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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes 'no evidence' also means there is evidence, they're just ignoring it. Like myocarditis.

I think "ignoring it" is unnecessarily imputing bad faith.

But ignorance is a thing, even for authorities.

There's a difference between a person/institution having no evidence of X, and no evidence of X in general. So, "who" doesn't have evidence, and how much effort they took to attempt to find evidence before they declared it non-existent, is a relevant question when "no evidence" claims are proposed.

It's funny, because when a person or institution comes out and says "there is no evidence" of whatever (without a context), it would be discredited if any obscure person in the world has such evidence, even if not widely published. It would, IMHO, be much better to say that "we have looked into <all the reasonable sources and literature> and found no evidence" instead.

Where by “ignoring” you mean “carefully studying and doing comparative risk analysis”? That risk was reported early on, and has been very well covered over time but each round of studies has shown that catching COVID while unvaccinated is substantially riskier.

Public health officials summarily denied any association early on. The only serious risk they acknowledged was propylene glycol allergy.

Do you have any evidence to support that assertion? I first learned of the issue from the scientific community tracking the data collected by the public health community.

Here’s an example of what that looked like in June 2021, covering developments in May, just 5 months after the first country in the world had approved the vaccine (UK, 2020-12):

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/myocarditis-coronavirus-va...

Similarly Israel’s public health agency’s report was covered in June 2021:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-sees-probab...

Here's a quote from the very Reuters article you linked:

> The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said last week that heart inflammation after receiving the Pfizer vaccine had been no cause for concern as such incidents were similar rate to those in the general population.

The CDC and other agencies also continue to heavily downplay the risk as 'mild myocarditis.'

Yes, and that’s accurate. People have carefully monitored it, but the risk is very low and much lower than getting COVID. That doesn’t fit any definition of “ignoring” in the English dictionary just because antivaxxers would desperately love to have something they weren’t wrong about.

"No cause for concern" and "denied any association" are not the same thing.

Both of those are 100% accurate claims.

So what are you actually upset about?

The risk of myocarditis may be higher for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated person which makes the "downplaying" much more nuanced, doesn't it?

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