So vaccinated Nordic ancestry young males have roughly 9 to 28 times more incidents of myocarditis. These same young males have virtually zero risk from Covid. If a young Nordic male has already had Covid and has natural immunity, the mRNA shots add risk with no benefit.
9 to 28 times? I figured “excess events per 100,000” means if the control rate is e.g. 200 events per 100,000 then the observed rate after vaccination was 209 to 228.
They give the excess events for vaccinated individuals compared to those not vaccinated, per 100,000 vaccinations. For males age 16 to 24, the excess per 100,000 vaccinations is 5.55 for Pfizer and 18.39 for Moderna. These numbers might be useful if you were comparing the badness of these events with the goodness of whatever you think is the number of Covid infections prevented per 100,000 vaccinations (which obviously depends on the general prevalence of Covid).
They also give a ratio, which could also be interesting, and which you can't deduce from the excess events without knowing the number of events in the reference group.
Roughly correct, but a bit high as far as I can see. The papers says risk ratio of 5.31 for Pfizer and 13.83 for Moderna. Not sure where you got 9 and 28.
It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
> young male already immune due to having had Covid
Citation needed on the “already immune” bit. So far studies have shown that immunity to the corona wears off, and most people can be reinfected months to a year later.
Yeah, they can be infected agains, but that's also true if they've been vaccinated, or both vaccinated and had Covid.
The incremental benefit of a healthy young person getting vaccinated after already having had Covid may be quite small. Plus the incidence of myocarditis in this group (vaccinated after having had Covid) could well be higher than it is in people getting vaccinated who haven't had Covid. (This is plausible, since as seen in this study, the risk is higher for the second shot, when the immune system has already been stimulated before.)
> (...) would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
This assertion is not only entirely baseless but also completely ignores the fact that a) unvaccinated individuals are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to die from COVID, b) the myocarditis issue pinned to vaccines is benign and transitory, and estimated to be at most less than 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinnees.
Pretty misleading citation source there, you must be implying the Kentucky study which is infected+vaccinated compared to infected only (not infected to vaccinated as most would read your sentence). You apparently ignore the New York/California study in the same link. All this completely ignores the age factor as well which reduces the absolute risk for youths to essentially negligible.
Yes. Even taking the Kentucky study at face value, the estimate odds ratio (probably similar to relative risk, given reinfection is fairly unlikely) is 2.34 (confidence interval 1.58 to 3.47), not "over 5-fold higher chances".
However, as they say, "...persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated."
Well, you shouldn't just take advice from a random person on the internet. But neither should you just take advice from medical experts and official government sources. There is no substitute for thinking.
One thing to think about is that "every nations medical experts" are heavily committed to a narrative that vaccines are good, and hence may be disinclined to admit there are exceptions to this (such as healthy young males who have already had covid). They may think that the vaccine is good for most people, and that they should therefore pretend that it's good for everyone to avoid "confusion"...
I don't know what to make of a "virtually zero risk"? Is it high enough that one also could say the vaccinated have a "virtually zero risk" of Myocarditis?
It would shed more light to know the delta between unvaccinated and vaccinated for those dead from heart problems vs dead from Covid.
But the vaccines don't prevent Covid infection. If the infection rates from Ontario and the UK were to be believed (before the UK stopped publishing the vaccinated vs unvaccinated breakdowns, that is), being vaccinated might even make you more likely to be infected.
> being vaccinated might even make you more likely to be infected.
That would certainly seem unlikely. Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior. Which is somewhat likely, but then you're not really comparing the effects of the vaccine anymore.
Everything I've seen has shown the obvious, fewer and less serious cases.
> That would certainly seem unlikely. Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior.
No, other possibilities which have been observed with other pathogens are Original Antigenic Sin (i.e. perhaps targeting the spike protein from the now-extinct Wuhan strain gets the immune system "stuck in a rut" with a less optimal response) or Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Not to say that these definitely are occurring in the case of SARS-CoV-2, but even Fauci acknowledged the possibility of disease enhancement before the vaccines were rolled out.
worries about ADE is clearly widespread in scientific community, and the inversion of infection rates, with vaccinated people catching it more than non-vax, has occured everywhere with the most recent variants.
