I haven't seen data on. The unconditional probability does not inform the conditional probability.
Also while I'm here, here's another article discussing the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jan/31/joe-rogan-co...
> "First, we confirm and extend our previous findings in more than 42 million persons that the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis following COVID-19 infection is higher than the risk associated with vaccination in the overall population."
Quick edit: while I was skimming the paper someone else commented exactly this excerpt, hehe.
I am talking about young men. The study says what I said above.
> In summary, the risk of hospital admission or death from myocarditis is greater following COVID-19 infection than following vaccination and remains modest following sequential doses of mRNA vaccine including a third booster dose of BNT162b in the overall population. However, the risk of myocarditis following vaccination is consistently higher in younger males, particularly following a second dose of RNA mRNA-1273 vaccine
But the risk association might very well be not so much the exercise happening while under immune stress but the processes that happen during recovery doing their thing while under immune stress. Usually immune stress means infection and we don't get to schedule our infections, so this distinction (exercise time vs recovery time) will be very much unexplored.
Young males tend to be more into performance-oriented training (competitive, or focused on metrics, or both) than other population groups, and with an actual infection it might even be that the relevant immune stress does not really start before more direct symptoms suggest taking a break. Could be as simple as shifting the "no sports" instruction that comes with the jab a few days backwards.
Also, what you say is not the case in every country. Many countries are jabbing young men with Moderna.
That statement isn't talking about the young male cohort. In the body of the study, it says the same thing that I said above.
I suppose for some version of "eventually" then everyone would likely expect to get a breakthrough case eventually, but even so the vaccines should drastically reduce the number of times one expects to be infected, so still risk would be reduced, even if it wasn't for breakthrough cases (although it appears that vaccines reduce the risk there as well).
For instance, if someone was vaccinated, but then exposed and was lucky enough not to develop an infection from their exposure, are they immunologically better off as a result of that exposure? I think they probably are, because my understanding is that's how the earliest vaccines worked (exposure on a small enough innoculum to avoid infection) but I'm not an expert, so would love to hear more about this & whether there's a name for such an immune effect when it happens in the wild.
It also depends on how many particles it takes to get you sick. Norovirus is only 7, which is insane and also why it spreads so easily. Hard to have just an exposure to that!
But for that, you are, at most, looking for the occasional transient exposure - not the bombardment that one is getting right now.
Also read a summary of influenza challenge studies. People exposed to low doses often seroconverted asymptomatically.
I feel it's plausible small exposures after vaccination would build more protection.
It is elevated, but the implications of that depend wildly on things like case rates, as events/vaccine doses is static, and events/cases is dynamic. A conclusion reached in Sept., 2021 misses a huge upswing in cases in young men from Omicron, which while milder on a per-case bases has also caused a lot more cases (to use a gaming analogy, making better saving throws, but making a lot of them).
Could you elaborate? I'm actually interested more in your opinion than on the mainstream one.
Unfortunately this study's message is quite obfuscating, probably intentionally. They mean exactly what they say though: covid-induced myocarditis rate is higher than vaccine-induced myocarditis rate, but it says nothing about covid-induced myocarditis rate in relation to vaccination status.
I was fit and healthy, no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, and exercising regularly with no family history.
I never had symptoms but maybe at some point I caught covid without knowing despite going out very rarely and always observing precautions.
He's saying that he has an effect 2 months after the vaccine. Is that not also worthy of consideration, or do you include it as an epigenetic factor?
What do you think is the prevalence of something happening to someone in a pool of, let's say, 4 billion people in 4 months.
I'm sure 2 separate people had a potted plant land on their head. Is it worth considering its relation to the vaccine?
I'm not saying it can't be related to vaccines, but as an anecdote it's useless until it's shown in statistics, or proven causality by his doctors.
Well, in my mind `epigenetic = biological age * food intake`, where `food intake` is 'is he eating a consistent healthy diet, given that a typical person not eating healthy will surely says that she's eating healthy'. It's (unfortunately) enough to be >30yo, having bad genes around cholesterol handling pathways and eating a standard american diet (even without significant overweight) to be in the danger zone in terms of cardiovascular risks.
ApoB in the golden (and recent) blood test here. OP: given that you have experienced chest pains, and if it's not the case already, go have your ApoB checked and ask for statins if needed: your 60yo you will thank you.
And, in my own and non-important opinion: don't waste your time even thinking about potential link between your condition and covid/vaccine, this is a path that leads nowhere in terms of prevention of futures attacks.
Source: https://peterattiamd.com/measuring-cardiovascular-disease-ri...
What's apob?
It's certainly rare, but young fit people do have heart problems. You can't conclude that this had anything to do with the vaccine, this is not how science works. Certainly the long-term health effects of the vaccines should be studied, but bandying about these kinds of anecdotes is dangerous: it's the same kind of thing that has (wrongly!) convinced so many people that vaccines cause autism.
