Heart attacks on rise for 25-44 age group | Hacker News Reader

Heart attacks on rise for 25-44 age group

khon2.com

260 pointsluu281 comments

For those who are desperate to draw a link between vaccines and heart attacks, this article essentially says the opposite of that. While the paper itself doesn't differentiate between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, it does contain a graph showing a state-by-state breakdown of acute myocardial infarction (AMI)-associated deaths:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/c0aed082-9f81-4a88...

Dark purple is a higher rate of death, light blue is lower.

A state-by-state graph of vaccination percentage is available here:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/12/16/us/covid-19-vacci...

These graphs would indicate that the states with the lowest vaccination rates have the highest AMI mortality rates.

It's difficult to draw conclusions because first graph is not the delta in deaths, just total deaths. and southern states have always had a high cardiovascular mortality.

I guess the bigger question that I often have is why the rush to completely rule out vaccines? Whenever this discussion comes up, its either complete blame or zero blame. How about investigate it like any other factor with the help of proper data? After all, it's the biggest change that young people have experienced that coincides with what authors note. Has there been any other huge lifestyle or external change for younger people? The other is staying indoors and not spending time outside. That could lead to lower activity levels and more stress. I can't think of many others, apart from covid itself.

It would be the right thing to do to explore it as a causal factor with cool heads. It's not impossible is it? What if it actually is leading to huge risk and we refuse to learn about it until 10 years later because we must not talk ill about vaccines?

In my own case, I had significant cardiovascular issues at a relatively young age, 1 week after I got my booster. They are simply not collecting this kind of data at a large scale to draw meaningful conclusions either way because the whole vaccine discussion is so charged. My doctor said he doesn't know if it's common enough because they are not instructed to collect this information. For me, even though it's anecdotal, the severity of my incident so close to the booster, without having any other history obviously makes me consider it as the #1 factor, not anything else.

How about exposure to actual coronavirus? Most everyone is exposed at least to small degrees on a daily/weekly basis given the levels in air.

Yes, that's definitely possible. All of this would be much easier to decipher if the studies went deeper into cohorts of who got the vaccination and where the heart attack delta is. So if you had 4 cohorts of people and noticed their heart attack delta: covid/no vaccine, no covid/no vaccine, covid/vaccine, no covid/vaccine, that itself would tell you a lot.

Because if no covid/vaccine is showing a much higher or similar delta as covid/*, that would be pretty worrisome. I think that seems to be missing in the given study.

Can we reliably detect if someone was vaccinated but not exposed to the actual virus?

Yes. I did a test last year to check for antibodies generated through the vaccine and antibodies generated through an infection. Vaccine was positive, infection negative.

Is the rest reliable?

“In participants that had COVID-19 and were tested one week after symptoms developed, antibody tests detected only 27% to 41% of infections. In week 2 after first symptoms, 64% to 79% of infections were detected, rising to 78% to 88% in week 3. Tests that specifically detected IgG or IgM antibodies were the most accurate and, when testing people from 21 days after first symptoms, they detected 93% of people with COVID-19. Tests gave false positive results for 1% of those without COVID-19.”

https://www.cochrane.org/CD013652/INFECTN_what-diagnostic-ac...

People also rule out significantly higher levels of sedantary activity, coupled with higher obesity and lower physical activity levels.

Sitting at home and working all day is really bad for your health, especially if you do it on/off for two years.

The group in question - 25-44 year olds - are primary members of the workforce, and most likely saw their work shift to WFH for extended periods of time. Anecdotally, all the people who worked from home within my circle struggled a lot with inactivity and weight gain, coupled with poor diets.

This works for office rats, but not really athletes, who've also seemed to have an unusually high rate of heart issues.

>why the rush to rule them out?

They were just introduced on a broad scale, so rushing to rule them out is only natural, as they are something it would be reasonable to suspect of causing this. You after all rule out likely suspects first.

The only thing thing besides the vaccines that come to mind having caused this is widespread lifestyle changes society wide as well as the most overwhelmingly obvious reason this trend might be happening which is that we just got hit by a major pandemic that causes heart attacks.

I don't fully understand. Are you saying since vaccines were broadly introduced, they are less likely to be the culprit? How is that implied? 30% increase in heart attacks in young age group is pretty broad too.

This study doesn't study vaccination cohorts to imply any association either way

No, I’m saying vaccines are so plausibly the culprit you would want to immediately subject them to analysis as to if they are the cause of the trend asap, but a natural consequence of any such analysis is you are very likely to do the opposite and rule them out as a cause.

Okay...I think I sprained a couple of nerves from these gymnastics but has anyone actually explicitly ruled out vaccines as the culprit of this?

Not heart attacks, but Scotland is investigating a rise in neonatal deaths, which correlates with the vaccine rollout, yet has decided that it's definitely not the vaccine. Science at it's finest. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23259523.expert-review-m...

Haha yeah, mother's vaccine status not checked, they don't know why it is happening, but definitely can't be the vaccine, wouldn't want to cause a scare you know.

What a joke.

Or, you know, exposure to a novel coronavirus which has been proven to cause serious cardiovascular issues even in healthy individuals.

I’d probably start there.

The experimental products don't prevent infection or transmission, so whether or not coronavirus itself has impact on cardiovascular function is not relevant to whether or not the vaccines do as well.

We know for a fact at this point the products cause cardiovascular injury. That's not really up for debate. So now we need to understand the extent. Some of us believe it's higher impact than others. One side was caught actively suppressing information, so there's no reason to trust them.

> The experimental products don't prevent infection or transmission, so whether or not coronavirus itself has impact on cardiovascular function is not relevant to whether or not the vaccines do as well.

You are presenting this as a binary option. Either the vaccines fully prevent infection & transmission, or they don't. But what if they reduce the severity of the infection, lowering the likelihood of cardiovascular injury by more than they increase it by? Suddenly your point is fully moot. And considering that there is a definitive difference in likelihood of injury/death between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated one seems much more likely to be true.

> One side was caught actively suppressing information, so there's no reason to trust them.

No matter which side people are on, they'll say this about the other side. If you're on the right you'll likely believe the left censors information on injuries. If you're on the left you'll likely believe that the right censored information on COVID mortality and dangers. What point do you think you're making with this kind of vague allegation?

> there is a definitive difference in likelihood of injury/death between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated

I have looked at a lot of data for children and haven't seen that. It seems children's deaths are mostly unaffected from the virus. What studies have you read which show excess deaths in children?

I'm sorry, but just how did you suddenly jump to children? Who is talking about children, or what gave you the idea that I was talking about children?

> there is a definitive difference in likelihood of injury/death

Which age groups do you want to discuss?

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality

You can see there. Up substantially in 2022, there is a widget at the side to add in previous years.

> I guess the bigger question that I often have is why the rush to completely rule out vaccines?

I don't believe that anyone has completely ruled out vaccines. I think that's a boogeyman conspiracy theorists tell each other "The possible risks from vaccines are forbidden from being considered or talked about!". It's attractive to conspiracy minded people to have secret suppressed information that "they" don't want you know about, but it just isn't real. Wild speculation without evidence intended to spread fear and vaccine hesitancy is what gets suppressed, and for good reason.

Meanwhile researchers are carefully keeping an eye on emerging evidence even when it's only preliminary (https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001051) and the mass media, even the left leaning media, has zero problems reporting on what the research we have shows (https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/moderna-shot-may-ca...).

What we know is that covid infection itself increases the risk of heart problems and blood clots in everyone and that not taking the vaccine increases the odds of death, severe illness, and overwhelmed hospitals, along with disruptions in society and the economy. Right now, all the evidence we have says getting a covid vaccine is the smart choice, but nobody actually thinks that there's zero chance of unexpected side effects from these vaccines and nobody is ignoring that possibility or forbidding people from "asking questions". Spreading lies and FUD on the other hand isn't and shouldn't be well received.

I think my biggest issue with the whole thing is lack of data collection at the national level about adults who face cardiovascular issues and their vaccination/covid status. If I was rolling out a new vaccine at the national level, this is the first thing I could collect to be able to make conclusions either way. And it's not a complicated thing to collect too.

Blood clots have gone up significantly for younger people in last two years. Is that due to covid or due to vaccination? We can't answer this simple enough question because we refuse to collect data. This is directly from my hematologist btw who is an expert in blood clots at a famous hospital. That itself suggests either bias or complacency to me.

Would you be against data collection? It's not implying anything.

> I think my biggest issue with the whole thing is lack of data collection at the national level about adults who face cardiovascular issues and their vaccination/covid status.

What is your evidence that there is zero data being collected on this? What is your evidence that we refuse to collect this data?

I can prove that the issue is being considered along with every other side effect experienced by people taking these vaccines. Research on the subject already exists, how is that possible if no one is collecting data? VAERS continues to collect data on the side effects experienced by people who have taken the vaccine, which is then being evaluated by researchers. What evidence you do you have that this isn't happening?

1. My doctor(s) (in USA) told me so. They were not aware of any data collection around this and my condition. I did explicitly ask them.

2. Where is this data? If it's being collected, we should be able to see it or clear conclusions from it? It's a very simple data set too. I have not seen any clear national level data or any discussion around it for vaccination status/blood clots in any media.

> I have not seen any clear national level data or any discussion around it for vaccination status/blood clots in any media.

In research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35582622/

In media: https://nypost.com/2022/05/05/fda-restricts-jjs-covid-19-vac...

I'll be generous and suggest that your doctor misunderstood your question. VAERS is a nationwide data collection program being used to collect evidence for the adverse effects of these vaccines, including heart problems and blood clots. Your doctor is certainly aware of this program and if they are dealing with covid patients they are most likely involved in collecting and sharing their own observations and data as well.

> blood clots became a concern starting in April 2021, when the government put a pause on the J&J shot after six women who received it developed rare blood clots—and one died. All of these cases were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), a national early reporting warning system to detect safety problems with U.S.-licensed vaccines. (https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-...)

Data on the problems the vaccines might be causing is continuously being collected and evaluated. Researchers all over the globe are exchanging data on every facet of this novel virus and the new vaccines we've developed. The possible risks of these vaccines are not being ignored and research is not forbidden. If people are telling you otherwise, you might want to ask them to clarity their position or you may want to reevaluate where you've been getting your information.

The problem is that if the front line medical staff don't collect the data the existence of collections organizations and publications is effectively irrelevant because they end up totally blind to this potential data. "Blind man reports on sky color" is pretty meaningless.

Generously we may call this an oversight that so many in front line medical believe there is no collection method or refuse to use it. Negatively, it provides plausible deniability to high minded academics while the process is intentionally shortcutted at the ground level in a massive fraud and cover up.

For myself, I've personally seen this lack of reporting for years, even before COVID, by nurses and doctors at various hospitals. There is a very pervasive attitude of, the vaccines are safe therefore your problem immediately following is total coincidence and we will report nothing.

Given it's existence for years and the lack of general training in this regard I can't help but lose trust in the entirety of the system as, at best, extremely dysfunctional.

To the down voters.

Because there exists a backend and reporting system that is extolled for it's beauty and elegance doesn't mean the users reporting front end issues are wrong. And such front end issues prevent all the data from getting to that backend and thus the reports are inaccurate.

For the system to function properly every step must operate well. Not just the ones you might like best. Otherwise it is broken. It only takes one bad line of code to break a system.

Ignoring user reports of it's brokenness is so common because those users have effectively worn out their welcome with the constant complaints.

There are better ways than blame the user though :P

> The possible risks of these vaccines are not being ignored

Several years after initial outbreak, I wonder if continuation of the emergency use authorization can be justified, or if it continues because it allows the medical establishment to not be liable for realized risks.

Possible risks don't matter to manufacturers, because nobody is liable for injury.

The observed risk of naive infection continues to outweigh the possible risks of the vaccine. The long-term effects of both are still being studied. In fact, several treatments that were granted emergency use authorization have been revoked [1], because on the balance, they were not effective enough to justify the authorization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Use_Authorization#Us...