Of course, any scientist name i'll give as a reference will be immediately categorized as "anti-vax" or "fringe and non representative"... Which curiously is still a grave thing, eventhough a lot of the consensus around covid vaccines has been proved incorrect times and times again (with the only remaining truth being that it does protect people at risk from lethal outcome, which is clearly the bare minimum and not the original expected outcome).
You're making a circular argument. Anyone who looks at the UK data showing negative effectiveness cannot avoid being "anti vax" because if vaccines make COVID more prevalent rather than less, then the cost:benefit ratio cannot possibly be positive.
In your construction, actually observing published government statistics and acting rationally on it automatically makes someone a "notorious antivaxxer". It's ideology, not rationality.
And no, he's not acting rationally. It may have the flavor of it at first glance, but the implications of what he says being true would invalidate large swathes of science. So is he a genius or a crank ? I don't have time to comb through and debunk every single claim (Brandolini's law !) but good old Occam's razor says he's a conspiracist crank who fallaciously massages data until it fits what he set out to prove. That is to say, an ideologue.
Well, full marks for honesty I guess but aren't you just proving my point?
You haven't read his article or engaged with his argument at all, but he must be a crank because you can't stomach the implications if he was right. A cursory inspection of the first few paragraphs shows that (a) it's about 2021 so definitely not "outside COVID" and (b) it's another example of what I was pointing out: he is looking at government data that looks pretty concerning and reacting to it in a rational way.
Your only argument he's not rational is that "vast swathes" of science would be invalidated if he's right, therefore he must be a crank.
That's not even an argument, is it?
1. Some of the biggest leaps forward in science have come from invalidation and correction of deeply fundamental science. That's why Einstein is famous. The potential to invalidate pre-existing scientific beliefs is pretty much a pre-condition for a study to be interesting.
2. Vaccine efficacy is a tiny sub-area of the overall scientific enterprise. If everything people believed about vaccines was disproven conclusively tomorrow that'd certainly be far less than 0.1% of all scientific knowledge.
3. Your heuristic is totally unable to correct handle or react to groupthink or bad incentives. The entire field of virology claimed that there was no possible way SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab and anyone who claimed it could was spreading conspiracy theories. Those same scientists were simultaneously writing private emails saying a lab escape was definitely possible and even looked likely. You were the sort of person who was successfully fooled by their conspiracy, and maybe still are.
Fundamentally, your attitude here is poisonous to the search for truth that defines science to begin with. If you can't be bothered evaluating their arguments then don't express opinions on them.
Just because somewhere a mechanism exists for a vaccine to render a pathogen more dangerous doesn't means that there is any reason to believe that mechanism is meaningfully a factor in this case. The fact that you yourself lack the know how to assess why this is or isn't a risk doesn't mean that everyone is rolling the dice it just means that you are uneducated on the matter.
You give yourself away by your obsession with Fauci whom you always refer to as if he was a mononym like an idiot celebrity. Rarely Dr. Fauci or yet Anthony Fauci. Just fauci. You know a few interesting highly specific terms of art like Original Antigenic Sin which is in stark contrast to your otherwise very shallow understanding of the topic. This is because you collect interesting nonsense like a bird picking up shiny things.
This site doesn't need people who have never created an account with Hacker News before to create one now to spread the same bullshit you folks spread on Facebook. I see folks like yourself all over hacker news in recent years and quite frankly like covid you are a pathogen. Its absolutely impossible to fix the dialogue with you folks because to you these are vital truths that are being ignored. You are for what its worth likely very much in good faith its just that you yourself have been infected. Fix your inputs and maybe you will fix your outputs.
Yep, and the virus has changed a lot since those trials were conducted, and even been subjected to certain evolutionary pressures by mass deployment of the vaccines themselves, which is not something it is possible to study in clinical trials. It's also not really possible to test for OAS because trial participants (at least, those in a highly abbreviated trial like those which were conducted for the COVID vaccines) only encounter one strain of the virus.
Yes, it's happened quite often unfortunately. And not just years later. Sometimes immediately. Flu vaccine rollouts have shown this effect in the past, as have (failed) HIV vaccines. People who took the Canadian flu vaccine got Swine Flu at a higher rate for example.
