It’s been clear that the Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines cause myocarditis for some time. What hasn’t been clear, though, is whether the risk of myocarditis after vaccination is greater than it is after infection. If the risk after infection is even greater than it is after vaccination, then a pretty good case can be made for not worrying too much about vaccine induced myocarditis, under the assumption that almost everyone who doesn’t get vaccinated is sooner or later going to get covid, and thereby be exposed to the risk of post-infection myocarditis.
If, on the other hand, the risk is greater after vaccination, then a more careful weighing of risks needs to be done. For the large segments of the population that face infinitesimal personal risk from covid-19 (basically everyone under 40 years of age who is not overweight and who doesn’t have any underlying health issues), even a small risk of serious disease from the vaccines could be enough to tip the scales in favour of not vaccinating.
And myocarditis is a serious disease, make no mistake. Lately, I’ve been hearing this sentence alot: “but the myocarditis caused by the covid vaccines is mild!”. I’d never heard of “mild” myocarditis pre-covid. Pre-covid, myocarditis was always considered a serious disease. What the people saying this mean is that the patients admitted to hospital with myocarditis after vaccination are usually able to go home after a few days, and don’t generally end up in an ICU. Which is true.
But we don’t say that most heart attacks are “mild” just because they don’t result in a stay in an ICU, and just because the patient is usually able to leave the hospital within a week. A heart attack is a heart attack, and is by definition serious. The same goes for myocarditis. Our heart muscles are not very good at repairing themselves, and it is impossible to know today the extent to which an episode of vaccine induced myocarditis increases the person’s future risk of serious long-term complications, such as chronic heart failure or atrial fibrillation.
So, myocarditis is always serious, regardless of whether it puts you in an ICU or not, and we need to know whether the risk of myocarditis caused by the vaccines is greater than the risk caused by infection.
Thankfully, a study was recently published in Nature Medicine that helps us to answer that question. What the researchers did was to gather data from everyone in the UK over the age of 16 who was vaccinated against covid-19 between December 2020 and August 2021. This works out to about 40 million people (more than half the UK population). For this massive cohort, data was then gathered on myocarditis events and on positive covid tests. 8% of the 40 million people had a positive covid test during the study period. The objective of the study was to see what the risk of myocarditis was within 28 days of vaccination vs infection, and relate that to the background rate of myocarditis.
There is one big problem with taking the numbers in this study at face value, and that is that it used a positive covid test as the indicator for covid infection. But we know that up to half of all covid-infections are asymptomatic, and on top of that there is an unkown number of people who have symptoms but don’t take the test. So the true number of infections is likely to be at least twice as high as the test-confirmed infections. This creates an unfair comparison when comparing with the vaccines, because we know about everyone who gets the vaccine. There aren’t lots of people who have been secretly vaccinated, and aren’t included in the statistics. So whatever risk rate we get for myocarditis after infection should probably be halved, to more accurately reflect reality.
Anyway, let’s get to the results.
The first thing that is important to note is that the relative risk of myocarditis after vaccination vs infection appears to vary massively depending on how old you are. Among people over the age of 40, there was no sign that the vaccines increased risk of myocarditis at all. A positive covid-19 test, on the other hand, increased the risk 12-fold in this group. So for people over the age of 40, the risk of myocarditis after infection was much higher than the risk after vaccination.
Among people between 16 and 40 years of age, however, the situation was very different. In this group, the 28 day risk of getting myocarditis after a positive covid-test was “only” increased four-fold. The risk after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine was increased two-fold, while the risk after the first dose of the Moderna vaccine increased four-fold.
Let’s remember that the the covid test is probably only catching half, at best, of all infections, so the real risk increase after infection is more like two-fold, not four-fold. In other words, in people under 40, the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine causes roughly the same number of cases of myocarditis as an actual covid infection, while the first dose of the Moderna vaccine causes roughly twice as many cases of myocarditis.
Ok, so let’s get to the second dose. The second dose of the Pfizer vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis three-fold, while the risk after the second dose of the Moderna vaccine was increased 21-fold!
