Increased cardiovascular events in Israel during vaccine rollout and third wave
nature.com
nature.com
If you want to confirm any pre-existing belief you may have, you can find fringe papers to support essentially anything.
See "controversies": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports
My guess is that a more correctly written paper would have been published in a better journal (maybe even Nature) if it got the same results, but it didn't.
[0] https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/03/22/the-bright-side-virus...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...
[2] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/04/22/air-pollution-expos...
From https://www.graphpad.com/support/faq/how-to-report-p-values-...
Three styles are summarized below:
P value 0.1234 0.01234 0.00123 0.00012 0.00001
APA ".123" "0.012" ".001" "<.001" "<.001"
NEJM. "0.12" "0.012" "0.001" "<.001" "<.001"
GP. "0.1234" "0.0123" "0.0012" "0.0001" "<0.0001"
Back on topic. A vaccine has risks. Not having a vaccine has risks. What one really cares about is whether one’s (personal or demographic) risks of serious medical issues are significantly decreased by getting the vaccine, or if one’s psychosomatic psychological issues outweigh the medical benefits. We all know this, but unfortunately discussions often seem to get sidetracked and only consider the risk of the vaccine.
In german: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-feuerwehr-herzpr...
They argue to change from mandatory vaccination to optional vaccination for their profession.
Evolution will tell what the right choice was. I am having popcorn while watching the extremists battle each others position.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
How do you know you haven't been infected? Asymptomatic cases are common, and most people aren't getting frequent tests.
Certainly if you did the deceptive deed of tracking "dead with vaccine" like we do for the disease.
Where are they not tracking "dead with covid" separately from "dead from covid"? Here in the UK we have very clearly recorded separate numbers for these (the "dead from" number were ~66% the "dead with" numbers until recently with the rise of Omicron meaning that far more people have covid and far few people are dying from it).
Interestingly enough, most of the covid restrictions affected the young the most, while the old were mostly unaffected (tehnically they were all affected the same, but most old people are at home and in beds when curfews started).
Unless it's much less that doesn't mean much given that those are usually the largest killers of young people.
Just the number of extra suicides due to curfews was probably higher than the death rates in those age groups.
In comparison, in total (so all age groups, including the 85yo+), we had more cigarette related deaths in those two years than of covid, and we still sell cigarettes pretty much everywhere.
Cigarettes are very different in that mostly affect the person smoking (in many countries we do indeed ban smoking in enclosed public places).
Restrictions were not introduced to "save" people, in such a way that you could restrict the lockdowns to the more vulnerable elderly population. Such a lockdown would have to be draconian (China-style).
Rather, restrictions were introduced (except for Australia and various countries in Asia which had zero case policy) to curb the growth in the occupation of hospital beds before the hospitals were full. Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions. Reduction of the reproduction rate cannot be achieved with a lockdown only of >60 year old people, since (like vaccination) the effect is inversely proportional to the amount of people not being locked down.
The reasons given for lockdown were ever shifting. Just very recently German Health Minister Karl Lauterach said we have to keep measures because 200 people a day die of Coronavirus and that's just too many.
> Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions.
Where, when, how? Even the very first lockdown in Germany happened when R was already <1. That used to be on the RKIs (our CDC) website.
What I don't understand is that I have to keep coming with facts (and still get censored) and you (the pro-lockdowners) can just keep doing argument by false assertions without showing any data whatsoever.
I agree that communication was awful all over the board and from both sides.
> Where, when, how?
Italy spring 2021. Note that in general I am talking about 2021 data not 2022. I wouldn't even call 2022 restrictions a lockdown, they are really more of a vaccination and mask mandate.
I appreciate the peace offering but you have to understand that, for me, this topic is deeply personal. I am not willing to let it go on "oh let's call it awful and move on". Maybe in the beginning there was an earnest motivation to avoid suffering but the rest of the time, the public was simply deceived if not down right gaslit.
As a general answer: Corona is seasonal depending on latitude and on northern latitude spring is the end of it's season. So no matter what you do, you get a decrease in cases anyway. But if you mean something else, please show me in detail.
The excuse for lack of evidence seems to so often boil down to "that wasn't true lockdown". However, the measures in 2022 followed the same logic as the early lockdowns and were justified with the same grab bag of reasons. For instance, in winter 2021/2022, in Germany, I wasn't allowed to do anything except shopping for essentials because I am not vaccinated. For me, it absolutely was exactly like lockdown: same restrictions, same reasons, same dire predictions what would happen without these measures.
So I want an explanation for why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022, a full one and a half month ahead of Germany and why are cases now dropping like a rock in Germany three weeks after repealing most measures.
Not entirely, for example US tended to have waves during the summer that Europe didn't have (more AC and less outdoor activity perhaps?). But yeah it seems to be mostly seasonal and definitely it comes and goes in waves of roughly 2 months.
> why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022,
Obviously the rate of vaccination had a role in the lack of "explosion" (transmission remains but is lower, and there are more mild and asymptomatic cases that aren't traced). However cases did start to grow around 25th of February, inverting the previous trend[1], and the simplest explanation is that measures had some effect.