The exact cause isn't known because anything that could be perceived as "anti-vaxx" doesn't get funded or honestly researched, even though it's important. But the best bet seems to be a form of imprinting. The immune system prefers to make antibodies that it's made before and does so even if it's exposed to a pathogen different enough to have evolved past those antibodies. For real epidemics this probably doesn't matter much, because they move in waves through the population, but if you repeatedly vaccinate the whole world then you're causing fixation on a long since extinct form of the spike protein. When a mutated virus turns up the body manufactures useless antibodies that don't work rather than trying to develop new ones.
It's actually not even clear that the trials showed positive effectiveness for COVID. They reported it but the way they defined "vaccinated" creates a denominator problem. Their methodology would create the appearance of initially high effectiveness that steadily decays to nothing for anything, including water. Regulators not only didn't notice this but public health agencies adopted the same methodology.
What becomes clear the moment you start learning about this stuff is, we never hear about these problems because any bad news about vaccines is immediately squashed and anyone who points it out gets banned and viciously attacked.
It's actually a proven matter of fact, so it's not really up for debate about whether it's likely or not. It happened already.
The few countries that publish infection rates by vaccine status all show the same thing: the vaccinated get infected with COVID at much higher rates than the unvaccinated and this has been getting worse with time. England, Denmark, New Zealand all show this. There may be other countries by now.
Most countries simply don't publish this basic statistic at all, which is all you need to know about the integrity of public health.
Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior
No, negative effectiveness has happened before with vaccines and there are biological pathways via which it can happen. In particular the COVID mRNA vaccines are immunosuppressant. This was known by Pfizer before approval but not mentioned anywhere - it came out during their document dumps. OAS/imprinting is another very likely candidate.
The better comparison is the total risk after vaccination vs the total risk from infection without vaccination.
Given the infectiousness of the recent variants, it's reasonable to assume very high probability of eventual infection.
(Myocarditis appears to be the more common severe side effect of vaccination, even though it is still quite rare. Hospitalization rates from infection (a reasonable proxy for a severe infection) in the similar age groups are probably higher.)
Yea I'd like to see that data too. I've seen that Myocarditis risk is higher with Covid than vaccine. The main downside I see is you're going to get Covid anyway so you're basically increasing your risk of Myocarditis once with vaccine and then again after catching it.
No, because the disease is much less likely to progress as severely once vaccinated, which lowers your risk of Covid-induced myocarditis.
In any case : vaccine-induced myocarditis is almost always benign and resolves without treatment, and while there's been a lot of focus on it in the press and in antivaxxer circles, it's really a footnote in the list of Covid-related health issues.
It's many orders of magnitude less frequent than Long Covid, for example.
> the disease is much less likely to progress as severely once vaccinated
There's really no solid data to back this up. The only randomized controlled trials that were ever conducted ended when the EUAs were granted and the placebo groups were immediately vaccinated, long before the Delta variant even existed, let alone Omicron. Everything else is observational studies subject to selection bias and other confounding variables. And even there, the proportion of vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths from Omicron (where good data is available) does not suggest high levels of protection from the vaccine.
We already know that in a naive host the adaptive immune system takes days to fully engage during which covid can spread far better than in a vaccinated host. This explains why vaccinated hosts are far less likely to end up in the hospital or a morgue than people with identical demographics.
It would be truly remarkable if vastly decreasing the prevalence of the pathogen early on somehow kept you from the hospital but led a far less extensive infection doing just as much damage. Posting solid data here when literally everyone on the forum has sought out such data at one time or another is a waste of everyone's time. If you have succeeded in ignoring it at this point no data is liable to change your mind.
I don't think it's "virtually zero risk" because there is "long Covid". Regarding myocarditis it seems important to know the prognosis, i.e. how many people quickly recover from myocarditis with apparently no long-term effects?
> These same young males have virtually zero risk from Covid.
This is a 2 years old belief that's convenient to politicians but has been utterly, comprehensively destroyed by science by now. It needs to die, yesterday.
For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. The latter also overwhelmingly resolves in a few days without treatment.
For another, there appears to be no such thing as durable "natural immunity" with Omicron. Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart !
Finally, not a single week goes by these days without a new study being released that describes "yet another creative way SARS-CoV-2 f*cks up the human body, yay!".
This week I suppose the most interesting development is a new meta-analysis reporting that HALF of people infected with Covid still have symptoms at least four months later (aka Long Covid) https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
In the UK, an estimated 1.3 million people had long Covid as of early 2022, growing by 200K each month.