What do you mean by "continuation of emergency use authentication??". They're all fully approved by the FDA by now [0]:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

As I understand, Pfizer got Comirnaty approved, but virtually no one has been administered Comirnaty still.

FDA continues to re-issue EUA, first issued under Trump, which shields liability and allows use without long-term studies of effectiveness.

Scroll down this URL and read some of the EUAs. https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...

"On October 19, 2022, having concluded that revising this EUA is appropriate to protect the public health or safety under section 564(g)(2) of the Act, FDA is reissuing the September 12, 2022 letter of authorization in its entirety to authorize the use of Novavax COVID‑19 Vaccine"

I think you provide a good link that's a basic start.

Here is my central issue: I still can't find basic cohort level information about blood clot incidences at the cohort level: covid/vaccinated/not vaccinated. I think this is pretty basic stuff. Since you seem to be knee or chest deep into this, any idea why this information is so hard to find? It's a pretty obvious question that I think someone like you would be curious too I assume?

I remember the study you provided. It was from the early days. What happened since then? Millions of people have been vaccinated repeatedly in the US itself, so where is the follow up for clots and other issues?

My cousin who works with a healthcare provider mentioned casually to me that health insurance claims around blood clots have gone up rapidly in the last 2 years. I am all for believing its purely covid related, but why not just dispel any myth and release the cohort information as I mentioned above. It's pretty basic stuff as a data scientist myself.

There is a bit of "trust me bro" vibe going on around any kind of large scale cohort analysis for vaccines that makes me very uncomfortable.

If I am completely misguided about my last sentence, would love to see concrete numbers at a population scale (from a credible source), not just a study among some participants. It would be make me pretty happy to see real population level vaccine cohort data, which so far seems to have been evasive for me (any my doctors).

----

Independently, I am going to share something else. My doc was VERY uncomfortable even implying that vaccine could be a possible culprit behind my issues, even though there was such a clear temporal link and I'm young/healthy otherwise. I guess there is a lot of pressure on docs to not be considered Anti Vax or even have their credibility be tarnished. But I think you can see how that can bias data and reporting one way or the other.

A cousin mentioning something and a bunch of inductive DYOR googling are both far weaker than the data provided. The main pressure on doctors is to remain scientific, which is currently incompatible with claims linking clots to the rigorously tested, surveilled, and proven vaccine. There is also a hard bias against doctors saying that spiritual possession causes epilepsy or that smoking is secretly healthy —and I’m glad.

The CDC continuously updates its surveillance of the vaccine via VAERS. Via VAERS, if any of those early warning signals reached significant levels, they would follow up with deeper studies. To date, that is not the case.

There are many questions worth asking yourself before you attribute your health issue to a vaccine:

Did I ever get COVID-19?

The risk of blood clots increases for at least 6 months after the virus.

Regardless of current fitness, have I ever had years of sedentary employment?

A computer heavy job (for instance coding) or lifestyle (say, one where you write long replies online or play videogames often) can be a major cause of cardiovascular issues for years.

Will another answer than the one you’re searching for satisfy you? Or is this truly a search for confirmation?

Nobody is saying that a link between your clots and the vaccine is impossible. They are gently reminding you that a massive body of evidence suggests it is as likely as a forest fire being caused by rain.

There is no data that I've seen that shows blood clots for vaccinated vs covid vs unvaccinated. Everyone keeps saying there's full transparency while not linking a single source. It's quite paradoxical.

If all this data is so well connected, how come my heamtologist has no clue about this? He is a pretty senior doctor.

If data is being collected, how come my doctor didn't report this potentially adverse event?

If people are being careful about this, why did the doctor outright reject any connection between vaccination and clots, even if they happened next to each other. How is that scientific if you reject observations that don't meet your theories.

I'll believe it when I see an actual study or data on this topic. The lack of transparency around vaccinated cohorts is very evident.

If you disagree strongly, I'd love for you to link me to anything. Just saying "trust me" isn't very scientific.

Just to be clear, did you or did you not have COVID-19 prior to getting your blood clots? Not for the convenience of argument, but in reality.

It sounds like you’re requesting a study that nobody will conduct. Conducting a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated cohort study on blood clots before VAERS identifies blood clots as a statistically significant potential adverse effect is like conducting a study on why it’s raining when there’s not a cloud in the sky. VAERS identified ischemic stroke as a potential risk for those over 65. That was ultimately rejected as a risk by subsequent study(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bi...). The effect of getting COVID-19 on the same cohort is well established. You can’t Google “ischemic stroke covid” without running into a handful of studies.

If you are unable to see VAERS and the early warning apparatus for what it is, nothing will help you.

And no, nobody is publishing raw data for underpowered minds to wildly misinterpret and recast into a HIPAA violating database match.

You keep referring to things as “not scientific” but it’s you. If anyone here is saying “trust me bro” it’s the guy pitting his anecdote against millions of reports into VAERS, a body of data which contradicts the notion that clotting is even in the ballpark.

You also mention there's a massive body of evidence in this regard. Where is it? I'm genuinely curious as I've wanted to dig into it.

This type of data is being collected at large academic institutions who are doing longitudinal analyses of their patient population.

>1. My doctor(s) (in USA) told me so.

Looking at general condition of healthcare systems around the world, I would never put 100% confidence into what one or a few doctors say. They are just people with ordinary motivations and beliefs, not always committed to stay informed about the progress in their fields, not always having time etc. Their observation probably comes not from reading scientific papers, but from experience of working with the healthcare system bureaucracy that may distribute information or collect data, or may not. This won't be any evidence of nothing happening.

I did look at https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html btw. It seems to have great intentions. I have no idea about the level of compliance since it's purely voluntary it seems. I would love to see the data around clots, which btw that page doesn't seem to list as a condition to be reported.

As you note, the VAERS database is voluntary and probably misses many conditions that aren't associated with a vaccine when undergoing treatment.

I accept that taking medicine, any medicine, imposes risk for adverse events. What's crazy to me is we just underwent widespread inoculation of a brand new type of vaccine technology that has never been used in humans before, meant to inoculate us against a disease that never existed before, and it _feels_ like the powers that be just don't want to ask certain questions.

Let's say the vaccine is great, it causes no one harm (this is true if no vaccine, but I pose it for the sake of argument). It would still increase confidence and dispel paranoia if it and its possible harms were studied in a much more direct way than having to look at secondary metrics, like voluntary vaers data, all cause mortality, this state vs that state, etc, when the confounding factors make it impossible to be certain of anything.

COVID was never very dangerous for young people. Many didn't even want to take the vaccine. Even if the patient wasn't blinded, why couldn't we have at least kept control groups and monitored them and been fully transparent about the outcomes?

For me I can't help but conclude that an agenda was pushed here; I think it was well intentioned. The people pushing it may have even been right, but I'll never be able to trust them like I did before.

Nit: mRNA vaccines were used in human trials for cancer immunotherapy starting in 2001, rabies in 2013, ebola, zika, influenza, cytamegalovirus, etc followed. It's not accurate to say the technology had "never been used in humans before" COVID19; but the US FDA had never approved widespread use of it until then.

This raises the question of why, despite being trialed for twenty years, the technology never was deemed ready for primetime until the emergence of COVID. Part of the reason is safety issues.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

We assumed that the vaccine doses are low enough to not cause any unacceptable health risks, but after finding these vaccines do cause cardiac complications, particularly in youth, we are hesitant to consider that these vaccines may in fact do more harm than good in some cases.

I’m confused by your link. It describes Moderna trying to use a drug to produce a liver enzyme and that was never safe, so Moderna ended up lowering their expectations with the safer and less profitable vaccines. If anything it shoes vaccines are the way to go with mRNA and the primary issue is profit.

Again, it was just an assumption that vaccines would be "safe enough", despite no mRNA vaccine having ever been rolled out at scale. The "profit" issue disappeared with COVID vaccines. You now have the FDA proposing annual COVID boosters and combined mRNA-COVID/Influenza shots for everyone, whereas European countries are age-restricting COVID boosters. If that doesn't smell like regulatory capture to you, you might suffer from COVID-induced anosmia.

You’re saying a lot to dodge the fact you made a claim using a source that doesn’t actually back your claim. You claimed this article showed mrna vaccines weren’t widely distributed because they weren’t considered safe. But this article isn’t saying that and all, and you’re misrepresenting it.

I never made this claim. I said the technology had safety issues, which the article supports. In the following paragraph, I claim that mRNA vaccines were assumed to be safe enough due to the lower dosage. Again, the article supports this.

> Again, it was just an assumption that vaccines would be "safe enough", despite no mRNA vaccine having ever been rolled out at scale.

Why is this a criterium we should pay attention to? If you never roll anything out, you'll never have data about a roll out. So instead we do studies and statistical analyses. Are you aware of any studies that "normal"/previous vaccines had to go through, which mRNA COVID vaccines did not? If so, could you please share them?

I'm not aware of any approved vaccine where the observation period in the RCT was a mere four months and the control group was vaccinated thereafter. If there is another such vaccine, I would be hesitant to take that one as well.

There's no controlled experiment to suggest that mRNA vaccines provide a survival advantage to a healthy individual. The brief RCTs certainly don't support it. The increased cardiac risk, small as it may be, may well put the vaccine into negative benefit territory for some, but we'll probably never know for sure, because none of our data is robust enough to draw such conclusions.

You linked to an article wherein the company itself deemed its own research into a different mRNA-type vaccine for a separate disease as not yet safe for human trials. This sounds like the type of caution you want to see from a vaccine research company.

Personally I would speculate the much larger "part of the issue" was that there was never any real need to seek authorization for mRNA vaccines in the US before COVID19, as alternatives for their targets existed. I would also speculate cardiovascular issues in mRNA COVID19 vaccines (which are real certainly) have something to do with spikey proteins in your bloodstream, and one can imagine what a more prevalent spikey virus might do to the same person. But I am not a doctor or medical researcher, just some guy on the internet who reads things; so I would not really put any stock into my speculations.

edit: my point is: it's good to be skeptical of things. Yes. It's not good to share inaccurate information, as the post above yours did.

> I would also speculate cardiovascular issues in mRNA COVID19 vaccines (which are real certainly) have something to do with spikey proteins in your bloodstream...

All COVID vaccines deliver spike proteins into your bloodstream, but not all of them substantially raise the risk of Myocarditis.

> ...and one can imagine what a more prevalent spikey virus might do to the same person.

Imagination is not enough, we're going to need some hard data. COVID vaccines don't prevent infection. Is there a net risk reduction? This is further complicated by underestimating the number of COVID infections. Many studies presume to have found a higher risk of Myocarditis with COVID infection, but these cases tend to be biased towards health care settings. For comparison, the difference between infection fatality rate and case fatality rate may be an order of magnitude. In this study, COVID was not associated with an increased risk of Myocarditis in the unvaccinated:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

> Imagination is not enough, we're going to need some hard data

Yes and I literally agree with you in my post. The problem is, as you admit, that data exists to point toward either conclusion; then you immediately speculate that the difference must be because:

> these cases tend to be biased towards health care settings

Unless you get 100% of infections tracked, the risk from COVID will always be measured to be higher than the true risk. That part is not speculation.

Also, if a large study measured no effect, there likely is no effect, even if troves of smaller studies disagree. Publication bias.

> approved widespread use

This conflates 'approved' with the ongoing emergency use authorization. Long term studies will help determine if it can be approved for normal use and effectiveness is part of that determination.

good point

Fair enough, I overstated my case, thanks. I hope the intention, that they are an untested technology compared to traditional vaccination, is not lost though.

This vax technology is super impressive and promising. I would like to see it succeed, hopefully in a way that some of the loss in public trust can be restored.

> is we just underwent widespread inoculation of a brand new type of vaccine technology that has never been used in humans before

If you're referring to mRNA vaccines here, then this simply isn't true. They had been used in humans before. For example they were given to humans in trials of a rabies vaccine in 2013. (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w)

mRNA vaccines are a more recent tool, but not something that is untested or one that has never been used before.

