It seems to be that the spike protein is responsible for this, which is present in both the virus and the vaccine.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
Technically correct, but definitely not the best kind of correct.
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.
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.