It was estimated that nearly a quarter million people had dropped out of the job market completely as a result :
Covid isn't going to immediately kill us all, but it's pretty obvious by now that it's already a mass disabling event, the main unknown being how reversible the neurological + cardio vascular damage is going to be in the long term.
Just a single data point, but a family member in her mid-30s was fully vaccinated (Pfizer) mid-September last year, got Covid in late January and got re-infected a week ago. Both confirmed with PCR tests after positive rapid tests.
> "We also estimated the excess numbers of myocarditis events per 100 000 vaccinees in the 28-day risk periods. Among all males, these numbers were (...) [at most 4.97 events] after the second dose.
> "Among all females, the excess numbers of events per 100 000 vaccinees in the 28-day risk periods were (...) [at most 0.48 events] after the second dose (Table 2).
Also, apparently these myocarditis events seem to be completely benign and experienced only momentarily.
> "Mild mycoarditis" is a complete propaganda lie up there with war is peace.
I'm not sure you're adequately informed or even being honest at all. Myocarditis refers to inflammation of the heart muscle. Amusingly enough, it can also occur with the common cold and influenza.
In the context of post-vaccine myocarditis, in the very rare cases where myocarditis is observed (IIRC between 0.2 and 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinated individuals), typically they are very mild cases where symptoms last a short amount of time without requiring any medical therapy at all.
> Berlin emergency services show a 30% increase for heart attack and stroke codes in 2021. No explanation. Many other such signs from around the world.
Do you have any way to substantiate your baseless claim, or even that there is any link at all to the topic?
Also, COVID infections are already known to cause heart attack and stroke. Why did you ruled COVID out but somehow tried to imply vaccines were a factor?
I find it strange that a) you try to pass off as something you personally describe as having "no explanation" as a consequence of taking a vaccine, b) you try to ignore the fact that it's no mystery that COVID is indeed tied to those health issues.
> Berlin emergency services show a 30% increase for heart attack and stroke codes in 2021. No explanation. Many other such signs from around the world.
Sadly ,due to the pandemic a lot of preventive check-ups haven't been made. This could be just one reason.
You can't criticise someone for doing "propaganda" while not providing any sources and pulling stuff out of the air yourself.
If you want to actually read up on what the problems are and aren't. I recommend this podcast (which includes all sources): https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
A potentially life-threatening disease can be mild. I'm not sure why you think your source is a gotcha argument? He sourced it in his second comment.
However, due to the increase in cases, especially in young people, they aren't recommended to get vaccinated with Moderna for example. And younger children aren't recommended to get vaccinated at all right now, except when having pre-existing conditions (Germany, can't speak for other countries).
You are grouping people and hope for a "reckoning", instead of trying to talk about arguments and actually replying to the comments. That's why nobody is taking you seriously.
> What a manipulative comment. First of all, you didn’t quote the key points of the study:
Please point out exactly where my direct citation from the article is manipulated in any way.
> Meaning The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young males after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose, and this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease. —-
Please read my comment. I quoted exactly the highest risk scenarios. The study determined that at worse it's less than 5 per 100 000 cases on young males.
> Second of all, the word benign does not appear in the study.
The study tracked primary and secondary myocarditis and pericarditis diagnosis at the moment of hospital discharge. The study mentions zero complications, let alone fatalities. A myocarditis diagnosis could mean something as little as claiming you feel fatigued and experience a weird feeling in your chest, no matter how brief you experience it.
Please read the study before going on personal attacks.
> The critical question in regards to heart inflammation was always about young males, this is very well known!
You need to decide if you want to accuse my quotation as manipulative or stressing nothing new. You can't have it both ways.
Also, you might find it interesting that the study points quite unequivocally that:
* "Myocarditis after mRNA vaccination was rare in this study cohort and even among young males."
* "The risk of myocarditis following the mRNA vaccines has been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration, which concluded that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks and fully authorized the use of mRNA-1273 in persons 18 years or older and BNT162b2 in persons 16 years or older."
My reply where I was claiming that the comment from arinlen was manipulative was flagged, but I stand by my statement. It’s also in no way a personal attack to describe someone’s comment that way.
Here’s why I claimed it’s manipulative: the study key points are “For young males receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, data were compatible with between 4 and 7 excess events in 28 days per 100 000 vaccinees after second-dose BNT162b2, and between 9 and 28 per 100 000 vaccinees after second-dose mRNA-1273.”