It’s safe to conclude here that the decision, a few months back, by authorities in many European countries to put a hold on giving the Moderna vaccine to anyone under the age of 30 was wise. One thing that is clear is that the second dose, of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, increases risk substantially when compared with the risk seen after the first dose. Which really begs the question how smart it is to recommend a third dose to people under the age of 40. It’s reasonable to think that the third dose might increase the risk of myocarditis even further.
One thing that is clear from the data in this study is that there is a strong age gradient, with risk of myocarditis after vaccination increasing massively with decreasing age. In fact, for the youngest group (16-29 years), the risk of myocarditis after getting the second dose of the Moderna vaccine was increased 74-fold!
Considering that decreasing age also means decreasing risk of a bad outcome from covid (including decreasing risk of myocarditis after covid), it is reasonable to think that there is an inflection point at which the harms of vaccination outweigh the benefits. On top of that, there is evidence that increasing the number of doses increases the risk of myocarditis. With those two factors in mind, it’s my measured opinion that giving boosters to healthy young people, and especially to children, is nuts. On top of that, many, if not most, young adults and children have already had covid, and therefore have as good immunity as it’s possible to get, so boosting literally exposes them to risk of harm without any possibility of benefit. When the benefits of vaccination are zero, any non-zero risk is unacceptable.
Thanks Sebastian…I agree with your findings . I was wondering have you reviewed the Novavax vaccine study report yet.
Thank you and happy new year.
It’s next on my to-do-list!
Thank you and really looking forward to your findings.
Thank you so much. I’ve been looking desperately for someone to review Novavax and risk of adverse reactions. I would much prefer to have no vaccine, however I live in a country where it may soon be forced on me and I may not be able to find arrangements to escape before then. I would be so, so very grateful for an expert review on Novavax.
“even a small risk of serious disease from the vaccines could be enough to tip the scales in favour of not vaccinating.”
You are basing your calculus solely on the risk of myocarditis and not other risks from the vaccine drugs, which may not be as well defined as myocarditis.
You are also glossing over the “benefits” of the vaccine drugs, when in fact there is good evidence that these drugs have no net benefit for patients of ANY AGE.
In the only controlled study I’m aware of, published in the NEJM, as many people died in the Pfizer vaccine drug group as died in the control/placebo arm. And a fraction of a 1% benefit in mild or moderate symptoms only. This justifies an emergency intervention with an experimental drug?
Risk benefit of any intervention must take into account risks, benefits, and alternatives. Vaccine drugs = possibly devastating and very common long-term adverse effects, short and medium side adverse effects which go well beyond myocarditis, and strong evidence of ZERO important benefit for anyone, young or old.
Sebastian, you have seemed to be a rational person up to this point but as far as a clear-eyed approach to these drugs, you’ve consumed the Kool-Aid.
WAKE UP.
Concurring… seeing a lot of good fearful scientists back down from this massive death shot. I say we strap down any unwilling “clients” and give them the jab in a sterile enclosed green room with the warden (doctor) there to safely observe them….. is that not so different from the induced fear we are producing now?
His comments relate solely to myocarditis so your criticism in this case is unfair!
My thoughts exactly. If the “critics” have looked at all of Sebastian’s postings, they will find that their criticisms are indefensible.
My son is 5 years old and has a very rare issue with his heart. He was diagnosed at 2 and we are now at 5 years old and now is the MRI next month and the surgery in April. I will not say who the doctors are or what hospital or the disease as it will call them out. They all said no vax.
Myocaratis or swelling of the heart is a long term issue and I am shocked they sweep this under the rug. 40%+ of the US heart transplants had this. Children have a positive outcome of 86% having myocarditis by age 30. That means 14% died. Stop the crazy, this is flat out dangerous. Rather have the odds with THE COVID
I chose J&J for myself for this reason. i strongly believe it is a better choice for men under 40.
