Rare myocarditis after Covid shots: Study rules out some common culprits | Hacker News Reader

Rare myocarditis after Covid shots: Study rules out some common culprits

arstechnica.com

6 pointsLinuxBender3 comments

> According to a large 2022 study led by researchers at Harvard University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the group at highest risk of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination—males ages 12 to 17—saw 35.9 cases per 100,000 (0.0359 percent) after a second vaccine dose, while the rate was nearly double after a COVID-19 infection in the same age group, with 64.9 cases per 100,000 (0.0649 percent).

Every article on this subject seems to feel the need to clear its throat by citing numbers like this, but I'm not sure why. Since the vaccines do not prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection, the risks are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. The protection they are said to provide is against severe cases and death, which are already vanishingly rare in the adolescent cohort to begin with.

There's also good reason to doubt that there has been an honest accounting of the causes of myocarditis. A friend of mine is now experiencing cardiac issues after 3 injections of Moderna -- his doctors attribute it to the mild COVID case he had (despite taking all the shots) and have not even considered (let alone reported) the possibility that it is an adverse event.

A huge population-level study in Israel found no increased risk of myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection in 2020 before the vaccine rollout: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

How do you know effects are cumulative? We know exposure/vaccine efficacy decreases over time, are you saying the side-effects don't?

I mean that the myocarditis risks from the COVID vaccines and from SARS-CoV-2 infection are cumulative. Maybe "additive" would be a more precise term to get at what I am saying: that the choice is not between two mutually exclusive risks, but rather whether to accept the added myocarditis risk of the vaccines in exchange for whatever benefit they may offer, which are both metrics which vary wildly by health demographic.

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