That is a direct quote. Now look at arinlen’s TLDR: only 5 versus 4-7 events for Biontech and 9-28 for Moderna in the key points.
The study authors clearly conclude that “The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young males after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose, and this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease”.
Quoting the outcomes in the general population from a study highlighting the effects in young males could have been a mistake. Given that the commenter insisted that their TLDR was correct after I pointed the above out, it’s more likely that they want to suppress any association between mRNA vaccines and heart inflammation.
This association is by now well established and many EU countries have dropped Moderna for young males.
Can we just instantly ban any account under some threshhold karma/creation time who starts spouting off about anti vaxxer talking points to keep discussions a little saner?
Exactly. I remember a while back this crazy physician said stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria! What a quack. That goes against everything we know about ulcers - they are purely caused by stress and diet, bacteria can’t survive stomach acid!
His ideas just make discussions “insane” as you say.
After Marshall had proven bacteria to be the cause, science accepted his discovery and even gave him a nobel prize for it. And before his experiment, there was just not that much evidence supporting either the “stress” or “bacteria” hypothesis.
Yes, jumping to conclusions before there is evidence is stupid, but ignoring the evidence is just insane.
Your doctor as an actual person would likely have plenty of interesting things to say because he's not a human relay in a disinfo campaign rooted in facebook twitter and reddit.
It isn't merely a controversial topic nor an unpopular position on the topic that is problematic. It is accounts created 20 minutes ago to promote bullshit making an otherwise interesting topic a boring referendum on bullshit. How many times would YOU like to explain that covid isn't flu nor totally safe if you eat right and exercise?
Downvotes exist for a reason and the moderation has their own thresholds for sane conversation. Most my karma has been gained by what I would bet you consider "anti-vaxxer" talking points. Best thing you can do is give a stupid person some rope, if they wind up doing something useful with it well maybe they weren't too dumb afterall.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadSo if that is virtually no risk, so is 20 cases of myocarditis (that aren't all lethal) per 100,000.
(I used 6100 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... divided by 53 million to get 10/100,00).
They also give a ratio, which could also be interesting, and which you can't deduce from the excess events without knowing the number of events in the reference group.
It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
Citation needed on the “already immune” bit. So far studies have shown that immunity to the corona wears off, and most people can be reinfected months to a year later.
The incremental benefit of a healthy young person getting vaccinated after already having had Covid may be quite small. Plus the incidence of myocarditis in this group (vaccinated after having had Covid) could well be higher than it is in people getting vaccinated who haven't had Covid. (This is plausible, since as seen in this study, the risk is higher for the second shot, when the immune system has already been stimulated before.)
There is no such thing as "already immune due to having had COVID".
Unvaccinated individuals were observed to have far higher reinfection rates than vaccinated individuals (over 5-fold higher chances).
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe...
> (...) would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
This assertion is not only entirely baseless but also completely ignores the fact that a) unvaccinated individuals are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to die from COVID, b) the myocarditis issue pinned to vaccines is benign and transitory, and estimated to be at most less than 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinnees.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm
However, as they say, "...persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated."
One thing to think about is that "every nations medical experts" are heavily committed to a narrative that vaccines are good, and hence may be disinclined to admit there are exceptions to this (such as healthy young males who have already had covid). They may think that the vaccine is good for most people, and that they should therefore pretend that it's good for everyone to avoid "confusion"...
It would shed more light to know the delta between unvaccinated and vaccinated for those dead from heart problems vs dead from Covid.
Yes. The risk of myocarditis from covid is higher than this, even if there were zero other effects to consider.
That would certainly seem unlikely. Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior. Which is somewhat likely, but then you're not really comparing the effects of the vaccine anymore.
Everything I've seen has shown the obvious, fewer and less serious cases.
No, other possibilities which have been observed with other pathogens are Original Antigenic Sin (i.e. perhaps targeting the spike protein from the now-extinct Wuhan strain gets the immune system "stuck in a rut" with a less optimal response) or Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Not to say that these definitely are occurring in the case of SARS-CoV-2, but even Fauci acknowledged the possibility of disease enhancement before the vaccines were rolled out.