By the way, this is not to minimize what you went through, I cannot imagine how scary or painful it must've been. I hope you will have a strong path to recovery, and I wish you all the best.
- Vinay Prasad MD MPH ( https://youtu.be/NR_ZVzrTeYk?t=47 )
Source used by the video author from nature.com: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf
I'm pro-vax (god, why do I have to say that?) but what's seriously pissed me off about this whole COVID thing is how quickly it became political. At the beginning there was a real sense of "we're in this together" but now you can be pretty certain of someones political affiliation if they choose not to wear a mask.
Vaccines prevent you getting the worst of the illness, they don't really prevent you catching and infecting others, so vaccines are a "cure" for overwhelmed healthcare systems and a protection for the individual.
So why do you need to have a vaccine pass to go places? You can still carry the virus and infect people.
Having unvaccinated parts of the population means we can track if it was the wise decision or not, hindsight is 20-20 and it seems obvious to me now that we should vaccinate.. But it also seemed obvious in the 50s that fireproofing buildings with asbestos was the right decision too.
The politics goes deeper: the definitions of the terms 'vaccine' and 'virus' were changed, governments have undertaken the biggest advertising campaign in history effectively bankrolling the media, people who died of unrelated causes but had a positive test were counted as covid deaths which plainly skews statistics, governmental psychological units were given a few rein, large corporations were allowed to remain open but small businesses were not, etc.
These are examples of how this was handled not in a neutral way, but to advance a political agenda. Especially when you consider that most western countries were implementing the same measures in a coordinated way.
Even if they aren't 100% effective, vaccines still reduce both the likelihood that you will become infected and also the likelihood that you will transmit the virus to others.
The largest issue with COVID was the over saturation of healthcare facilities, that's the only reason the UK locked down at all.
Oversaturated healthcare is a problem for people who have the worst effects of COVID and people who otherwise need beds, since their bed may be taken up by a person with COVID.
Vaccines lowering the spread of the virus may be true, not really going to argue that point, I'm more pointing out that vaccines do not halt the spread and thus a vaccine pass is a poor way of saying it won't spread.
Instead you just prevent the non-vaccinated from participating in society, when in reality we probably need people to remain unvaccinated due to underlying health conditions or to understand health complications that can arise through the vaccine and/or the virus when unmitigated.
I'm not claiming "anti-vax rights", though it might sound like that, it's just not very scientific to have no control population.
There's always been "unconventional" (diplomatically) ideas, and that's great since some fraction of them do turn out correct. But with the last decade or two of ubiquitous social media use, the fringe ideas that aren't dangerous in 0.1% of people, are very dangerous if they reach 5 or 10%.
This is not a defense of authoritarianism on ideas, but merely describing the practical effects.
Arguably it's the other way around. Not wearing a mask (if voluntary) is the normal and natural choice, which should tell you nothing about a person at all. Choosing to wear one even when not required, on the other hand, tells you a lot about that person and their perception of risks/expert status etc.
Edit: This is confirmed in the supplementary data. Only 347 (0.23%) of the 162,690 people in the COVID-19 group were vaccinated prior to infection. That being said, a reasonably large percentage (61.93%) were vaccinated by the end of the follow up period, which would seemingly indicate that vaccination post-infection doesn't help all that much against these risks.
That's the pool of 60+ year-old veterans who were selected after testing positive and then subsequently monitored for one year.
It is likely that many were vaccinated during the 1-year period from Jan 2021 - Jan 2022.
e.g. as of July 2021, the VA % vaccinated was about 50%, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/07/26/va-man...
We know that mRNA vaccines have resulted in negative cardiac consequences in some patients, although that has mostly been in younger men.
Like, was this study pre-registered? Or did they just mine the database until they found an association with p<0.05?
we have a saying that only cows don't change their mind.
Seems impossible to tell if this holds for omicron as well, given that it's replication behavior and general outcome is a bit different and usually more mild.
Post covid (two months now) I feel the burn so much faster. Completely anecdotal but it had my doctor worried enough that she send me to an EKG and for blood testing (which was normal) leave her with no answer other than “who knows”.
In my N=1, any one of the myriad other common colds that I've had caused similar symptoms. The degree of muscle soreness was strange. Along with another person in my bubble who also got infected, we both measured increases in red blood cell count outside of the normal range several months after. It wasn't clear if this was due to COVID-19 or being athletes. I didn't have a baseline unfortunately.
I had a dramatically different experience with a flu that I got in December 2019. My resting HR was up by 10bpm for a month after. My exercise regime was broken, and it took almost two months to fully recover.
I truly hope that COVID-19 is just a window into these infection disease processes that are going on all the time, damaging our bodies without giving us clear feedback. This massive pulse of naive infection is a unique opportunity to understand this. I fear that we will not be able to generalize these lessons. And I understand why. COVID is very weird...
I chuckled. Was it an intentional typo?