Booster? Still undecided, but most likely I will skip it…
One other thing, not mentioned here, is about aspiration of the needle during vaccination. But the study is from the UK where they apparently do not aspirate.
Dr John Campbell on YouTube has spoken plenty about the need for aspiration to avoid unintentional injection into the blood stream which is believed to cause both myocardities and blood clots ( after experiments on mice l…
Agree with you about aspiration. A Danish study compared Denmark (aspiration) with Norway (non-aspiration) and found that myocarditis/pericarditis were 2.4 times higher in Norway…
I’m very envious you got a choice of vaccine! Here in the UK most doctors’ attitude is “Shut up, you’ll get what you’re given and be grateful” – which is why I was holding out for some good news on Novavax. But now I think it’s increasingly unlikely that it will even be licenced for use in the UK 🙁
Do you have a link for this study- I could not seem to find it? There could be many other differences between countries, eg which vaccine was used, the age spectrum of the vaccinated, diagnosis criteria etc.
@iank, should be this one:
Intravenous injection of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine can induce acute myopericarditis in mouse model
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/
I would love a discussion about this aspiration issue.
I am a nurse in the US. My job does not require me to give subQ injections and I did not administer any of the vaccines to anyone.
I distinctly recall being told in nursing school about 12 years ago that “evidence based research” indicated that aspiration was no longer recommended.
Since I don’t practice in an area that does these I have never spent the time looking it up but honestly it seems necessary to me. The only risk associated with aspiration appears to be the slightest risk for mild transient tissue bruising with the slight needle movement associated with aspiration.
I believe there is some concern that it’s more painful (in kids?) when the injection is done with aspiration.
On the other hand, it takes only a few seconds extra and you get some assurance that the injection is done as intended. (in muscle tissue and not in the blood stream).
Most readers referring to the mouse paper have been led to believe the i.v. story but have never looked carefully thru the paper and especially not into the supplemental data ( Figure S3) and Table 1. Sebastian does not mention the Hongkong paper (180-fold incidence after 2nd Pfizer in the male age cohort), left out the Kaiser Permanente data and does not cite the new revision of the data separating males and females by Patron et al. in a preprint.A recent very careful review also mentioned that recovered patients have myocarditis observed after the first shot.
The thing that almost everyone seems to miss in this regard (even doctors and experts) is this:
Even if a person is at highish risk from myocarditis after contracting Covid itself, in any given year, only a relatively small number of people will actually contract Covid (and some people will potentially go decades without contracting it – case in point, my wife has not had influenza in the 25 years we’ve known each other), and therefore, the exposure risk is relatively low on a population-wide basis.
However, if we insist on vaccinating everyone, a far larger number of people will end up with myocarditis in any given year, even if the risk ratio is lower from the vaccine, than if we had simply exposed them to the risk of contracting the disease itself.
Please correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I’ve run the calculations several times, and the risk from the vaccines seems far higher according to those calculations.
Of course, if the risk from the vaccines is higher, then we’re really in trouble!
No, you are not wrong. That is exactly the point. Also: Age over 40 is a far too gross classification. You have to have many sub-classes to make valid statements. Beginning with: men / women / overweight / not overweight / existing sicknesses / no existing sicknesses etc. etc. By far the most egregious error: “over 40” or “over 60″ lumps together people age 87 with heart conditions with healthy people age 70 or healthy people age 50… Last not least: 1) Evidently protection against a serious illness with covid-19 last at most 6 month. After booster shots – see newest data Israel – it disappears even faster. Compare this to natural immunity which seems to last far longer. So, with repeated booster shots every 4 or 6 month, you have an ever increasing risk of adverse effects of all kinds. In contrast to natural immunity, where – basically – you are done with 1 infection for – probably – several years. 2) 28 days is far too short for valid statements. See American Heart Association: ‘Abstract 10712: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning.’… “We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.” The warning applies to these adverse effects coming into effect over serveral years…
Yes, and the other factor that concerns me in these comparisons is the assumption that it’s either/or vaccine or infection. Since the vaccine is far from 100% effective, and has a very limited duration of action, this isn’t valid. What is the risk to those who get the vaccine and then go on to develop covid? The only valid way to study this is to take everyone who is vaccinated, compare to everyone who isn’t, and see how many have ended up with myocarditis ( or whatever other end point we want to evaluate) at the end of a defined period of time.