A good article on the UK vaccinated/unvaccinated data, which was pulled when it no longer flattered the vaccines: https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/uk-will-hide-vaccinated-ca...
Of course, any scientist name i'll give as a reference will be immediately categorized as "anti-vax" or "fringe and non representative"... Which curiously is still a grave thing, eventhough a lot of the consensus around covid vaccines has been proved incorrect times and times again (with the only remaining truth being that it does protect people at risk from lethal outcome, which is clearly the bare minimum and not the original expected outcome).
That's because they probably are fringe and non representative. And for every Galileo there are 100.000 Dr Wakefield's
> a lot of the consensus around covid vaccines has been proved incorrect times and times again
If that were true it wouldn't be the consensus, by definition.
In your construction, actually observing published government statistics and acting rationally on it automatically makes someone a "notorious antivaxxer". It's ideology, not rationality.
What I'm saying is that this guy is a run-of-the-mill antivaxxer, even outside Covid. Check his tweets and blog : he writes fallacious pieces against childhood vaccinations like : https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/florida-vaccine-hesitancy-...
And no, he's not acting rationally. It may have the flavor of it at first glance, but the implications of what he says being true would invalidate large swathes of science. So is he a genius or a crank ? I don't have time to comb through and debunk every single claim (Brandolini's law !) but good old Occam's razor says he's a conspiracist crank who fallaciously massages data until it fits what he set out to prove. That is to say, an ideologue.
You haven't read his article or engaged with his argument at all, but he must be a crank because you can't stomach the implications if he was right. A cursory inspection of the first few paragraphs shows that (a) it's about 2021 so definitely not "outside COVID" and (b) it's another example of what I was pointing out: he is looking at government data that looks pretty concerning and reacting to it in a rational way.
Your only argument he's not rational is that "vast swathes" of science would be invalidated if he's right, therefore he must be a crank.
That's not even an argument, is it?
1. Some of the biggest leaps forward in science have come from invalidation and correction of deeply fundamental science. That's why Einstein is famous. The potential to invalidate pre-existing scientific beliefs is pretty much a pre-condition for a study to be interesting.
2. Vaccine efficacy is a tiny sub-area of the overall scientific enterprise. If everything people believed about vaccines was disproven conclusively tomorrow that'd certainly be far less than 0.1% of all scientific knowledge.
3. Your heuristic is totally unable to correct handle or react to groupthink or bad incentives. The entire field of virology claimed that there was no possible way SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab and anyone who claimed it could was spreading conspiracy theories. Those same scientists were simultaneously writing private emails saying a lab escape was definitely possible and even looked likely. You were the sort of person who was successfully fooled by their conspiracy, and maybe still are.
Fundamentally, your attitude here is poisonous to the search for truth that defines science to begin with. If you can't be bothered evaluating their arguments then don't express opinions on them.
You give yourself away by your obsession with Fauci whom you always refer to as if he was a mononym like an idiot celebrity. Rarely Dr. Fauci or yet Anthony Fauci. Just fauci. You know a few interesting highly specific terms of art like Original Antigenic Sin which is in stark contrast to your otherwise very shallow understanding of the topic. This is because you collect interesting nonsense like a bird picking up shiny things.
This site doesn't need people who have never created an account with Hacker News before to create one now to spread the same bullshit you folks spread on Facebook. I see folks like yourself all over hacker news in recent years and quite frankly like covid you are a pathogen. Its absolutely impossible to fix the dialogue with you folks because to you these are vital truths that are being ignored. You are for what its worth likely very much in good faith its just that you yourself have been infected. Fix your inputs and maybe you will fix your outputs.
Good Luck.
Sure, but that's something that trials test for before a vaccine gets to the general public.
The exact cause isn't known because anything that could be perceived as "anti-vaxx" doesn't get funded or honestly researched, even though it's important. But the best bet seems to be a form of imprinting. The immune system prefers to make antibodies that it's made before and does so even if it's exposed to a pathogen different enough to have evolved past those antibodies. For real epidemics this probably doesn't matter much, because they move in waves through the population, but if you repeatedly vaccinate the whole world then you're causing fixation on a long since extinct form of the spike protein. When a mutated virus turns up the body manufactures useless antibodies that don't work rather than trying to develop new ones.