In fact the share of positive tests in Switzerland is so ridiculously high (50% around mid March) that the cases probably did explode, but were mostly mild or asymptomatic thanks to the vaccine. So again you cannot compare effects of suspending restrictions in 2022 on what would have happened without lockdowns in 2020.
Furthermore, while deaths among 40-60 year olds are pretty low, that's less true for hospitalizations. The impact of uncontrolled spreading before vaccinations would have been worse than a CFR measured in "ideal" conditions where everybody had access to healthcare.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
So the real question is: how many have died who would not have died of the flu or RSV or Andenovirus or Beta-coronavirus or any of the other innumerable causes of respiratory infections?
Not to mention, this has nothing to do with people younger than 40 or even younger than 60.
Such as
Discharging hospital patients into care homes:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/28/the-covid-care-home...
"The practice of discharging untested patients from hospitals to care homes remained in force until 15 April 2020."
Killing people with ventilators:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
"Bergmann’s case illustrates a shift on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, as doctors rethink when and how to use mechanical ventilators to treat severe sufferers of the disease - and in some cases whether to use them at all. While initially doctors packed intensive care units with intubated patients, now many are exploring other options.
England had 70.000 more deaths than usual in 2020 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...), how many of those were from care homes? The balance was ~30.000 in mid April, were all of them in care homes? And even if so, how do you justify the remaining 40.000 that died later in the year?
> Killing people with ventilators:
Also April 2020, so the question is the same. How do you justify the excess deaths from the second half of 2020 and 2021?
> except that a lot of countries didn't have any unusual excess mortality in 2020
Which? How did death causes compare in 2019 and 2020?
There are studies for this such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099995/
https://appgpandemic.org/news/hospital-and-care-home-visitin...
“There are still obstacles in place when trying to visit a loved one in a care home and the impact has been and continues to be devastating. The safeguarding issues I am seeing and hearing about are atrocious. Residents left for hours in dirty, wet incontinence pads leading to dangerous pressure ulcers. Malnutrition. Dehydration. End of life medication given to patients without their or their family’s consent. Psychological trauma, post traumatic stress and suicides have resulted because of this. Multiple systems are failing, including Local Authorities and the CQC. It is a complex situation that needs a bold approach by both empowering families and galvanising government action to hold public bodies to account and stop private equity firms placing profit over people.”
The single largest group of people, between 40% and 60% depending on country, to die from coronavirus were from care homes [1],[2] so it stands to reason that measures applying to care homes had an outsized effect on corona virus mortality.
And indeed, Sweden, after admitting it did wrong by the care home residence in Spring 2020 and taking steps to rectify the situation, got their deaths under control which allowed them to end 2020 at (minus) -2.3% age-adjusted relative mortality.
> There are studies for this such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099995/
This study uses unadjusted mortality which does not account for an aging population. In particular it doesn't account for Sweden's 2019 negative excess mortality. I look at this report by the UKs Office of National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Table "Table 2: Relative cumulative excess mortality ..." is the most interesting. It shows that more than half of these European countries had absolutely nothing exceptional going on mortality wise between 2020 and June 2021. I'm not sure how the Corona narrative (100000k death / month without lockdowns!!) can account for this data. If it's really only the virus we should've seen mass mortality everywhere especially the places with a more "hands off" approach like Sweden. That's just not what happened.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/half-of-corona...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...
That's not how I read it. First, all except Norway, Finland, Estonia, Denmark had at least +20% in 2020. Second, it's the peak that the graph plots so you cannot use it to take conclusions over the whole year. All the graph can tell you is how hard the country was hit by the spring 2021 wave compared to 2020.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/download/table?format=xlsx&uri=/peopl...
(warning excel)
It shows that of the 32 European countries 17 didn't even exceed an excess of 5% in the whole period from 2020-01 to 2021-06.
In fact the only countries with negative mortality are either islands or the northern Europe countries which have long been known to be outliers.
> [..] increased CA incidence was not observed among the 16–39 age group in 2020
In 2021 incidences rose another 10 % or so. To ascribe this rise to vaccinations and just shrug at the year before is... creative.
FWIW something that would seem to fit almost perfectly is infections, which were about twice as high in 2021 compared to 2020.
Also: this is an association of "vaccine-critical" firemen asking these questions, and the data is from 911 calls, which are not diagnoses. They are also trending towards being more specific in their classification scheme because they now have specific protocols and equipment for some indications, such as strokes.
The numbers are less impressive then what they seem, and IMO the numbers look like they were computed in a way that resulted in what the authors wanted. For example, weekly counts of cardiac arrest calls are computed using a five-week centered moving-average, and COVID-19 and vaccination doses are computed using a three-week centered moving-average. I'd assume that using three weeks for cardiac arrest calls, the numbers would look less correlated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports
> Scientific Reports is an online peer-reviewed open access scientific mega journal published by Nature Portfolio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_journal
> A mega journal (also mega-journal and megajournal) is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE. This "very lucrative publishing model" was soon emulated by other publishers.