Do you have the absolute numbers of the risk of getting vaccine induced and infection induced myocarditis depending on age and number of doses given? How many million doses of vaccine needs to be given to cause one case of myocarditis?
I hear a lot that the probability of going to hospital is greater if vaccinated than having covid infection in young people – Is this true? Does omicron change things significantly with respect to this and the chance of myocarditis from omicron relative to delta?
What is the absolute risk of Myocarditis after vaccination for those <40?
I skimmed through the report but was only really able to see that myocarditis is much lower risk for younger people than older people. So is the increased Myocarditis risk for younger people so low it can be ignored (not for Moderna obviously). Is a doubling a significant risk?
This is particularly the case since we know a main argument for healthy U40s to get vaccinated is the altruistic motive or benefitting society rather than the purely selfish motive of protecting my self that applies to 60+ diabetics like me. We already know that we are asking young people to do me and my parents a big favour by getting vaccinated.
2 other points. Are historic records of myocarditis for the young a reliable source of comparison? (I presume there was no control group). It strikes me as something almost guaranteed not to be diagnosed well in the very rare cases for young people who might now show symptoms as easily as older patients? So is the doubling/quadrupling actually happening or just highlighting previous under recognition.
The pro-vaccination argument for u40s has weakened throughout the last 12 months and I don't see myocarditis as being a significant factor in that however one intreprets the paper (though thanks for having done so). The kill rate of Covid continues to fall (plummets with Omicron) so the threat of Covid is less and less. The protection from infection or reinfection or from passing virus on for vaccines continues to fall, and the virus spreads so much better now, so the altruistic gain is less than it ever was.
So we are left with a purely selfish decision whether to vaccinate or not and bogus anti-libertarian arguments. If people of my age are stupid enough not to vaccinate that really is their problem but their choice.
“Stupid”?
Do the post infection figures take into account previous vaccinations?
As I read it, the study was only on people who’d been vaccinated. So all the infections would be post-vaccination. Does it follow that the post-infection risk in an unvaccinated person would be the same? Might not the prior vaccination have changed the risk?
8% of the study population had a known covid infection during the period. Roughly 80% of those infections happened pre-vaccination.
That was my question too. I wish the study compared myocarditis of covid infections of unvaccinated people vs vaccinated people. I’m wondering if say you had covid, then had the two jabs, does risk go up each time you have jabs? Is it cumulative? I had covid at the very beginning. Then the 2 jabs. Didn’t think I needed any jabs bc of prior infection but as we know, that idea seems to have been cancelled. My country has v passports for restaurants, gyms etc and to travel so I got the 2 jabs to have a life. But I’m very worried about the long-term effects. After second jab (Pfizer) I did have acute pain between shoulders on second night. And did have severe flu like symptoms after both jabs. I definitely do not want boosters.
Hi Sebastian,
Have you changed/updated your views on “long covid” especially in these omicron days?
I think this is over simplified and possibly too trusting of bad data.
In the UK if someone was taken ill within 14 days of a vaccination, they would be counted as unvaccinated. If at some stage in their hospital stay they tested positive for Covid then they would be recorded as myocarditis from the virus when it could have been from vaccine.
If they are taken ill 20 days afterwards it would probably not be linked under any circumstances.
Neither of these scenarios is at all unlikely.
The only way we could tell would be if there were control groups in the “ongoing” trials and in society. And there aren’t.
Actually, there is (at least) this control group of unvaccinated people who regularly report their health status (https://www.vaxcontrolgroup.com/), so even Covid infections and myocarditis should show up here.