> and it _feels_ like the powers that be just don't want to ask certain questions.

Is it worth asking yourself why it feels that way when readily available evidence shows otherwise?

> It would still increase confidence and dispel paranoia if it and its possible harms were studied in a much more direct way than having to look at secondary metrics, like voluntary vaers data,

Not all the research looking into the safety of these vaccines is dependent on VAERS data. Research on the safety of these vaccines has been going on starting long before they were ever used on a human, and before the release of the covid vaccines trials (with controls and monitoring) were done to look for safety issues. The very article we're commenting under is about research that didn't depend on voluntary vaers data or all cause mortality stats. This is how science detects problems with medications and vaccines. By doing research and trials for years, then following all of the data we have available to reach the most likely conclusions.

> COVID was never very dangerous for young people.

That is very much unclear. The fact remains that we're still learning about the risk that getting infected has on everyone, young and old alike. This takes time. We already have evidence to suggest there may be long term or even permanent damage from prior infection even in cases where the symptoms were mild or even undetected.

Lots of people didn't want the vaccine, but there were many many reasons for that and not all of them held up to facts and reason. At least here in the US, people were strongly encouraged to take it, but ultimately still had the choice and there are many who are not vaccinated to this day. According to the best data we have right now, it appears that those people are dying and getting seriously ill at a rate not seen in the vaccinated population.

> For me I can't help but conclude that an agenda was pushed here;

this is very broad, and speculative, but I'm inclined to agree with you. I think that agenda was most likely promoting what the best information we had at the time indicated was the best available options we had at the time to combat a new virus that devastated our economy and our way of life. Of course governments and those in power wanted people to take them. Wouldn't they all be hoping it would help things return to normal as quickly as possible?

> The people pushing it may have even been right, but I'll never be able to trust them like I did before.

This I also agree with you on, although probably for different reasons. I've lost a great deal of faith that the CDC will be honest with the public and in our government to make sure that the American people are well cared for in times of crisis.

It may still turn out that the vaccines were a terrible mistake. Maybe everyone who took it will suddenly drop dead in 20 years time, but today there's no evidence to suggest that might be the case.

I try to make the best choices I can with the information I have currently available. I accept that I may have screwed myself over, but I'm putting my money on avoiding getting infected at all if I can, and using the best medications and vaccines available to minimize the harm that an infection would cause me if I fail at that.

I appreciate the correction mRNA vaccine use. I was imprecise, I meant to say something like, '...never approved for widespread use.' Never emerging from trials successfully is relatively speaking an untested medicine compared to more traditional methods of vaccination.

The problem with this whole situation is we were/are in inherently uncharted waters here. I suspect people above a certain age or in certain circumstances should be vaccinated and probably get boosted at some frequency and people below a certain age who are otherwise healthy do not receive enough of a benefit for this to be a blanket recommendation. I am confident that the benefit to the patient and others (vis a vis transmission) is too low to mandate vaccination for young people.

What has happened is the authorities and public health officials generally marched out there in a very authoritative and confident way, asserted things they could not assert, and then mandated censorship and vaccination in a very cavalier way. There's been a lot of lying, or more charitably, just getting ahead of their skis and asserting things as truth that were just unknowable. This puts everyone in a situation of having to evaluate a lot of murky data on their own.

I was a microbiology major in college long enough to have taken immunology, virology, etc courses. I'm not totally ill-equipped, but I have no interest or frankly time and ability to read and digest these studies and make the best possible decisions for myself. Lacking some central authority I can trust now, I don't think I have a choice though.

I very much hope mRNA vaccines turn out to be revolutionary. There's a lot of promise there, and maybe we've even realized it. If there are issues, maybe they are minor and can be resolved, but the damage to public trust is almost irreparable.

> COVID was never very dangerous for young people…

An ex-colleague who is now 31 (or 32) who was running the Stockholm marathon in 2018 and 2019, got Covid very early in 2020, and suffered a massive pulmonary embolism which took him months to fully recover from.

This was before the vaccines were available, of course.

I think they were saying from a statistics standpoint not a one off anecdote. You can find these stories with the the flu too. Any virus you get from a toddler to your 20's to your 70's is no joke and should be taken seriously.

> got Covid very early in 2020

Was that determined by a blood test for developed antibodies, or by swabbing around and amplifying whatever was picked up?

There are many types of thrombosis being registered to VAERS. While VAERS is fully voluntary, it is not for healthcare workers, so any healthcare facility will report these.

Do note that VAERS registers any adverse effect post-vaccination, someone dying from a bullet wound is registered in VAERS as a post-vaccination adverse effect. I've seen a lot of people reading into VAERS as causation.

Don't bother doing full statistical analyses with VAERS, dig around on PubMed and you'll find some. Either way, excess deaths are getting a lot of attention so expect more analyses to pop up in the coming months.

Edited out some confusing phrasing.

Vaccine Safety Datalink has this data. It's not nationwide, but covers a decent chunk of the country [1] There are about 9 million people whose medical records are included in the dataset.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/...

> Blood clots have gone up significantly for younger people in last two years. Is that due to covid or due to vaccination?

You can look at countries with young populations with low rates of vaccination before the first infection, say South Africa.

The data points to it being due to covid.

> That itself suggests either bias or complacency to me. > Would you be against data collection? It's not implying anything.

The data is being collected. In countries like the UK and Israel where government knows the vaccination status of 100% of the population, you can do very precise studies.

You ARE implying something.

> I think that's a boogeyman conspiracy theorists tell each other "The possible risks from vaccines are forbidden from being considered or talked about!". I

Funny that Youtube systematically removes any video that suggests that, even when backed by actual publications. When the action is widely visible in front of you, is that still a conspiracy or are you just blind?

> Funny that Youtube systematically removes any video that suggests that,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB80U-FSieI

Why would you even make a claim that like? This took literally seconds to disprove. That video has been up for over a year! Youtube does not "remove any video" that talks about possible health risks being caused by vaccines. It probably does remove videos that are spreading lies and FUD though, even if those videos also happen to mention things that are also backed by "actual publications"

Not that what youtube removes is any indication of some big conspiracy anyway. Youtube removes a lot of things it shouldn't. Frankly, google isn't very good at moderation on their platform and there is plenty of evidence for that.

>> backed by actual publications.

Where are these actual publications coming from if it's forbidden to consider or talk about?

What world have you been living in to miss all the documented reality of the government and co censoring, deplatforming and manipulating social/traditional media to reduce that. You're painting a very rosy picture of reality here.

Unless you believe that all those censored, shadow-banned and deplatformed people are just the conspiracy nuts with lies and fake data?

> Unless you believe that all those censored, shadow-banned and deplatformed people are just the conspiracy nuts with lies and fake data?

It'd be impossible to make that claim. I couldn't possibly be aware of all of the people who have been censored/shadow-banned/deplatformed for talking about the risks of vaccinations, but I do suspect that the vast majority of them likely were (intentionally or otherwise) spreading FUD and disinformation, making claims not supposed by evidence, and misrepresenting facts. Why would I think that? Here's my reasoning:

Is it possible that in some situations social media platforms have been too heavy handed? I'm sure of it.

Does the likely existence of inappropriate actions taken by social media companies mean that the "government and co" (whatever that's supposed to be) is involved in a conspiracy to silence everyone who dares to mention that there are or could be risks? No, it doesn't.

Does it mean that researchers aren't allowed to look into the risks of the vaccines and that no data about those risks has been being collected and studied? No, it doesn't.

Does it mean that mass media refuses to inform the public about any possible risks? No, it doesn't.

Are there many many examples of people talking about the health risks of the vaccines on social media, in mass media, and in the literature without being censored and is that information easily found and accessible? Yes, there are and yes it is.

That tells me that if there is some global conspiracy to silence such talk, that it isn't doing a very good job.

When countless people are talking about those risks, researching those risks, collecting data on those risks, and reporting those risks to the public, and they've been doing it in plain sight for years without being censored, it's then pretty unlikely that there's some hidden conspiracy to make sure those risks are never expressed or explored.

If talking about the risks of the vaccines doesn't get you censored/shadow-banned/deplatformed (as evidenced by all the people who do exactly that and aren't censored/shadow-banned/deplatformed) then there must be a different reason that some people who have been making claims about the risks of vaccines are censored/shadow-banned/deplatformed.

If you look at the twitter files released by Matt Taibi it indeed confirms there is collusion among former twitter and numerous government entities. It’s no conspiracy, there’s straight emails of the government asking for XYZ list of accounts to be suppressed.

https://amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/14/editorial-t...

You further had the suppression of the Hunter biden laptop in DMs and tweets, because government entities stated it was Russian disinformation, while after the convenient time of election cycle, they admit it’s real. What’s the consequence of the intelligence community signing a document stating that it was truly some subversion campaign by Russia, when it was actually a lie to get social media companies to remove politically damning evidence?

https://nypost.com/2022/11/21/cbs-confirms-hunter-biden-lapt...

I fully hear the balanced argument you’re proposing, and to some extent agree, but both sides currently have different sets of blinders on as to what’s reality, and that to me is a scary scenario

The fact that governments do actually engage in censorship doesn't mean that everyone who posts about the real or possible risks of the covid vaccines get their posts censored or that people whose posts about the risks of covid vaccines were removed, were removed because of goverment censorship.

Even in the case of twitter. Here: https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1536697529454272512

There's a tweet about the risks of covid vaccinations. If the government, twitter, or both were censoring discussion of the risks of covid vaccinations how does that exist? How do the countless other uncensored and easily searchable posts that do the same thing exist?

Isn't it more likely that if a post about the risks of covid vaccinations does get removed that it's for a reason other than because of an attempt to hide information about, and prevent discussion of, the risks of covid vaccinations?

Who do you think is telling people they can't talk about the risks? We're doing it. It's talked about all the time everywhere. It's researched every day. The media reports on it to the public. Nobody thinks that there aren't any risks. Whatever oppression exists in the world, "preventing people from talking about or learning about the risks of covid vaccines" is not an example of it.

Particularly at the time of the vaccine rollout, there absolutely was a huge effort across many platforms to mock, silence and ultimately censor individuals. Whether or not there was government collusion, I obviously can't say, but I'd hardly be surprised given the close relationships between media outlets and government officials.

Clearly everyone wasn't being banned, some things were being allowed, but personally I think the conversation was being steered/herded in a way that made one particular point of view more prominent and minimised exposure to alternatives.

For example, I was banned from Reddit world news for simply sharing a science.org article about some of the potential vaccination side effects:

https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-cases-coronavir...

You have been banned for posting content that downplays or mocks necessary public health measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic, such as taking vaccines or wearing masks in the comments section. Such comments violate this subreddit's rule against offensive content and reddit's guideline against harmful content:

Note that health misinformation, namely falsifiable health information that encourages or poses a significant risk of physical harm to the reader, also violates the Rule.

I can't contest this ban and it's permanent.

> There's a tweet about the risks of covid vaccinations. If the government, twitter, or both were censoring discussion of the risks of covid vaccinations how does that exist? How do the countless other uncensored and easily searchable posts that do the same thing exist?

Censorship doesn't have to be perfect to be real and to have real effects.

Still waiting for Giuliani to release that hunter Biden laptop evidence he's been claiming in his possession

I guess one question that comes up is that, has there ever been a time in history when the US government hadn’t lied to the American people and had an alternative agenda from the mainstream narrative / propaganda campaign.

And why should I believe now is any different?

I’ve already seen evidence of intentional misleading in the name of public health around Covid.

Not to mention just the incompetency of leadership.

Between incompetency and lack of integrity, I’m not very inspired to follow the leader.

Let's pretend for the moment that there isn't a single person in all of government who has integrity and every one of them would lie to you if it served their own ends. This is a global pandemic. Is every government everywhere corrupt? Actually, probably to some extent, yeah, but corrupt in the same way? Much less likely. Yet even if they are that's actually okay, because you don't have to trust them. You can instead listen to the the doctors, researchers, and experts who by overwhelming majority agree with each other.