Basically it's bunk-for-hire.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports#Controversi...
> Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0·0023%, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·0015–0·0039) and increasing exponentially through ages 30 years (0·0573%, 0·0418–0·0870), 60 years (1·0035%, 0·7002–1·5727), and 90 years (20·3292%, 14·6888–28·9754). https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
But of course we can't directly compare the two, as we'd need to know the fatality rate from these CA and ACS calls, not to mention looking at other negative outcomes short of death. Regardless, it certainly appears to me that vaccination still makes sense for all ages, but if you assume the risk of these side effects is the same for each booster, whereas the impacts on serious covid outcomes are diminishing, I guess there would be a point at which the risk of the side effects would outweigh the marginal benefit of additional / more frequent boosters for young people.
It could be the novel virus and degradation of healthcare services due to overloading.
It could be an interaction of both and unknown external factors.
The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination. But I know biology can be incredibly complicated times. So, provided the results are statically significant since it seems to be the standard, what possible hypotheses can be made ?
When the vaccine came out it was believed that the spike is harmless but later it was shown that the spike protein is enough to cause symptoms similar to the disease COVID. [1]
For a long time people thought that the mRNA, and therefore the spike from the vax, would stay in the muscle tissue and be broken down in a matter of days. This study [2] in Cell found that, actually, the mRNA can get to the lymph nodes and cause spike production for as long as 60 days. Spike protein is also found in the blood of 96% of vaccinees and the concentration is comparable to that of an acute infection.
[1] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/spike-protein-of-sars-cov...
[2] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9
> The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination.
But this is bad logic.
The mechanism behind the adenovirus clotting adverse reactions is that Platlet Factor 4 sticks to the adenovirus capsid. It shares nothing with SARS-CoV-2 at all. Since the virus sticks to the capsid it is endocytosed as the virus particle enters cells. That results in PF4 inside of cells, which is not supposed to happen. Some people have the 'right' HLA subtype and bits of the PF4 molecule is displayed on the surface of their cells. Then further some breakdown happens in the bodies identification of "self" proteins in some people and the immune system starts to produce autoantibodies against PF4. This autoantibody attack results in vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia.
Both SARS-CoV-2 viral infection and adenovirus-based vaccines can cause clotting issues. Biologically they only really share the spike protein in common. But the clotting issues observed after ChAdOx vaccination are due to a mechanism unique to adenoviruses (and naturally occurring human adenoviruses may cause the same issues, but it has never been detected before).
[The other comment here is also full of nonsense. The spike protein is contained within the cell producing it. There is detectable spike protein in the blood of some people post-vaccine but at femtogram per mL concentrations that require special assays to detect, likely due to lysing of the cells in lymph nodes and tiny bit escaping. This is very unlikely to have any direct biological effect]
Can anyone weigh in on the methodology or data?
(Interesting to note that the linked page puts this article in something like the 99th percentile for how much it’s tweeted, which I would put squarely in the “reduces my confidence” category…)
Doing basic checks like "what else did the authors publish" seem fairly sensible.
It seems like the authors probably went into this with a conclusion in mind…
It's Scientific Reports from the same publisher, but not Nature, the journal itself. Scientific Reports has a very high acceptance rate, i.e. they publish pretty much anything that passes peer review.
I think the real question is the quality of peer review. A "high rate of acceptance" isn't bad if accepting an article happens only after good quality peer review. But a high rate of acceptance without adequate peer review would be a big source of concern.
Not sure which of these publishing considerations applies to this article. I'll have to go over it again in detail when I'm more rested, anyway on quick overview I didn't spot any glaring problems in it.
Basically you have a data set and some statistical evaluation. The gabs are filled with some medical and statistical "Mumbo Jambo" I didn't read. Seems professional, the graphs are pretty clear cut, which is nice.
The discussion basically states that the data is flawed for the purpose of making clear connections and urges the necessity to provide better data in the future. They aren't even able to make their derived call data public, due to privacy laws in this case.
They are absolute right and have a valid point here. No reason not to publish this and it conveys some important messages.
We should gather better data and find a way to share it, without touching on the privacy of individuals. A very difficult topic I personally wouldn't touch with a stick.
Agree completely. This topic has got so ideological that if (when) it comes up in conversation I tend to demur and politely change the subject.
Perhaps at some point there will be a genuine attempt to gather more data on just who genuinely benefits from vaccination (obese/elderly/other comorbidities?), and who doesn't (young/healthy).
One thing we can be sure of is that no such study will ever be funded by Big Pharma.
It won't have any effect on the final result, which basically states that the data set is insufficient.
> It is important to note the main limitation of this study, which is that it relies on aggregated data that do not include specific information regarding the affected patients... underlying comorbidities as well as vaccination and COVID-19 positive status
Also from the graphs, while the number of events do seem correlated, there are some peaks that are hard to explain
search: >scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine cardiovascular event'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 CO...>