I have seen the view in several places that you repeat in the first paragraph of your blog, that if myocarditis risk from the virus exceeds the same risk from the vaccine, that the myocarditis risk can effectively be ignored in coming to a judgment about whether or not to vaccinate. Such a view suffers from at least 3 fundamental flaws.
1. The risk benefit balance which needs to be addressed will vary in its result depending upon the individual, so general conclusions cannot be drawn. The most obvious important variable to illustrate that seems to be age (although it might just be a marker). It does appear that many of the risks and benefits of both COVID and the injections vary markedly with age.
2. The second flaw is that while you are necessarily and certainly exposed to the vaccine myocarditis risk UPON VACCINATION, someone is only exposed to the risk of myocarditis from the virus ONLY IF you become ill because of the virus. Since the risk of getting ill is not at all certain, a direct comparison is simply invalid. It also assumes the issue as a binary choice: vaxxed or vaccine-free. This ignores the effect of the many effective treatments and prophylactic steps that can be taken, but are being ignored by the “narrative”. And finally, it ignores the probability that the virus will in effect “go away”, become endemic, diminish in its severity and so on over time. oMicron might be an example of this:time will tell. You are stuck with the effects of a shot forever.
3. The only way to treat properly and compare the risks from COVID versus the risk from the vaccine is to look at all risks on both sides of the inevitable risk-benefit balance. This is certainly not to say that such a balance exercise is easy, but it is the only way to compare the risks meaningfully. Cherry-picking your risk to evaluate is a Pharma tactic to arrive at a desired answer.
Ignoring for the moment flaws 1 and 2, lets consider an example that illustrates flaw 3. Let us assume (it pretty much is certain to be true anyway) that COVID and the vaccines have a number of ways of harming those exposed. Those harms can come in various forms and severities, of course. From death through life-changing, lifelong harm to much more minor and perhaps short term injury. But again to simplify, let us just focus on death. (Not necessarily the worst harm, in my opinion but clearly definable). To make a valid comparison between deaths caused by the vaccines and deaths caused by COVID, you must consider deaths of all types that are caused by both “options”.
The approach you advocate is interestingly the approach that Pharma uses to sell statins. Their advertorial “science” papers, marketing their drugs to naive medics almost always focus on the cardiac “event” risks only and choose to ignore other harms (or benefits) deaths/risks from other causes. In risk analysis (which is what you and they are doing) one of the early and most important steps is to define the boundary of the system you are analysing.
One of the best summations of Jab/C19 risk I have read in the last 2 years.
Recent trials (in Japan) appear to discount the idea of asymptomatic transmission.
Also, the lack of training all these hordes of ‘jabbers’ received, points to the possibility that many injections are inadvertently IV instead of the intended IM. (They are not trained to aspirate.) So the side-effects could be partially, or even all, due to the stuff going into a vein and thus spreading quickly to organs.
This is unlikely. I was an anaesthetist in UK, and you can only aspirate blood if the needle is in a decent size vein, and there are no decent size veins in the deltoid muscle. If the needle tip does enter a small vein, then aspirating it sucks the vein wall onto the end of the needle and no blood will appear in the syringe. This is a common problem in babies veins.
If anatomical oddities in the deltoid vasculature occur even 0.1% of the time, this could cause many problems with injections.
” An additional variation may be present involving blood supply. The thoracoacromial artery plays a large role in providing each of the deltoid heads with blood supply and oxygen. This artery typically runs through a groove between the deltoid and pectoralis muscles.
However, a variation may be noted in some individuals where this artery tunnels through the deltoid rather than around it.”
https://www.verywellhealth.com/deltoid-muscle-anatomy-4688693
asdgamer
Venous anomalies of sufficient size within muscle to allow inadvertent IV injections are not common, and nowhere near common enough to be a causal factor in myocarditis. It is quite difficult to inject into an artery because of the thick wall and they roll out of the way
not so nice results in the final conclusion for people under 40… considering that now they even start to vaccinate the children all over the world.
Sebastian, thankyou for highlighting the issue again.