You already know, because you've seen with your own eyes, that it isn't forbidden to talk about the risks of these vaccines. You're doing it right now. So are countless others and those endless examples don't all come from the lips of politicians and government workers.

You really are living in a rose-tinted reality, or being deliberately disingenuous. Of course we can talk about it now, the evidence is piling up enough that it can't be censored without it being obvious.

We're at the point now where all the 'smart' people are saying the 'stupid' conspiracy theorists and 'anti-vaxxers' got a lucky guess or were right by coincidence, because of course such smart people couldn't be fooled or have missed the evidence. So they defend their egos.

I do wonder if the professionals that had their reputations and credibility trashed earlier on when they were 'guessing it right' or 'fluking it' will get any apologies and be allowed to serve some humble pie... I doubt it, being wrong is a powerful thing to face, especially with the righteousness that came from 'being right.'

> Right now, all the evidence we have says getting a covid vaccine is the smart choice, but nobody actually thinks that there's zero chance of unexpected side effects from these vaccines […]

Or any vaccine in general. The question is always do the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits.

There are folks who are allergic to the ingredients of some vaccines, so one of the side effects for them in particular is death. So they absolutely should not / cannot take one. But that doesn't necessarily me you shouldn't.

This is an excellent reply

> why the rush to completely rule out vaccines?

Are you kidding? The vaccines are the most politicised issue of the last 10 years. With the left and right wing media bating their respective audiences with dehumanising terms like 'antivaxxers' and 'face-diaper people', our society became incredibly tribalised on this issue.

Whether the vaccines are or are not to blame, good luck getting any social consensus. This is akin to religion now.

Yep, more papers isn't going to fix this.

This "life saving vaccines are the devil" stuff is indeed just a religion now. Isn't anti-vax generally literally correlated to geographies with more religious people anyway?

It's more charitable to acknowledge that each 'side' has been pretty 'religious' on this stuff. Fauci made his was onto Christmas ornaments and so on, after all. There were pro-vaccine dance numbers, and people who went to the beach without being vaccinated or masked were harangued.

There were people who 'followed the science' on this stuff, which is more contentious on general covid policy than you might think, and then there were people who took whatever position their tribe took and threw venom and hate at the other side.

My point was that the issue wasn't the quality or lack of science. There's plenty of papers out there addressing most points people worry about (some come out a bit late, but hey... science takes time to do).

The issue is with politics and media, which you seem to agree on since you're talking about "both sides", Fauci, tribes, venom and hate etc. All of which are concepts that aren't (or shouldn't be) relevant when doing virology and other related science.

In my view this isn't science versus anti-science, it's just media (sponsored by big money) & politicians (sponsored by big money) v.s. the people.

More papers or blaming scientists isn't going to fix any of those issues.

On the other hand, if you exclude vaccines and not even look at them, you just fuel the other sides arguments.

"yes, there is a rise in heart issues in young men recently,..."

"did you check if it's not the vaccines?"

"it's not the vaccines, we didn't check them at all, but we checked everything else, and it could be gas stoves, red meat and eggs, but we're not sure"

I'm vaccinated, but when I got vaccinated, we had four options here in slovenia (J&J, astrazeneca, pfeizer and moderna). Soon after, astrazeneca got cancelled due to causing heart issues in italy and some other places, so we were down to three. Then J&J killed a girl in slovenia, and we stopped using that too. Then moderna stats came out and in many northern european countries it caused a lot of heart issues with young men, and they cancelled it, and we followed... and we were left with pfeizer only.

> just

The poster must mean 'creed' (accepted doctrine), right after '«just»'. But the context is that of distrust - in which that «'just'» is strongly unfit. Not a positive creed but a negative distrust; not an acquired notion but a founded reaction (based on the staggering amount of seen "mess").

>why the rush to rule them out?

Any fact that would lead to the conclusion that there was a deliberate campaign of organized malice by large groups of people especially in government agencies is false because the conclusion is always false. Also, obedience and compliance with government dictates is always rewarded. Any fact leading to the conclusion that that is not the case is always false.

The proper way to determine the truth is to determine first what are alway false conclusions and then rule out the facts that would lead to those conclusions regardless of the evidence.

/poe's law

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

You should report this to VAERS if you’re in the US and it hasn’t been reported already. Indicate the batch number, which should be written on your vaccine card.

I’ve had four Pfizer shots. For three shots, the side effects were mild. But after one, I had chest pains for about a week. It turns out that shot was from a batch with many cases of serious illness and several deaths reported on VAERS. The other batches had almost no reports. It could be a coincidence, but the more data they have the better.

I wish people could talk about real problems like this and not made-up problems like you'd seen being passed around on social media.

The politicization (which has lead to a complete jam-up in the public discourse - on one side you have heavy, active censorship and on the other you have totally fabricated hysterical theories with no grounding in reality) and close integration between the manufacturers and the regulators (which is there in every industry sadly) has created an ideal environment for mundane errors in manufacturing through point-of-care administration to creep in undetected, or at least unremarked on.

To offer one example, if the person giving you the shot hits a blood vessel, the risk of a clot goes up a lot. Like many injections, it's supposed to go in to muscle tissue. How many overworked nurses are hitting deep blood vessels by accident? Even basic questions about this are not being asked in the public square, as much if not more due to the crowding out by the "they're modifying our DNA" stuff than due to tech companies indiscriminately deranking keywords that a brand wouldn't want to be associated with.

Yet, the simple mention of aspiration meant you were conspiracy theorist. So we can't even have the simple conversations, much less the difficult ones.

I asked the person administering boosters at Walgreens about aspiration. She had never heard of it.

Perhaps should you should be asking why the batch which damaged you was not withdrawn when it was realized that there were many cases of serious illness and deaths reported on VAERS with it, or why the authorities did not constantly monitor VAERS for batches with higher complaints about them.

> In my own case, I had significant cardiovascular issues at a relatively young age, 1 week after I got my booster.

The vaccine is only a part of the virus right (the spike protein)? Yes for you it’s likely the cause, your experience regarding data collection might be anecdotal because there are growing evidence regarding myocarditis following the vaccine for example.

What is usually missed is that you and people responding like this would have been far worse with the virus alone, because you only got exposed to a fraction of it. The virus is known to cause significant cardiovascular damage (orders of magnitude more than the vaccine in healthy young adults), so it seems not that relevant to focus only on the vaccine at that point in the study.

The virus is known to cause significant cardiovascular damage (orders of magnitude more than the vaccine in healthy young adults),

This is not true. It might be true across all age groups and genders, but when you narrow to young men, the vaccines shows similar rates of heart issues, or much higher in the case of Moderna, than from Covid alone.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FbS_AvMaQAEiMCZ?format=jpg&name=...

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...

But the risk of myocarditis associated with the vaccine was lower than the risk associated with COVID-19 infection before or after vaccination – with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis following vaccination.

That risk rose with the second dose for all three vaccines studied and was highest for Moderna's, which had an additional 97 myocarditis cases per 1 million. For unvaccinated men under 40 with COVID-19, there were 16 additional myocarditis cases per million.

I'm cautious about that number. There were about 3000 people, and then cut down into only men, only under 40, must have had the moderna vaccine and must have had two doses (it's broken down even more in the article). The UI is hard to use on the actual article site but I think that's 44 events.

I had adverse cardiovascular issues soon after the vaccine. I've wondered about this, but as far as I can tell the 'covid would have been worse' argument is not definitive. At least with later strains, virus / spike protein may be more localized in the respiratory system than vaccine (at least in cases where the administration inadvertently crosses a vein. I've seen some studies on both sides of this argument, but nothing that was compelling to me. It didn't match my personal experience, that's for sure.

I had my adverse event with the second shot from the vaccine. I was scared to get the booster, eventually got COVID over a year (18 months?) since the original vaccine, so presumably it was offering no protection at that time. I got sicker with COVID. It was unpleasant, but it was 'like the flu, but different.' Very much a respiratory ailment.

My heart was not seemingly affected at all. I had an increase of 5-10 beats per minute for a day or too, which I also got with the flu. Following the vaccine I had a spike in resting hard rate north of 100 BPM almost all the time for months. I'm young, healthy, exercise a lot, etc. The period after my vaccine felt like I was in a bad way and it took a long time to recover.

I was so confident in the vaccines that I initially assumed I was developing a severe anxiety disorder. It was not good.

I can't conclude anything definitive from my anecdotal experience, but I'm not going to touch any mRNA vaccine until these cases are studied and understood.

> eventually got COVID over a year (18 months?) since the original vaccine, so presumably it was offering no protection at that time

I think you've misunderstood how the vaccines work. The protection provided by vaccines is not 100%. It doesn't necessarily give you sterilising immunity. The immunity wanes, but still gives protection against severe outcomes for a long time. You likely got a less severe bout of covid because you were vaccinated.

> I was scared to get the booster

> I was so confident in the vaccines

How do you reconcile these statements?

> I was so confident in the vaccines

This was before the first (two-dose) vaccine.

> I was scared to get the booster

This was after the first vax (two shots) and adverse reaction.

except the virus doesn't enter the body the same way as the vaccine. it may or may not have a different impact on cardiovascular system amongst the young people.

>My doctor said he doesn't know if it's common enough because they are not instructed to collect this information.

Some other countries are collecting this data, and it's not uncommon. Prospective studies (which compare cardiovascular health measurements of a cohort pre- and post-vaccine) show a myocarditis rate of around 0.1-1% in teenagers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36602621/ https://www.mdpi.com/2414-6366/7/8/196 . Compared to no observable increase in the rate of myocarditis from covid infection itself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9025013/

Many european countries stopped Moderna for men under 30 because they saw this early signal -

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> I guess the bigger question that I often have is why the rush to completely rule out vaccines? Whenever this discussion comes up, its either complete blame or zero blame.

All the evidence I've seen is that the adverse cardiovascular issues seen rarely as a side effect of the vaccine are a direct result of circulating coronavirus spike protein in the blood stream. You know what causes way more spike protein to circulate in the blood stream, literally by several orders of magnitude over the course of an entire infection? Getting COVID, of course.

So if you're a mountain hermit who's never going to be exposed to COVID, then you shouldn't get the vaccine. Anyone else who even occasionally goes out in society and sees people face to face benefits from it though.

If this hypothesis is true, why are only the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines associated with substantially higher risk of Myocarditis? Why is COVID not associated with Myocarditis in this study?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

It’s worth reading the full text yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9839603/ . As usual, the study provides much more information than the linked-to summary.

In this study, the authors analyzed 4 time periods, the first 2 of which were before vaccines were even available. For different age groups, the increase was identified in all 4 periods:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...

Exactly, it's not 'desperate to link them to vaccines,' but that it is 'desperate to find any reason at all before even looking at vaccines.'

Considering the distrust of both Pharma and government (both sides) that preceded the vaccines and the 'heart attack' issue, it is quite astonishing the level of support seen for dismissal of them possibly causing anything. And especially as they're a novel vaccine.

I don't mean to accept it's the cause here, I mean even the thought of genuinely investigating it.

It seems as though if people were desperate to prove the vaccines were safe and effective, there would be more open and exhaustive research into any and all potential harms from the vaccines.

If something is safe and I am confident in the safety, I will do any and all testing to prove so and request others do the same.

"any and all testing?". Are you aware of the flat earth movement? For some of their members, no amount of evidence is enough. The goal posts always move. I suspect the same applies here.

Bad analogy. The flat earth theory isn’t novel.

It seems to me like a lot of people want to start with a positive intervention being to blame. I can sort of see the logic with vaccines for diseases not everyone would catch without the intervention but in general there's a disregard for what mistakes you are making when your choice is a bad one instead of a vaccine.

Obviously the timing is wrong here for a vaccine to cause things before roll out. Novel virus causing a subject heart damage is a known thing. Other interventions were bad for heart health. The states with less vaccination had more exposure to vaccine alternatives and more heart events.

