Comment by myhorsehasworms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myhorsehasworms | Hacker News Reader

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myhorsehasworms

To be fair, that twitter context post is almost entirely useless.

Comparing the risk of myocarditis from vaccines to the risk of myocarditis from actually getting covid is not a helpful comparison.

Generally speaking, everyone is going to get covid whether you are vaxxed or unvaxxed. So the question is whether adding vaccines into the mix REDUCES the overall myocarditis risk or increases it.

In other words

(Covid infection myocarditis risk + vaccine myocarditis risk) VS (covid infection myocarditis risk)

From 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. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S."

Unless I am horribly misreading this, it seems that

(Covid infection + non-moderna vaccine), has a lower risk of myocarditis than (covid infection + no vaccine)

EXCEPT in men under 40 receiving moderna.

In that case, (covid infection + moderna), has a HIGHER risk than (covid infection + no vaccine)

Can anyone correct me if I am reading this wrong?

I disagree that the context post is almost useless. I bet there were a lot of people reading that who didn't know that myocarditis is a possible side-effect of Covid itself without the community pointing it out to them right there.

I understood that the same way as you.

By itself, this carries a high "we found a link between green jelly beans and acne" flavor (xkcd/882). But even if it's not there, there are a lot of other complicating factors.

Those studies about myocarditis were important because they derived improvements on the procedure to apply intramuscular vaccines. But that improvement by itself is enough to invalidate any findings you will find on any such study from that time.

Many if not most studies don’t clearly demarcate pre-omicron covid vs omicron. I’d love to know what the science is on myocarditis risk from just omicron is.

There have been numerous studies showing that omicron severity is very likely equivalent to prior strains.

The decrease in serious illness is due to prior immunity and vaccination.

Though it’s obviously a hard thing to prove either way. But certainly I do not think it should be assumed that omicron is inherently more mild.

Can you provide some citations? My understanding is that omicron and prior strains have fundamentally different effects especially wrt synctia formation.

https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...

Here is recent, high quality one, but there are many more (and some with conflicting results - but to my eye the best studies all point to similar conclusions).

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