Cases of myocarditis and pericarditis also disproportionately affect males. In the Hong Kong study of 12-17 year olds, it was 87.88% males as opposed to 12.12% females.
(Sebastian’s piece didn’t specifically address the gender imbalance.)
The paper in Nature also shows the gender disparity, but to a much lesser extent, with the increased risk for males being in the region of 2x or 3x.
But we can perhaps postulate that all males under 40 are, at the very least, double as likely to experience this adverse outcome compared to females.
If the risk for all 12-40 year olds after second shot is multiplied x3 for Pfizer, and x21 for Moderna, then what is the increased risk for males only??
And the data strongly suggests that the risk for males under-18 is elevated even further….
Without any benefit.
And in a rational world, why would you even consider rolling out to the under 12’s….?
Nature only looked at risk in the 1-28 day period. Does the risk return to baseline 28 days after receipt of shot? Of course, it does not….
A study that followed a cohort for, say, 6 months, would undoubtedly find a much greater incidence.
As has been noted, this is just one type of adverse outcome, that has become highlighted because of its very apparent nature, and often visible sudden onset.
Minor quibble: “Nature” and “Nature Medicine” are different publications, though coming from the same parent organization.
I believe they have updated their pre print from the original to include sex stratification in addition to age.
Young men particularly worse off.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf
Happy new year! Ive started reading your book on Covid- wonderful resource esp from a Swedish perspective. Thank you.
but myocarditis is worse after vaccination than after covid infection; see https://www.facebook.com/Hexeen/videos/1089101318527921
Is there evidence to indicate that the risk factors for myocarditis differ between vaccine and virus? For instance, is a person with multiple comorbidities at high(er) risk in both cases and is a healthy person at low(er) risk in both cases?
Thank you so much for the good explanations, easy to understand. What a pity that our self proclaimed health authorities want to destroy lives. Thank you for being a real physician and spending the time to put the puzzle pieces together of the big picture.
BTW I also loved the video with the low carb doctor, his very kind and loving description of his wife, being large, small and medium, made me smile all day! I too am like his wifey and found that that limiting carbs and increasing vegetables and healthy fats very healing.
The experts can’t even agree on what it means to be “vaccinated” yet: Natural… jabs 2, 3, 4… Brand, X, Y. Z…
I think I’ll stick with drinking my urine while having my palm read.
Lol…thanks I needed that !
The vaccine does not prevent infection. Omicron is everywhere. Is there more risk of myocarditis to the vaccinated who get infected post vaccination?
I read somewhere that, after making the proper adjustments to the numbers on both sides of the equation, the fatality rate for the vaccine vs. the virus is 2 : 1 for 20 year-olds, and 6 : 1 for those over age 75.
Would hydroxychloroquin or Invermectin, given appropriately in the early stages of Covid, reduce the risk of myocarditis ?
If any palliative treatment lowers the spread or impact of the virus in your systems, then it will surely lower the degree of myocarditis.
The premise of this analysis is that the vaccines work. In other words, the assumption is that the vaccines prevent COVID-19 in an absolute manner – 100% effective. I’m not even sure the effectiveness is greater than 0%.
Agree. Signs of vax negative effectiveness now appearing in several countries.
Omicron infection appears to cause mild clinical symptoms that are restricted to the upper respiratory tract, and are self-limiting. It has been dubbed a de facto live attenuated vaccine by some.
Though the possibility that it may yet have an unidentified sting in the tale, should not be discounted.
But if things are as they appear to be, and Omicron becomes ubiquitous, then all bets are off.
Benefit/risk will no longer be the required calculation, because there will be no benefit.
Very interesting; however your first paragraph misses the fact that the vaccines impart no immunity so the vaccinated are as likely to catch covid in any case therefore any risk from the vaccines is in addition to and not instead of the risk from the virus.
THAT’S A GOOD POINT!!!
Fantastic piece as always!
I work in the US at a large, well known electrophysiology and cath lab. I can attest that I NEVER heard any cardiologist refer to myocarditis as mild. Never.