The argument then becomes that pharma suspicious states just always have worse heart health. So the suspicion is overblown or heart health doesn't really matter? We just want vaccines to be better than moms cooking because we like mom more than big pharma?

Not being curious has become a joke.

https://babylonbee.com/news/experts-say-they-dont-know-what-...

> I guess the bigger question that I often have is why the rush to completely rule out vaccines?

Because antivaxxers don't want to have a nuanced discussion of pro and cons of any vaccine. This iteration is "mRNA is new so it's bad". But it's always been the same and ends with "vaccine is bad" for them. It's not possible to bring a reasonable discussion to someone who will happily throw out reason to accept their own preconceived conclusions.

> In my own case, I had significant cardiovascular issues at a relatively young age, 1 week after I got my booster.

Even before the vaccine, it was clear that covid triggers cardio events in some people, even young. Even three years in, it's not clear why that is. So it's plausible that a vaccine's spike protine could trigger an event, above the background level. The question then is, does the vaccine trigger cardio events at a higher or lower rate than getting covid?

> Because antivaxxers don't want to have a nuanced discussion of pro and cons of any vaccine. This iteration is "mRNA is new so it's bad". But it's always been the same and ends with "vaccine is bad" for them. It's not possible to bring a reasonable discussion to someone who will happily throw out reason to accept their own preconceived conclusions.

This is a common viewpoint of someone who hasn't actually seen their arguments.

It started off as a more generic "we've never successfully made a vaccine against coronaviruses before, this needs more testing to be sure we don't have the same problems as those old attempts".

Then they started noticing patterns no one else was willing to address, like in 2021 countries kept having massive covid waves after reaching high vaccination rates. It was obvious they weren't doing what they were sold on, yet this never got addressed. Instead they were just called "anti-vaxxers" and ignored.

Around the same time they noticed the spike in myocarditis in young men, and only now, over a year later, are people talking about it.

They refer to research and public numbers, they use archive sites to keep things available from official websites that get deleted, and yet are constantly dismissed as "anti-vax" when they have evidence no one wants to look at and actually try to debunk. They just get ignored through ad-hominims instead.

> 2021 countries kept having massive covid waves after reaching high vaccination rates.

This happened in low vaccination rate countries like Russia, South Africa, etc. So probably not due to vaccination.

> Around the same time they noticed the spike in myocarditis in young men

This was noticed with people catching covid pre-vaccines.

> they use archive sites to keep things available from official websites that get deleted,

I've seen those sites. They said "hydroxychloroquine data was being suppressed". Then they switched to "ivermectin data was being suppressed". And at the same time they were against "mandatory masking". They've always been against vaccines, mitigation, shutdowns, masks.

Basically, they were all for letting the disease run rampant.

> when they have evidence no one wants to look at ... they just get ignored through ad-hominims instead.

UFO guys have been saying the exactly the same thing for 50 years. Lol.

Aaaand that's an example of exactly what I'm talking about. Ignore half my statement to argue against something unrelated and pretend you refuted it, jump to preconceptions without knowing what I was referring to, and deflect by trying to associate my comment with crazy people.

Would you like to try again?

> I guess the bigger question that I often have is why the rush to completely rule out vaccines?

Because it's a distraction from (in the deliberately misleading sense) the more relevant question: rule in or rule out the role of actual COVID-19.

> I guess the bigger question that I often have is why the rush to completely rule out vaccines?

> They are simply not collecting this kind of data at a large scale to draw meaningful conclusions either way because the whole vaccine discussion is so charged.

I think you partially answered your own question: if a causative link is found, they're scared about what may happen to themselves/people who pushed the vaccines, given how many people have taken them.

Let’s pretend there was a statistically significant relation to heart attacks with the mRNA vaccines. I would imagine that the risk of a heart attack would be far greater with worse outcomes if you got infected with COVID unvaccinated.

I also understand why the authorities are adamant about there being no link to heart attacks and vaccines given all the pushback against vaccines. However, it also worrying to see science take a backseat to politics.

https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2022/11/07/18/5...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

For disclosure, I’m fully vaccinated with booster, and I am a proponent of vaccination. However, I’m not going to ignore research and data just because it doesn’t match my views. It really annoys me that the mainstream media treats the increased likelihood of myocarditis as a conspiracy theory. All this will do is further undermine public trust in public institutions. It wasn’t that long ago when public officials ridiculed the need for masks in order to secretly help preserve PPE supplies for healthcare workers

Fauci told CNN, “The thing that has inhibited that a bit is to make sure that we don’t take away the supply of masks from the health care workers who need them,” he continued. “But once we get in a situation where we have enough masks, I believe there will be some very serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks.”

https://khn.org/morning-breakout/cdc-considers-shifting-guid...

> However, it also worrying to see science take a backseat to politics.

It's not politics directly, it's lying and all the "whoopsies".

I live in slovenia, so there was no trump vs others here.

When I got vaccinated we had four kinds of vaccines (J&J, astrazeneca, pfeizer and moderna... if you got vacicnated abroad, also sputnik). All those vaccines were said to prevent getting a symptomatic covid infection and also prevent the spread.

Then slowly three out of those four got cancelled here, because they caused issues here and abroad and in case of J&J, even killed a young girl here. Every time one of them got removed, the rest were "completely safe"... first astrazeneca, but the others were good, then J&J killed a girl, but moderna and pfizer are safe, then moderna went away, but pfeizer was safe... it was just a matter of time when something "safe" was an "whoops, it's not safe, but the others are". Also the "prevent symptomatic infection and spread" was somehing stalined-away and "prevent severe illness" appeared.

I understand the need for fast action, but most of the anti-covid measures (limited and forbidden stuff, also stuff that needed you to be vaccinated to do) were targeted towards young people... old people need a local grocery store and a doctor... young people need clubs, bars, restaurants, party locations etc. (not to mention in person schools). So young people, who generally didnt die in any significant numbers (compared to traffic accidents and suicides) got the most of the damage, and old people didn't need to get vaccinated at all, because the measures didn't affect them.

Basically, the whole handling of covid, the lies, the wrong priorities, and the "whoopsies" have destroyed the trust in science, scientists and other authorities for many many years.

Young people also need doctors and teachers and the entire infrastructure of society. Old people not only continue enjoying restaurants and social events but they are a significant percentage of those doctors and teachers and infrastructure workers. In Slovenia, specifically, 20% of the population is over 65. Let's say covid is dangerous if you are 55 or older. Oops, there goes 30% of doctors and 30% of teachers! That's OK, of course the medical system is robust and can handle a 30% drop in staff, the average GP only has 1500 patients already. Maybe losing 1/3 of staff will only take 1/4 of hospital beds out of service, so there are still 3 hospital beds per 1000 persons. Do you start to worry that they will not have a spare bed for young people in traffic accidents? Of course, it's possible some doctors under 55 have another condition, and will also stay home. And with most of the country still going to bars and schools, some of the medical staff will simply stop caring about any of you and quit. And because of all that socializing, the hospitalization numbers for younger adults will be far higher than they were under lockdown, with far fewer beds, and many more deaths.

I was saying that "stuff old people do" was not limited/forbidden for unvaccinated, while "stuff young people do" was. Mostly because old people don't do a lot (except for stay at home, socialize at other peoples homes, go to the store, doctor, pharmacy)... in turn, if an old person stayed unvaccinated, it did not affect their day-to-day life. Even cufew, after 21h/22h, old people are usually home then. But we did close bars, restaurants etc for unvaccinated, also clubs (somewhat understandable) but also stuff like outside playgrounds, basketball/football fields, etc. which was illogical to most. Curfew caused kids who would otherwise drink and party outside on benches in parks to move inside into small unventilated bedrooms and stay inside until morning.

If we assume vaccines save lives, making them mandatory to get your pension (or atleast getting pension harder for unvaccinated), and left all the clubs open, we'd save more lives, than with closing the clubs and playgrounds and not affecting old people at all.

Where I live, they forced bars to close if they were serving alcohol - you could serve mocktails and stay open all night. It's a wondrous germ, it knows what you're drinking.

Meanwhile the restrictions on cafes where old people gather during the day were much more lenient. It's just nuts.

Yup... alcohol for your hands when you enter... and no alcohol for your mouth when you're inside :)

> All those vaccines were said to prevent getting a symptomatic covid infection and also prevent the spread.

Right, this is nonsense. You claim "lies", but you're parroting lies yourself and spreading dangerous misinformation.

Let's have some sources to back up these extraordinary claims. Show us where medical authorities or the drug companies themselves ever claimed that the vaccines would "prevent getting a symptomatic covid infection" or "prevent the spread".

The original data presented never showed that the vaccines would prevent symptomatic infections or completely prevent transmission.

How do you interpret this, if not that the vaccines are 90% effective in preventing getting a covid infection, by CDC which is a medical authority?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262334

I interpret that as them being 90% effective in preventing symptomatic infection, for a specific period after vaccination, against the variants that were circulating at the time. That's not a lie: that's what the data showed. I don't believe that's been contradicted since.

No one claimed they were perfect at preventing symptomatic infection. The ability of the vaccines to eliminate symptomatic infection reduced over time, but that's not because the authorities were lying about it. That's just the evolution of the virus and waning immunity.

> DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR

> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...

Oh good grief. That's a transcript of a real-time interview. People speak colloquially in ways that are not precise. Is that the best you can come up with?

It's the fucking director of the CDC. Precision is not optional, not for her, not on this subject.

She also said:

"We're just almost there, but not quite yet. And so I'm asking you to just hold on a little longer to get vaccinated when you can, so that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends.”

Give me a break.

Oh come on... this is not some physicst on a kids show, explaining how GPS works and skipping relativity....

...This is the director of CDC in a time of a huge pandemic and also a time when semi-mandatory vaccination policies were implemented everywhere, telling people directly, that if you get vaccinated, you won't carry the virus and/or get sick.

This is (was) no time for imprecise explanations, it was a time when you were literally getting forced to get vaccinated so you wouldn't get sick and transmit it to coworkers.

> telling people directly, that if you get vaccinated, you won't carry the virus and/or get sick

As a high level description, getting vaccinated means you won't get sick is not an unreasonable explanation, given they were 90%+ effective at the time in reducing symptoms.

> you were literally getting forced to get vaccinated

Really. Which country is this where literal forced vaccination was carried out? I don't believe any Western country implemented this. You appear to be spreading blatant lies while whinging about slight imprecision in a single transcript of a real-time interview.

"reducing symptoms" is something different than no symptoms at all and not carrying the virus.

> Really. Which country is this where literal forced vaccination was carried out? I don't believe any Western country implemented this. You appear to be spreading blatant lies while whinging about slight imprecision in a single transcript of a real-time interview.

Ok, "literally forced" was maybe a too-strong of a wording, but "forced to get vaccinated or lose your job" was a thing in many countries. For mine (slovenia) it's hard to find english articles of what you were unable to do if unvaccinated, but here are examples for usa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_mandates_...

We can talk about technicalities of what "forced" means, but many people are/were not in a (financial) state to be able to survive without their jobs, and had to get vaccinated to keep them. Technically you're not forced, because you could choose not to eat and be homeless, but for most people that's a bad choice.

So why’s this study published in a virology journal?

Simpson’s paradox should be taken into account.

If you group the population into only 2 groups: all of the vaccinated and all the unvaccinated, regardless of age; then the vaccinated had a higher death toll.

But age is a hidden factor. The older have more risks and are more vaccinated.

If you group by vaccination AND by age bracket, the opposite happens. For example, the 60 to 65 vaccinated have a lower death rate than the 60 to 65 unvaccinated.

The study is about age group 25-44 where you should really not expect heart attack (very rare).

Just so I understand what you're saying, it sounds to me like covid is killing old people and something else is killing everyone else at a higher rate, correlating with vaccination status?

So only old people and high risk individuals should've gotten the vaccine?

That much was obvious. Young people weren't asked to take the vaccine to protect themselves but to protect the herd.

And by „asked“ you mean (in many cases) forced.