It's actually not even clear that the trials showed positive effectiveness for COVID. They reported it but the way they defined "vaccinated" creates a denominator problem. Their methodology would create the appearance of initially high effectiveness that steadily decays to nothing for anything, including water. Regulators not only didn't notice this but public health agencies adopted the same methodology.
What becomes clear the moment you start learning about this stuff is, we never hear about these problems because any bad news about vaccines is immediately squashed and anyone who points it out gets banned and viciously attacked.
It's actually a proven matter of fact, so it's not really up for debate about whether it's likely or not. It happened already.
The few countries that publish infection rates by vaccine status all show the same thing: the vaccinated get infected with COVID at much higher rates than the unvaccinated and this has been getting worse with time. England, Denmark, New Zealand all show this. There may be other countries by now.
Most countries simply don't publish this basic statistic at all, which is all you need to know about the integrity of public health.
Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior
No, negative effectiveness has happened before with vaccines and there are biological pathways via which it can happen. In particular the COVID mRNA vaccines are immunosuppressant. This was known by Pfizer before approval but not mentioned anywhere - it came out during their document dumps. OAS/imprinting is another very likely candidate.
The vaccine is not effective against the less dangerous Omicron variant, and the hospitals are not overwhelmed.
There's some fuzzy outlines of that data here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm).
Given the infectiousness of the recent variants, it's reasonable to assume very high probability of eventual infection.
(Myocarditis appears to be the more common severe side effect of vaccination, even though it is still quite rare. Hospitalization rates from infection (a reasonable proxy for a severe infection) in the similar age groups are probably higher.)
In any case : vaccine-induced myocarditis is almost always benign and resolves without treatment, and while there's been a lot of focus on it in the press and in antivaxxer circles, it's really a footnote in the list of Covid-related health issues.
It's many orders of magnitude less frequent than Long Covid, for example.
There's really no solid data to back this up. The only randomized controlled trials that were ever conducted ended when the EUAs were granted and the placebo groups were immediately vaccinated, long before the Delta variant even existed, let alone Omicron. Everything else is observational studies subject to selection bias and other confounding variables. And even there, the proportion of vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths from Omicron (where good data is available) does not suggest high levels of protection from the vaccine.
It would be truly remarkable if vastly decreasing the prevalence of the pathogen early on somehow kept you from the hospital but led a far less extensive infection doing just as much damage. Posting solid data here when literally everyone on the forum has sought out such data at one time or another is a waste of everyone's time. If you have succeeded in ignoring it at this point no data is liable to change your mind.
This is a 2 years old belief that's convenient to politicians but has been utterly, comprehensively destroyed by science by now. It needs to die, yesterday.
For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. The latter also overwhelmingly resolves in a few days without treatment.
For another, there appears to be no such thing as durable "natural immunity" with Omicron. Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart !
Finally, not a single week goes by these days without a new study being released that describes "yet another creative way SARS-CoV-2 f*cks up the human body, yay!".
This week I suppose the most interesting development is a new meta-analysis reporting that HALF of people infected with Covid still have symptoms at least four months later (aka Long Covid) https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
In the UK, an estimated 1.3 million people had long Covid as of early 2022, growing by 200K each month.
It was estimated that nearly a quarter million people had dropped out of the job market completely as a result :
https://www.ft.com/content/33444f29-bab1-4655-85b5-c0b1f68d9...
https://www.ft.com/content/8b9166af-2e85-4429-ab1f-362c189e4...
Covid isn't going to immediately kill us all, but it's pretty obvious by now that it's already a mass disabling event, the main unknown being how reversible the neurological + cardio vascular damage is going to be in the long term.
https://archive.ph/qcO5H
https://archive.ph/AHv1W
If only the vaccines would prevent infection, so these risks would be mutually exclusive, instead of cumulative.
> Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart !
How soon has an infection been documented after becoming "fully vaccinated"?
> "We also estimated the excess numbers of myocarditis events per 100 000 vaccinees in the 28-day risk periods. Among all males, these numbers were (...) [at most 4.97 events] after the second dose.
> "Among all females, the excess numbers of events per 100 000 vaccinees in the 28-day risk periods were (...) [at most 0.48 events] after the second dose (Table 2).
Also, apparently these myocarditis events seem to be completely benign and experienced only momentarily.
I'm not sure you're adequately informed or even being honest at all. Myocarditis refers to inflammation of the heart muscle. Amusingly enough, it can also occur with the common cold and influenza.