This goes especially for young people. Before this vaccine fiasco, any cardiologist standing bedside to a 22 year old with myocarditis would have been quite concerned and asking a whole host of questions.
I point out one correction: none of us heard myocarditis referred to as mild until AFTER the vaccines rolled out and not, as you say, after Covid began to spread. The people who wanted us to believe that the vaccines were safe and effective for everyone and therefore “mandate-able” introduced that term. And no one in health care pushed back on the lie.
It is initially surprising to note the complete lack of concern by most doctors when faced with evidence suggesting that they may be damaging their patients unnecessarily.
But this is a common feature of humans in many situations. We are herd animals, and apply considerable pressure to persons who step outside the herd. This is known, so politicians, businessmen and activists make extensive use of shameing, scapegoating and cancelling opponents to drive their policies through.
40 years old is just a number. Do you have any idea what biological/clinical process can explain this huge difference in susceptibility to myocarditis?
Two “possible” scenarios that I have seen Michael Yeadon and others kick around:
1 – All batches / lots are not the same. Some batches have been discovered to be way more lethal than other batches which seem to be less noticeably impactful. The research on this is via deepdive review of CDC and Euro data.
2 – Not all doses within a batch are the same. Change the potencies of any given vaccine as well as the ratio of full dose to placebo to hide the lethality so that it does not blow up the mass psychositic trance.
Each / both fit well with the (conspiracy) hypothesis that “emergency use” is really code for “phase-3 trial / experiment that in order to provide what the Vaccine Industrial Complex needs in terms of determining dose-lethality levels by age group, dose-morbidity (types of diseases)…..
The atypical and all too obvious rush to vaccinate and/or silence everyone could be an attempt to eliminate the only control group: the unvaccinated, so that there is no evidence with which to compare impacts of the vaccines, a process which is clearly underway in the way that official data are being manipulated and/or hidden completely.
We all need a GP that we have got to know and trust and who is open to us requesting a second opinion. Just recently a prominent figure in the Irish health sector said that we should be appointing more administrators. What we really need is more doctors who can give patients five minutes more of conversation time about their medical concerns before rushing them off with prescriptions.
“under the assumption that almost everyone who doesn’t get vaccinated is sooner or later going to get covid” This assumption is weak. There is nothing to support it. My daughter had Covid but her children did not get it although sharing same house and were not isolated. In Sweden, for example, in almost two years only 13,8% of the population tested positive. Would be interesting to know what the percentage was before the vaccination.
Am also surprised you trust so much the PCR test. Internet is full of serious texts doubting its accuracy.
You are proceeding from the assumption that vaccination, just like a disease, is a one-time act. But this is not the case when you consider 2 doses of injections and an unknown number of boosters. The European Union, for example, has stocked 10 times the population of vaccines. https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-response/safe-covid-19-vaccines-europeans_de
Dr. Rushworth,
Myocarditis is merely one adverse outcome from the clotshots, isn’t it? Isn’t the first question to answer whether there is a benefit from all-cause mortality?
Have I missed where you looked at the FDA data about all-cause mortality for the Pfizer covid vaccine?
https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download
Scroll to page 23 in the document. As regards all-cause mortality, there were 21 deaths in the Pfizer covid vaccine arm and 17 deaths in the placebo arm.
I agree with David Healy. If a vaccine doesn’t show a benefit for all-cause mortality, it shouldn’t be allowed.
But covid vaccine deaths should be obvious if they are occurring, right? Maybe not. If public health authorities aren’t providing guidance about how to detect deaths caused by covid vaccines, that should be a red flag that covid vaccine deaths are being missed. I note that Arne Burkhardt, a well-experienced and eminent German pathologist, provides guidance on how to conduct autopsies where a covid vaccine is suspected to be the cause of death. Certainly, pharma had to have conducted autopsies on animal models when they tested on animals, right? So public health authorities ought to have that information, right? What am I missing?