Not to mention, the emergency auth clearly stated (in europe at least) that it was unknown if the serum prevented spread. Lookup the documents, it‘s right there.

So the reality is that young people were forced to take untested gene therapy for no medical reason at all.

Despite the fact that the clinical trials didn't test for ability to stop transmission and infection. So the CDC, FDA, and Pfizer outright lied to the public. And when that lie fell apart, it was so 'you don't overrun the hospitals' despite the fact that young people weren't being hospitalized at any rate more than the seasonal flu.

And for anyone skilled enough in mathematician to check the assumptions for the formulas for "herd immunity": It was clear from the beginning that the term "herd immunity" was based on totally unrealistic assumptions. These are seasonal viruses - and outbreaks were following strict mathematics fitting a seasonal outbreak. This was clearly visible from the beginning (people posted formulas for that in early 2020....). The term Herd immunity absolutely doesn't make any sense for a seasonal virus like this. There is no such thing as a constant R-Value. That model is based on stochastic independent infections... (which is very unrealistic... and dumb...)

Pfizer didn't. Their press release distinguishes between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, only claims they prevented symptoms in people not previously infected by the virus, and didn't make any claims about infection/transmission. It was the conflation of the two terms in the media, referring to the virus as "COVID-19", that resulted in this mistake.

And even so, for several months articles were coming out questioning of it stopped infection/transmission at all. It was only once we got a few months into 2021 that that got buried with the assumption it did.

I think you jumped to a conclusion. COVID still kills vaccinated individuals, just at a lower rate than unvaccinated.

Comparing states is fallacious because there are so many confounding factors. The lowest vaccinated states, in the Bible Belt, are highest for almost all health conditions. People in those states are less healthy period. One cannot draw conclusions that way.

Yes, that’s definitely caused by the Climate Change.

It's disturbing how eager people here are to jump on "vaccines are bad" or "why isn't anybody talking about vaccines bad sides". The side effects of vaccines and Covid have been under heavy scrutiny from the very first day. Where in the fuck are you people getting your news and what are you doing on HN?

Under scrutiny where exactly? VAERS?

I get my "news" on vaccines from PubMed, the Lancet, the BMJ, etc. All such sources show at best disagreement over safety, at worst, unsafe.

It's not hyperbolic, deranged, or lacking in intellect to be concerned by this.

For example, a recently submitted study out of NZ, done by the NZ Ministry of Health, exhibited a clear indication of yet another side effect: kidney disease, along with reconfirming myocarditis etc.

The rates again suggested that younger people and repeated boosting is likely a bad idea.

There is going to be selection bias for articles like this. Who is more interested in the cause of increased heart attacks in the young? Who will most likely comment on their concern.

Once you adjust your priors things start making more sense :)

Vaccines in general is probably one of the most important discoveries of modern science but i find it quite bizarre that people put so much trust into a very unique fasttracked process and pharma companies that have a very visible history of deception and fraud.

7 pharma companies got "reprimanded" by the EU after the last 2010 flu pandemic because of astroturfing and "using a crisis to profit from vaccines" that the EU didn't need.

Personally, though double vaxxed, i'm still not convinced the vaccines were a net positive - especially for the sub 60 cohort when looking at the actual stats - the risks are higher from the myocarditis than from actual Covid, at least in the younger pop.

> especially for the sub 60 cohort when looking at the actual stats

Right, I'm going to call bullshit on this. If you're going to make incredible claims like this on HN against all scientific orthodoxy, you have to show your workings.

What is the risk of myocarditis from the vaccines in under-60s? What was the unvaccinated fatality rate for under-60s?

Cite your sources.

Somebody elsewhere posted this reference:

> But the risk of myocarditis associated with the vaccine was lower than the risk associated with COVID-19 infection before or after vaccination – with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis following vaccination. [0]

[0] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...

That's a very different statistic: under 40s, and only in men, and only for one vaccine, after a second dose.

It seems odd to pick that one outlier from the article, which generally concludes the opposite:

"The overall risk of myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle – is substantially higher immediately after being infected with COVID-19 than it is in the weeks following vaccination for the coronavirus, a large new study in England shows."

The extra risk seemed to be less than 1 in 10,000, and was easily mitigated by offering younger people a different vaccine.

> That's a very different statistic: under 40s, and only in men, and only for one vaccine, after a second dose.

The original post you replied to said:

> i'm still not convinced the vaccines were a net positive - especially for the sub 60 cohort when looking at the actual stats - the risks are higher from the myocarditis than from actual Covid, at least in the younger pop.

They had that part in there that said "at least in the younger population". They didn't say the sub 60 cohort only, like you quoted.

> It seems odd to pick that one outlier from the article, which generally concludes the opposite

You called bullshit on a specific statement in the original post - vaccine myocaditis being more dangerous than covid myocaditis for some people - and asked for a citation. I gave you one. The study proving this has been around since last August.

The fact that this is an outlier does seem to confuse some people. Risk assessment is not everyone's strong suit.

Many people got vaccinated before this study came out. They had to make decisions while data was still coming in, data on the worst vaccine side effects like myocarditis and blood clots, data on covid, all this data for different vaccines and demographic groups and co-morbidities, data coming from multiple sources, some better than others, all of this developing over time, and new data still being collected.

> The extra risk seemed to be less than 1 in 10,000, and was easily mitigated by offering younger people a different vaccine.

Why did you call bullshit when this backs up what the original poster said? The odds of a younger person dying are low - from the vaccine or from covid. They took this into account when they made their decision, which sounds reasonable. They said they got vaccinated. I don't get what you are arguing against? Maybe you wanted more specifics?

> They had that part in there that said "at least in the younger population". They didn't say the sub 60 cohort only, like you quoted.

They absolutely did! Let's go through that one sentence clause by clause.

> i'm still not convinced the vaccines were a net positive

...which is utterly ridiculous. The vaccines have clearly saved tens of millions of lives by any reasonable assessment.

> especially for the sub 60 cohort when looking at the actual stats

..."especially", so not only the sub-60 cohort, but to a greater degree for them. Looking at "the actual stats", so should be verifiable, but still no evidence for that. And there won't be: the benefits very clearly outweigh the negatives for under-60s.

> - the risks are higher from the myocarditis than from actual Covid, at least in the younger pop.

"At least" in the unspecified "younger pop". But this is only true if you chuck a bunch of qualifiers in there.

If you want to argue that the risk of myocarditis is higher from the vaccine than from covid in, say, under-35s, then I don't think that is true in general, but it gets a bit less clear (and there are other risks from the virus than just myocarditis). But if you are going to argue that then why talk about the "sub 60 cohort"?

> You called bullshit on a specific statement in the original post - vaccine myocaditis being more dangerous than covid myocaditis for some people - and asked for a citation

No, I most certainly did not. You can read what I wrote by moving your eyes a couple of paragraphs up. I called bullshit on "especially for the sub 60 cohort when looking at the actual stats".

Ah, a miscommunication then. I read the original poster as referring to the myocardetis issues that do exist for younger people, issues that I was already familiar with, backed up by numbers from the American Heart Association.

Your reading of the original post wasn't very charitable, considering there was some truth to their complete statement - "at least for the younger population", as they mentioned. Or maybe you didn't know this risk existed.

If you had said "we now know that's true only for males under 40 years old getting moderna" about this persons concerns, instead of "bullshit, cite sources" I wouldn't have jumped in. You asked specifically about the myocardetis risk from the vaccines in under-60s. That's the relevant data I linked to, the best data that we have at the moment, that I know of. I wanted to provide more accurate information for other people reading this.

The risk of myocardetis is certainly something younger men would have been prudent to pay attention to, the study quoted in the linked article showed that this problem really has existed and appears to be specific to the Moderna vaccine, which we weren't sure about before. I find it odd that you doubt the American Heart Association on this. There's also the blood clot problems discovered in younger women for other vaccines, so it hasn't been just younger men that have had concerns. This is all new information we didn't have at the time the vaccines were released, and statistically relevant given the low risk of death from covid for young people. Countries updated their vaccination policies because of this stuff, it makes sense that there were concerned individuals like the original poster paying attention along the way.

This wasn't what we were promised. Especially in the younger age groups.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Try hygiene and sewerage systems.

I don't understand the rush to defend vaccines.

I've been vaccinated and don't regret that because in those circumstances, they were a positive health choice. But it's impossible to know the long-term impact of any medicine unless you've actually studied it, well, long-term.

In 5 years, the vaccines might be death in a vial. Or they might be completely benign. You'll only know after 5 years.

The vaccine is just unrelated to the article. It's about the people who have had Covid-19, not the vaccine.

Stop spreading these right wing anti-vaxxer lies, my god. "Death in a vial". Dont you feel ashamed and ridiculous posting this insane over-the-top inflammatory rhetoric?

People are already discussing the science and long term effects and few people just take the vaccines at face value.

And to add to your harmful, conscious spread of disinformation, you thinly veil it in "I am vaccinated myself, but..."

Way to miss the point.

Absolutely hysterical.

No, "death in a vial" is hysterical nonsense.

You very clearly wrote what you wrote. It was inflammatory language and you are well aware. Nothing hysterical about it.

I have to say that's a pretty good trick to never have to do anything. Like I should probably take out the trash, but who knows, I might get killed by a car veering off the road while I put it out. Or sure I'd go to the gym, but I might get killed by a weight falling off a machine or something; better not to risk it. I'll probably be using this is in the future.

> I don't understand the rush to defend vaccines.

It's because they've been among the most successful medical treatment in history. For example, smallpox alone killed up to half a billion people in the 20th C and we managed to eradicate it.

> In 5 years, the vaccines might be death in a vial. Or they might be completely benign. You'll only know after 5 years.

This isn't how biology works. You don't just have drugs that set off a timer with a trigger that suddenly kills you 5 years later. If something is doing bad things to you then you start getting adverse effects far sooner than that.

We've given billions of doses of these vaccines out. We have an excellent idea of the side-effects they cause, and they're generally extremely safe.

How many vaccines have actually been subject to proper long term trials? Sure VAERS is a self reported system, but long term monitoring isn't actually done in any meaningful sense.

Hygiene and sewage systems have saved far more than vaccines did.The diseases that we eradicated were already in massive decline before vaccines were introduced. Viruses usually mutate to milder but faster spreading strains. It is heresy to say so though.

> The diseases that we eradicated were already in massive decline before vaccines were introduced.

The only human disease we've ever eradicated is smallpox. But semantics aside...

Here's a graph of polio cases in the US.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-polio-rates...

The polio vaccine was introduced in the 50s. Please explain how polio was in "massive decline" before then.

> Hygiene and sewage systems have saved far more than vaccines did.

Whether that's true or not (feel free to provide data), it's irrelevant. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives.

> Viruses usually mutate to milder but faster spreading strains. It is heresy to say so though.

It's not heresy, but it's wrong. You're propagating an idea from the 19th Century. It's not considered correct any longer. It's at best a very simplified view.

If it were true, humans would be untroubled by viruses, but clearly that is not the case. Viruses evolve to spread effectively; as long as they spread faster than they kill their victims they continue to spread.

Flu regularly comes up with strains that are more dangerous than previous years, the 1918 pandemic being a case in point.

Polio didn't become less mild. Lots of other viruses have not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol...

It’s more that the claims are very confidently and loudly made by the same people who were wrong about the severity and spread of the virus, possible treatments, and made provably false claims about the vaccines, often for financial or political profit.

It’s certainly possible that there will be some long-term problem that only becomes apparent after a considerable period of time but there isn’t a known mechanism for that, and if that is identified it’ll be due to the actual scientists who are carefully studying it rather than the people trying the old conman’s trick of making enough vague claims that they’ll be able to say they predicted the future.

No. Most vaccines do not remain, nor are they detectable in the body after a pretty short period of time (a matter of weeks)

> ... you'll only know after 5 years.

See above — that is simply not how vaccines work. Stop spreading misinformation.

Tho whole pandemic was founded on the base of death count, where every death of a person who tested positive for covid was counted as covid death. That is a fact.