In the context of post-vaccine myocarditis, in the very rare cases where myocarditis is observed (IIRC between 0.2 and 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinated individuals), typically they are very mild cases where symptoms last a short amount of time without requiring any medical therapy at all.
https://www.chop.edu/news/health-tip/myocarditis-and-covid-1...
> Berlin emergency services show a 30% increase for heart attack and stroke codes in 2021. No explanation. Many other such signs from around the world.
Do you have any way to substantiate your baseless claim, or even that there is any link at all to the topic?
Also, COVID infections are already known to cause heart attack and stroke. Why did you ruled COVID out but somehow tried to imply vaccines were a factor?
https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2022/01/covi...
I find it strange that a) you try to pass off as something you personally describe as having "no explanation" as a consequence of taking a vaccine, b) you try to ignore the fact that it's no mystery that COVID is indeed tied to those health issues.
Sadly ,due to the pandemic a lot of preventive check-ups haven't been made. This could be just one reason.
You can't criticise someone for doing "propaganda" while not providing any sources and pulling stuff out of the air yourself.
If you want to actually read up on what the problems are and aren't. I recommend this podcast (which includes all sources): https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
"Myocarditis is an uncommon, potentially life-threatening disease that presents with a wide range of symptoms in children and adults."
That's experts, scientists, who are saying this and this is published on a government website.
I can source most things I say but I find it to be pointless because the comments just get dismissed after I did all the work.
Btw, why doesn't he have to source his ridiculous claim that mycoarditis is "mild"?
However, due to the increase in cases, especially in young people, they aren't recommended to get vaccinated with Moderna for example. And younger children aren't recommended to get vaccinated at all right now, except when having pre-existing conditions (Germany, can't speak for other countries).
Please point out exactly where my direct citation from the article is manipulated in any way.
> Meaning The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young males after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose, and this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease. —-
Please read my comment. I quoted exactly the highest risk scenarios. The study determined that at worse it's less than 5 per 100 000 cases on young males.
> Second of all, the word benign does not appear in the study.
The study tracked primary and secondary myocarditis and pericarditis diagnosis at the moment of hospital discharge. The study mentions zero complications, let alone fatalities. A myocarditis diagnosis could mean something as little as claiming you feel fatigued and experience a weird feeling in your chest, no matter how brief you experience it.
Please read the study before going on personal attacks.
> The critical question in regards to heart inflammation was always about young males, this is very well known!
You need to decide if you want to accuse my quotation as manipulative or stressing nothing new. You can't have it both ways.
Also, you might find it interesting that the study points quite unequivocally that:
* "Myocarditis after mRNA vaccination was rare in this study cohort and even among young males."
* "The risk of myocarditis following the mRNA vaccines has been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration, which concluded that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks and fully authorized the use of mRNA-1273 in persons 18 years or older and BNT162b2 in persons 16 years or older."
Here’s why I claimed it’s manipulative: the study key points are “For young males receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, data were compatible with between 4 and 7 excess events in 28 days per 100 000 vaccinees after second-dose BNT162b2, and between 9 and 28 per 100 000 vaccinees after second-dose mRNA-1273.”
That is a direct quote. Now look at arinlen’s TLDR: only 5 versus 4-7 events for Biontech and 9-28 for Moderna in the key points.
The study authors clearly conclude that “The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young males after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose, and this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease”.
Quoting the outcomes in the general population from a study highlighting the effects in young males could have been a mistake. Given that the commenter insisted that their TLDR was correct after I pointed the above out, it’s more likely that they want to suppress any association between mRNA vaccines and heart inflammation.
This association is by now well established and many EU countries have dropped Moderna for young males.
His ideas just make discussions “insane” as you say.
Yes, jumping to conclusions before there is evidence is stupid, but ignoring the evidence is just insane.
Think "wow, your idea is so stupid I can't believe you call yourself a doctor" type criticism.
My suggestion is not "can we ban anti-vaxxers" but rather "if someone posts anti-vax comments just address them with counter arguments"
It isn't merely a controversial topic nor an unpopular position on the topic that is problematic. It is accounts created 20 minutes ago to promote bullshit making an otherwise interesting topic a boring referendum on bullshit. How many times would YOU like to explain that covid isn't flu nor totally safe if you eat right and exercise?