How doesn't this completely invalidate the title? If we aren't actually comparing between a group that provably did not have COVID and one that did, we can't possibly draw any conclusions about the effect of having COVID compared to not having it at all.
These are 2 different things. The vaccines obviously have not had any long term testing.
I can’t believe such unthorough data but extremely alarmist headline is allowed in print.
Sounds like another biased article to promote experimental vaccines. Curiously right after so many studies about increased hear failures, myocarditis and pericarditis in healthy population and dying athletes in front of the cameras.
> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346 > https://swprs.org/covid-vaccines-a-reality-check/ > https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v... > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0 > https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arre...
>Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study shows.
> “I am actually surprised by these findings that cardiovascular complications of COVID can last so long,”
Does this imply that the risk decreases with time as the body recovers? Or is the elevated risk permanent?
Let’s just say that there are some statistical issues with this study design.
Without the Apple watch monitoring your heart rate: you don't see the warning signs early enough and have a fatal heart attack, once.
With the Apple watch: you get alerted earlier, get to hospital and survive your heart attack. So you can go on to have another, and another, and another. All contributing to the "heart attacks while wearing Apple watches" statistic ;)
They're also not testing for the more dangerous ventricular fibrillation.
I was swimming hard 5x a week and didn't notice anything during that and the weekend before was hiking about the countryside carrying my kids on my shoulders so it feels a bit of a mystery. I'm pretty sure, again in hindsight that I had a milder attack/angina on the Thursday before which I chalked up as heartburn. Because it was during the night I sort of soldiered through it and fell asleep again. Which could have been very bad.
The actual heart attack I had whilst swimming and because I'm an idiot, just slowed down a bit and finished another 30 minutes of swimming. It only got very painful after I was chilling after my swim. I got out and dry heaved a couple of times in the bath room and walked home. Lay down, took some antacids, that did nothing and it was painful so got my wife to take me to the hospital. They seemed pretty skeptical that there was much wrong with me until they hooked me up to an EKG and then I got filled full of drugs and ambulanced straight into surgery. Ended up with a stent as the main left artery feeding the heart was totally blocked. It's an amazing experience as you're totally conscious for the surgery and get to watch whats happening on a monitor. The only really painful part was a lower branch getting collapsed, I got some morphine for that but am not 100% convinced it did much of anything. Instant relief once it was opened again.
I'm 30 now and with every year I tell myself "I really need to eat better/exercise more/etc or else I'll have a heart attack like dad". It's stories like this that make me even more scared haha. Lesson learned: listen to your body.
This study has nothing to do with the vaccine, and yet this is what HN clamors for. I wonder how many people here understand what kind of ride they're being taken for.
How would you even begin to understand and deal with this kind of situation on a massive, global scale... it's an interesting problem.
Makes you think about the sudden and almost unexplainable push from aggressive, vocal experts to have the public unmask and drop all COVID mitigations immediately after the latest surge too...
This way of thinking really feels rampant in our field. I've seen developers read a Wikipedia page or blog post and suddenly think they know better than mathematicians, lawyers, doctors, research scientists, economists, ethicists etc. No topic is too niche or trivial to be safe from this effect. A little while ago the topic of Geometric Algebra swept through HN and engineers with no math theory background were posting sensationalist takes about how GA was destined to supersede the orthodoxy.
Correction, it should be "re: vaccine rhetoric". Normality is no vaccine.
Remember, vaccination is an idea propagated by some entity - "anti-vax" as anyone who disagrees has been labeled, is in actuality the base condition.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/02/09/heart-problems-after-cov...
Heart Problems After Covid Are Much Worse for the Vaccinated, Nature Study Shows – But It’s Hidden in the Appendix*
It might as well be that those who are vaccinated and still get sick are just predisposed to heart complications. Saying they get those because they were vaccinated is a fallacy.
(Argues so poorly that it doesn't really deserve a response, but I'll follow this digression)
> > It might as well be that those who are vaccinated and still get sick are just predisposed to heart complications.
> No, it's based on a study with a sample size of 42 million
If someone is in poor health, they may be
A) more likely to get COVID, despite being vaccinated, AND
B) more likely to have heart problems
In turn, it doesn't matter what the sample size of your study is. A & B will be correlated, even though there's no causal relationship between vaccination+covid->heart problems; the causal relationship is between "poor health" and "heart problems".
Table 21 removes individuals from the cohort once they become vaccinated, whereas Table 22 continues to follow up with those individuals until the 12 month mark. It is entirely possible that many of the individuals that were removed from Table 21's cohort did go on to develop myocarditis, but they aren't included in the measured rate by virtue of being censored from the analysis. In other words, you would naturally expect the numbers in Table 21 to be lower than the numbers in Table 22 simply based on the fact that they are measuring two different things, and this has nothing to do with the actual risk of vaccination because this study wasn't trying to measure that in the first place.
Given the above, the napkin math performed by the author pretty much comes across as nonsense. You can't play with the numbers like that because they don't actually mean what you think they mean.