To level the field, we should count every death of a person who took the experimental gene therapy as death due to the said therapy.

The only difference is the propaganda machine, sorry, media, was spreading the unjustified panic about the former and is dead silent about the latter.

This started before the vaccines, so it's COVID.

Although the vaccine may well docthis, just to a much much lesser extent.

> For those who are desperate to draw a link between vaccines and heart attacks

I have problems with that argument. If the claim is that the coronavirus spike protein from vaccines causes heart attacks, then surely the coronavirus spike protein from an actual coronavirus infection will cause even more heart attacks. How have they been able to bypass this logical problem?

According to my neighbor who is an ER doc, the spike protein stays in your system a lot longer than it does after natural infection. Unfortunately I can't find a reference for this claim, and the worst part is that I don't know if that's because my Google fu is lacking or if this information is being suppressed...

I'm wondering about Maine....

I think the disease does draw a link. I don't find it particularly surprising that after 2 years of a stay-at-home order infarcts of all kinds are going up.

What if this is just due to people on average being the fattest and most stressed out they've ever been? Being inside for a few years didn't help everyone physically.

Obesity has been trending up even before the pandemic. I don't see how driving through stressful traffic for 60-120+ minutes per day and eating restaurant food is supposed to make anyone healthier. In my personal experience, the pandemic led me to build a home gym and prepare my own food, both of which have seem to have led to better health both "objectively" (weight, cholesterol, CRP, VO2max) and subjectively (how I "feel").

> In my personal experience, the pandemic led me to build a home gym and prepare my own food, both of which have seem to have led to better health both "objectively" (weight, cholesterol, CRP, VO2max) and subjectively (how I "feel").

Yeah, I doubt this applies to majority of office workers, majority of people just stopped moving while WFH and get fatter, so obviously their physical condition deteroriated vax/COVID or not.

Probably not for most people, but it's not known whether this is due to WFH, considering obesity has been on a linear upward trajectory for decades.

I gained about 20 pounds during the first 2 years of the pandemic. I was stressed and depressed being locked down, especially during those awful winters.

Since early 2022 when things began to normalize I have lost 10 pounds.

Correct, I'm pretty sure the trend was same, the question now is whether it's accelerated in most vaxxed nations compared to least vaxxed nations, then you can draw conclusion whether it's caused by COVID or vax, if it accelerated since 2021.

Or you could simply check some of the papers that have already been written on this exact issue: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/research/publications/inde...

institution which was forcing people to vax and was spreading lies you can't get infected or spread virus while vaxxed is the last place I'd look for unbiased information

Then the inverse is also impossible, so this can't be a stipulation of the argument. It's a binary situation, either an institution accepted the unvaccinated or they didn't, ergo, by your logic, neither should be trusted to do this research. If not an academic institution then who? Dare I elicit a gasp from the crowd and say "The Government"? What exactly is it that would satisfy you?

Or it could be related to the fact that COVID-19 is also a clotting disorder and venous thromboembolism is a common complication.

Obesity and lack of exercise are long-term risk factors that hit later in life. Not at 25-44 (maybe in the late 30s/40s). Haven't looked at the exact data but there might be something else driving this.

It’s not about the obesity, it’s about the metabolic disease. We have T2 diabetic children with human foie gras. Why? Because of the standard American diet, accurately named SAD.

Correct. Sitting at home absolutely destroyed my health. I got a cervical disc bulge, gained nearly 10kgs in weight, had weird pains and aches in random body spots. It's the worst I've felt in ever.

On a normal day during the pandemic, I would get like 1500 steps in. Before the pandemic, walking to/from the metro alone would take up nearly 8k steps. Total would easily be 12k+ steps.

It was a drastic reduction in activity. I attribute all my current health problems to it.

As someone that got COVID in March 2020, and was pretty active before.

It took some time to recover, but I continued getting exercise, despite being a studio apartment dweller.

But after a shook COVID, I stopped listening to the news and government that said going outside was dangerous and got my walking in and continued to go out for fresh air.

I have fully recovered from COVID, and have actually lost weight (food got more expensive, my income did not go up to cover that).

I can understand how some people worked from home and got fat eating good food, but I also understand these things were choices. I choose to exercise. I choose to eat less healthy food instead of eating cheap crap.

I choose to think about my health, and put in the work to be healthy.

For me, COVID was an opportunity to control my health, and it seems like others suffered by failing to do so and following the media and masses.

I think I made the right choice. Do you have any regrets about your choices? Or do you think COVID was just a bad thing that happened to you and you had no control?

A lot of my physical activity was almost automatic. I would walk to/from the metro. On the way back, I would stop by the gym. It was all momentum.

Covid killed all that momentum. And anytime I would get into a groove, a new round of lockdowns would put a giant pause on it. The gyms and parks were closed during all the multiple waves.

I would workout at home but it was just not enough activity - every hour long workout was followed by 23 hours of sitting/lying down. Whereas in a normal day, an hour long workout would be followed by a walk to the metro, walking around in the office, walking to the local market…way more motion.

Worse, there was nothing much to do except sit around and look at screens. No going out for drinks, no weekends at the park, no chatting around after gym.

I could have made some better choices, admittedly though.

Covid killed my momentum also. I had lost 25 lbs and was going to weekly weigh-ins just before lockdowns, then I was able to keep that momentum going and lost 10 more pounds....then being forced to stay pretty sedentary, especially due to the added stress of trying to keep my job and -- to a lesser extent -- my sanity in the midst of the whole world going nuts (except walking the dogs periodically) I ended up putting all that weight back on and gained another 20 lbs.

I felt I needed to be extra cautious too since I'm middle aged, obese, and have asthma, so I didn't do a whole lot outside of the house until I got vaccinated, mostly just walks around the neighborhood or at forest preserves.

Last year I sort of got better and dropped that extra 20 lbs, this year is off to a bad start though with a muscle strain in my arm taking its sweet time to heal and making it difficult to work out and constantly being too cold to go on walks outside this past month. Hopefully I can start making things happen in a month or so though.

Overall I definitely think I'm in worse overall health than I would have been without the Covid pandemic being a thing. But I might be in even worse health if I got Covid that first year (and especially that first six months when we knew practically nothing about it and how to treat it in the hospital).

Shortcut for reading these comments: if anyone says "conspiracy theory" or "anti-vaxxer" you can stop reading them right away. They're just ideological warriors.

Being scientists, we can design a longitudinal test (of these two groups, identical otherwise, one vax'ed and one not, did the vax'ed have more side effects?) that answers the risk question pretty definitely. Then all the data people trot out can just be examined with, "Is this as good as that test?"

It seems rather clear that the governments of the world, in responding to a perceived emergency, cut some corners. You could argue this was a responsible thing to do. It would also be responsible to start being honest about it.

Currently doctor questionarre has "do you smoke?" yes/no. If you vape or using stuff like iqos, it's "no". Available answers should expand from boolean to list vaping/vaporizing products. Otherwise you'll see from analisis that non-smokers have problems, what if ie. iqos users are exposing themselves to 5x more nicotine or something else is happening that is problematic?

COVID-19 is also a thrombotic disorder.

This has been known since the relatively early days of the pandemic. Have any of you been paying any attention at all?

We know, but it’s not like there is much of a choice here. We are all going to be exposed to covid no matter what we do.

Well doing your best not to catch it before there was a vaccine and then getting vaccinated will best improve your chances.

But I was more referring to everyone in this thread speculating about obesity, vaccines and everything other than the novel pandemic virus with the thrombotic complications that swept the globe that just MIGHT have something to do with the rise in heart attacks.

Which was pretty much predicted by anyone paying attention back in summer of 2020. And probably why people who recover from COVID have a higher mortality rate 18 months after infection:

https://www.nursinginpractice.com/clinical/dermatology/covid...

Oh yeah. I agree with this. I am just frustrated by people saying we still need to keep avoiding COVID when the cost is much higher to continue doing so.

Sitting on your ass all day in front of a screen will also cause thrombotic disorders.

The overwhelming majority of us have gotten covid, though. But only some are suffering from the thrombatic disorder.

Have you thought about that at all?

Many have gotten COVID, but not everyone got significantly, sick. Many have gotten the flu, yet only very few of us have died to it. Most of us survived all the various illnesses we have as children, but not all of us were so lucky.

What are you trying to imply? Is it really such a strange thought to you that not everyone will have the same symptoms, and not everyone will have similar kinds of damages?

Yep, a frighteningly large chunk of the population thinks that their experiences generalizes to literally the entire rest of the population. You see this on both sides of the coin as well -- "I only caught a cold what are you all worried about" and "I got long COVID so everyone else will".

Did you read the rest of the context here? To avoid implying anything let's recap:

Heart attacks are on the rise, is the topic.

Some are saying it's due to covid-19, as implied by parent.

Some are saying things like, "What if this is just due to people on average being the fattest and most stressed out they've ever been? Being inside for a few years didn't help everyone physically." (comment here) And suggesting other causes (vax, etc).

I then point out that almost everyone has had covid-19 at this point. It's not about discussing anecdotes / the strawman argument. I'm pointing out that clearly something else is at play here. Look, you have a very unhealthy population relative to recent history, given the high percentage of overweight/obese/sedentary people; you have stupid shutdowns of recreation[1]; you tell people the air outside is poisonous and the moral thing is to stay inside on the couch. Now it's end of 2020, early 2021 Suddenly everyone's a baker, consuming large amounts of alcohol, not exercising and many are gaining weight. We're doing the moral thing, but we're not doing what we were born to do, which is move our bodies, the singular best prevention for cardiovascular issues.

That this constellation of things that happened prior to and during the pandemic would make some more susceptible to vascular disease is worth exploring as a multifactorial set of causes.

1 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/california-shuts-down-beac... At one point we even shut down beaches, because we thought the virus was flying around in the wind and sea air out of people's mouths. I still see people walking around alone on the streets wearing masks, today in 2023, like some sort of medieval superstition (reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory).

> I then point out that almost everyone has had covid-19 at this point.

I literally don't understand how you can think that is a counter argument.

We know that COVID-19 is also a clotting disorder because it slaps us in the face with it in severe cases.

We expect that in less severe cases there could be long-term damage that only causes issues months to years later.

We see that risk of death increases 18 months after recovery, long after the virus is gone.

What's the mechanism at work there? It affects those who have recovered, not everyone who was sedentary.

And at the same time it can be true that the vast majority of people do not suffer any long-term damage. Nobody disputes that, which is why your argument doesn't make any sense.

> Nobody disputes that

[Well I guess as with all strong statements about humans that's not true, but outside of a few people on twitter with bad math and an emotional need to keep the pandemic running forever, nobody else thinks that COVID is going to cause serious harm to literally everyone]

Yes. Genetics, HLA subtypes, prior immune exposure, original antigenic sin, etc.

Does anyone have link to the full text? (can't access from my institution)

I ask because they seem to point to covid but there are lots of other factors that need to be considered that are quite obviously causal. For example obesity is on the rise[0], including a ~5% between 1999 and 2019. I think it would be unsurprising to anyone that obesity increased in a period where we all shifted to online and that regular exercise decreased. Especially true for younger people who typically are more active than the other groups (which could correlate to the difference in age groups). Stress is another big factor and I think even excluding the pandemic stress in our country is on the rise and the pandemic made it way worse.

There's obviously many more factors like this and since I can't see if the paper attempts to account for these I'm asking if someone else can answer this. But if these are not answered (as the link suggests) this is quite reckless to just state that a temporal correlation equates to the virus being a causal factor and ironically may increase said risk through the aforementioned factors.

[0] https://www.tfah.org/report-details/state-of-obesity-2022/

Heart attack deaths were steadily falling until the pandemic, over a period when obesity rose massively.

Obesity is linked to heart attacks but larger rises than could have happened in past three years didn’t cause a population level of heart attack deaths

Obesity is also a risk factor for severe COVID cases, so the two might even be entangled.

Here’s the full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9839603/

The submitted article describes this study as “new” (and uses an incomplete headline as clickbait…), but it’s been public since September and was widely covered at that time. Here’s a more detailed article from October: https://scitechdaily.com/covid-19-surges-linked-to-spike-in-...

That reminds me of [1] which has disappeared/was deleted but was archived in [2].

> We’re living in the golden age of cocaine,” said Toby Muse, the author of the 2020 book Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels [...]

I'm sure both are unrelated coincidences (heart attacks and cocaine availability and the disappearsce of this article).

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/golden-age-cocaine-happening-...

[2] https://archive.is/05AY0

i've always wished someone did a study on the usage of cocaïne among politician and the impact it had on their policies. I suspect a lot of overreacting, impulsive and careless decisions were taken while under influence.

Affairs or secret gay lovers tends to make the politicians more vocal about "traditional family values" so I doubt any other "taboo" wouldnt generate the same hypocracy.

Nancy Regans "Just Say No" crusade could be because she was secretly hiding an addiction to Quaaludes and she didnt want anyone to notice.

edit: turns out she was ... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9471693/Nancy-Reaga...

Similar suspicions surround Laura Bush's late urgency for reading skills.

glad you mention this. i have a similar concern about stimulant use at ivy league schools. it's not just about getting stuff done, like mowing a lawn. it impacts expectations of what people can tolerate.

What I find interesting is how many people rush to blame vaccines for this when the easier explanation, occums razor, is that the thing that killed +1m in the US has long term and secondary effects. Could it be the vaccine? Maybe because it isn’t impossible but let’s be reasonable and acknowledge we already know COVID caused blood clots and this is highly likely the culprit. I mean the damn virus was so weird and severe it caused temporary and delayed brain damage in the form of parosmia.

Could also be both too.

For some context as we discuss this:

The pandemic (any pandemic really) is an existential disaster for the libertarian right, for it invalidates their ideology that people should be allowed to do whatever they like and somehow it will all work out for the best [for me]. Thus their response is (and really can only be) two fold:

1) deny that it is happening, and if that fails

2) deny that there is anything that can be done about it anyway - by undermining, obstructing, and discrediting the attempts by the rest of us to deal with it.

Posts here should be understood in that light. Indeed, we can already see a mix of denialism (people are fatter nowadays) and obstructionism (it was the vaccines/lockdowns that did it)

>The pandemic (any pandemic really) is an existential disaster for the libertarian right, for it invalidates their ideology that people should be allowed to do whatever they like and somehow it will all work out for the best [for me].

I think you're declaring victory a bit too early here. There's one specific instance where an ideology failed and it's "an existential disaster"? Given how poorly western countries handled covid compared to asian countries (at least during the initial stages), should we say that covid was "an existential disaster" for western democracies? Given the political unrest in the US from 2020 to 2021, should we say that it was "an existential disaster" for US democracy?

Asian countries were doing fine until the "vaccine" roll out.

> is an existential disaster for the libertarian right

That's strange cause I see it as a disaster for authoritarians, technocrats and bureaucrats.

They've truly lost the trust of the public and revealed themselves to be nothing more than hubristic level-pullers and demagogues.

Fauci lied throughout the entire pandemic. He handled it horribly. The death toll happened under his authority.

Let me guess: the public health establishment shouldn't be blamed for the absolute atrocious health of the average American?

Even worse he claimed his inept plans were being sabotaged or ignored by scapegoating Trump. This couldn't be further from the truth: he had complete control, rallying people behind the scenes to squash opponents & was illegally censoring people left and right through the fascist cooperation of federal govt and private corporations.

"Such readthrough events would not only decrease the number of immunogenic proteins, but also produce a longer protein of unknown fate with potentially deleterious effects."

Go past the abstract (which is worded politically) and read the actual research then tell me why we should not be worried that the first deployed version of the mRNA code may have an error in it, like all code that's released in a rush. LOL.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8310186/

Can't watch from my country, what's the tl;dw? In which population, and are there any reasons why?

Journal article is here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.28187

I only read the abstract, but they don't offer an explanation - only that it's linked to the pandemic in terms of time-frame.

Full text available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9839603/

Important rise, we don’t know why(job loss? stress?, covid?), we don’t talk about mRNA vaccines.

I'll give you my experience with them.

I just turned 63 and got the Pfizer vaxx and boosters as early as I could. Honestly, I did not have any side effects at all and neither did my wife. We made a point to take some vitamins and supplements for a few days before getting the shots, but that was all.

In Dec 2021 one of our daughters, who refused to get vaxxed, came up for the holidays and tested positive about 5 days later. She was sick in bed for 5 days. My wife and I had to nurse her but we still did not get infected. Neither of us wore masks in the house during that time, but we did open windows and doors to freshen the air everyday.

She's gotten infected two more times since then, and told us not long ago she's dealing with some long haul issues.

I don't get out much but my wife deals with people from all over (we live near a tourist destination) and neither of have been sick at all since before this crud hit.

The only other thing we've really done is keep up on the vitamins and supplements. And really don't even do those everyday. More like a few times a week.

So I really can't say anything negative about the mRNA vaccine I and few other's I know got. None of us who are fully vaxxed and boosted have experienced any downside or been infected with Covid.

Don't get me wrong... I'm not feeling anything close to invincible, or smart for that matter. It's been a roll of the dice no matter what we've chose to do about covid.

My wife and our friends all got vaccinated as early as we could, and got all the boosters we could. We're also pretty careful around strangers, and stay home when we feel sick.

Most of us have had Covid at least once now.

I'm super glad that you haven't had Covid and I hope you never do. But the vaccine just vastly improves your odds of not contracting it, and lessens the effects if you do. It's not anywhere near 100% effective against it.

My point is that you should continue to be at least a little cautious, and not just ignore Covid.

I got 2X vax, my wife also. We both got covid anyway. I also got covid early and it was bad, took time to get through it.

My aunt got heart problems 3 days after second dose, almost died, dismissed by doctor, unreported.

I saw that a simple procedure (aspiration) would reduce 3X the number of cardiac problem caused by the vaccine (make sure you inject in the muscle not in a vein) they don’t do it even if it take just a few second and even the veterinarian do it on horses.

I also saw how the medical system work from the inside: The pharma own everything, that make the "formation" control the governing bodies. Follow the money explain a lot of what is happening.

The risk/benefit was probably good for the first few variants. Also to get emergency use(absolution from responsibility) they had to have zero other solutions, doctor that found solution got destroyed, the solutions got demolished.

TLDR: it’s complicated

Covid infection, even previous infection, will doubtless be one reason. With so many people getting infected (and reinfected), that's got to take a toll on the population.

> anyone infected with COVID is at higher risk for heart issues—including clots, inflammation, and arrhythmias—a risk that persists even in relatively healthy people long after the illness has passed...I went into it thinking that [the risk] was going to be most pronounced and evident in people who smoked a lot or had diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, or some [other] risk factors. What we found is that even in people who did not have any heart problems start with, were athletic, did not have a high BMI, were not obese, did not smoke, did not have kidney disease or diabetes—even in people who were previously healthy and had no risk factors or problems with the heart—COVID-19 affected them in such a way that manifested the higher risk of heart problems than people who did not get COVID-19. (https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/covid-and-the-heart-it-spa...)

> The coronavirus may infect and damage the heart’s muscle tissue directly...Coronavirus infection also affects the inner surfaces of veins and arteries, which can cause blood vessel inflammation, damage to very small vessels and blood clots....As the virus causes inflammation and fluid to fill up the air sacs in the lungs, less oxygen can reach the bloodstream. The heart has to work harder to pump blood through the body, which can be dangerous in people with preexisting heart disease...Viral infections can cause cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disorder that affects the heart’s ability to pump blood effectively (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...)

Any idea if an EKG as part of an annual checkup will notice if your heart has been damaged in this way?

EKG results can change after covid, but I'm guessing it'd be even easier to see problems with imaging (CMR) too. I'd make sure your doctor knows you've had covid so they can take that into consideration and I wouldn't wait around for your annual if covid symptoms resolved a while ago but you've been experiencing symptoms like shortness of breath or chest pain.

I've been seeing discussions for a long time about the advantages of cardiac screening for people post-covid and when it'd be most appropriate to recommend it or request it, but I have my doubts it'll ever be common practice to do it for everyone. The healthcare system in my country isn't great about giving preventative care and early screening to the masses.

I'm extremely surprised at the volume of dead comments on this post pointing out the COVID vaccines as a potential cause... NOT.

I'm sure most multi-billion dollar company CEOs froth at the mouth at the idea of having an army of unpaid, unthinking drones to directly and indirectly protect them and their companies operations from criticism and investigation. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2875889/

Looking at the paper, the rate in their younger cohort went from about 1.6 or 1.7 per 100,000 pre pandemic (read from a plot, I didn't check to see if they give a specific number in the text) to about 2.1 per 100,000 during the early phase of the pandemic.

That's small enough to potentially be explained by all sorts of factors. And then of course the causes could be split among several factors.

Doesn't really justify speculation about what factors might increase personal risk.

Have we ruled out failure to exercise and shut facilities that occurred during those absolutely outrageous and ridiculous lockdowns?

Exercise is by far the best path to cardiovascular health, along with nutrition. Prior to the pandemic we had a epidemic: obesity. Then we tell people for their health we need to shut down their recreational activities and they'd better stay indoors or the air outside risks killing them. Both ideas we all now agree were wrong.

Presumably, there was also a jump in heart attacks around 2008, the so called Great Recession?

Personally, I don't remember that happening. Do you?

Are there jumps in heart attacks during specific stressful periods in countries throughout the ages too? Not sure.

It would be interesting to see if this is happening in each country.

It is no wonder people are doing poorly when people have a limited say about the direction of their countries - Instead barely elected officials who are mostly governed by self interest are ruling the world.

A general sense of health deterioration and feeling of hopelessness can only be blamed on inept leadership.

You are right in saying there are some who are desperate to draw a link between vaccines and heart attack. There are also many who are desperate not to draw this link.

the older i get the more i think about mortality. God I hope I go quick, like <1ms response time to off. This link makes me feel woozy

What we really need to do is to compare highly vaxxed nations with least vaxxed nations (Africa will be helpful, China without mRNA as well) and see their heart attacks trends, then you can draw conclusion whether this rise is most likely caused by vax, COVID or other factors.

Obviously with population getting more obese by year they were growing already before vax/COVID, but the question is whether this trend accelerated since COVID and/or COVID vaccine introduction.

You cant easily compare between geographically or culturally different populations as there are just too many factors to reckon with. This is a big problem in population genetics because these factors confound the already difficult to measure links between genetics and traits.

Edward Dowd points out that one group where these problems are not increasing is the unemployed. Many people took the vaccine to stay in employment. Many other quit employment to opt out of the experimental treatment.

The health and demographics of unemployed people differ in very meaningful ways from the employed.

yes, vaccine status being one of them

"This content is not available in your country/region."

Maybe mixing adhd meds with narcalepsy meds with prozac with weed with booze with cocaine isnt good for your heart health.

The corporate press is unwilling to even acknowledge that the vaccine might be a cause of this.

Humans are the cause

Thank you covid for making everyone lethargic

I think is all related to this ketogenic diet that people are following, too much cream, eggs, saturated fats, etc.

In 2020-2021, while working from home, I gained like 7kg. I think it had non zero influence on probability of cardiovascular problems.

I blame the vaccine.

I base this upon my own experience. With people I personally know. Who got the vaccine and who didn't. Who suddenly, unexpectedly died. And who is doing fine.

It's hard to take your fragmented sentences more seriously than the fact that 12.7 billion vaccine doses have been given out world wide as of october of last year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

(criticizing my grammar? Really?)

I refer to my own experience while you refer to a secondhand news-product. Consider the difference.

Bloomberg actually has a github page where they show all their data.

https://github.com/BloombergGraphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-d...

I've seen a thousand vaccinated people have no negative health effects at all. I've also seen some vaccinated people win at a casino after being vaccinated. We can conclude that the covid vaccines are not just safe, but increase luck as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com