“Notes and recommendations for conducting post-mortem examination (autopsy) of persons deceased in connection with COVID vaccination”
https://doctors4covidethics.org/notes-and-recommendations-for-conducting-post-mortem-examination-autopsy-of-persons-deceased-in-connection-with-covid-vaccination/
What l want to know is why are fit, healthy soccer players and other young men are suddenly having heart issues, some having heart attacks while training or playing
Even 12yr olds having heart attacks, l read about a 13yr old in the US who had 2nd jab and was out playing with friends the next day and had a heart attack
l had never heard of heart attacks in children and young people but since these “vaccines” came out they are happening everywhere and even deaths
l live in a small town and know of quite a few young and old, post jab, suddenly dying or having strokes and heart attacks
Some are suffering from other issues
Sadly when they seek medical help they are fobbed of and told it is stress and just a “coincedence” that it happened post vax
Sebastian I enjoy your work .I just have to take issue with your comment that myocarditis is always serious and you have never heard of mild myocarditis.
You have no evidence to support that. The fact is that myocarditis is probably routine and mild in most cases of influenza and other viral illnesses, we just don’t test for it. Just as it is routine to have mild inflammation of most organs like liver,thyroid and gut during a viral illness like influenza. There is no evidence that the mild myocarditis during viral illnesses causes later heart issues. This is selection bias.
Sebastian,
If we were to assume that the early treatments are effective, would they reduce the risk of myocarditis for the infected people over the age of 40?
Sebastian,
It seems that I have misunderstood your article. You do say clearly: “What the researchers did was to gather data from everyone in the UK over the age of 16 who was vaccinated against covid-19 between December 2020 and August 2021.” However reading further down my mind wondered into what I wanted to know and equated the “infected” to the “infected unvaccinated”. That being the case my question above is invalid.
Why are we talking about boosters when we still should be on the subject if kids need even 1 or 2 vaccine doses? I vowed to wait 2 years for full data to come out on a medication that I give to my kids. So why is still waiting not reasonable for those that want to for their kids? Does the risk of Covid death doesn’t even rank in the top 10 ways a teenager can die? I haven’t seen that but still value a parent’s choice to vaccinate/booster or not.
With the spike protein entering the nucleus of cells, there is also a concern with what this means in the future. No? What I know for sure is that there is no physician or drug company in the world that is willing to accept liability for any adverse effects both now and in the future. Why not? This is done with other medications. This is not something that I feel is acceptable for something that is deemed SO SAFE. So forcing kids out of activities for not being vaccinated at this point in time (for a disease that vaccines do a poor job of preventing) is unethical by regular medical standards. I wish physicians had the gumption to protest these mandates on children which are wrong. Recommend all you want but never coerce and be willing to listen to the patients.
Also this study only looks at 28 days! My understanding is that the increased risk lasts for 5 years.
How could anyone know that it lasts for five years?
See link:
https://news.sky.com/video/nhs-doctor-tells-health-secretary-he-wont-get-jabbed-12511306
I posted a comment with two links. Please let it out of jail.
Let’s consider immunity. There are the castle walls, with sentries. Mucous membranes with IgA, T-cells, etc. Then there is the castle garrison. Humoral immunity–IgG, IgM, circulating IgA, etc.
The vaccines provide a strong response, but not without allowing damage to the system. Natural immunity includes mucosal immunity, so it actually provides total protection against a recurrence. I suspect that innate immunity depends strongly on vitamin D and zinc levels. Perhaps that is why a relapse is often more serious than the initial infection.
“so it actually provides total protection against a recurrence”
If only that were true.
Novak Djokovic, unvaccinated, has had covid twice. Keir Starmer, leader of UK Labour Party, vaccinated, has had covid twice within 3 months. The UK Health Security Agency (a rather sinister title) estimate that prior infection used to provide 85% protection against reinfection, but now with Omicron, possibly as low as 19%.
It seems our immune systems are unreliable, and some individuals are just going to get repeated covid infections regardless, rather as some individuals get repeated infections of the common cold and flu.
Realistically, there are too many powerful vested interests, commercial, political and professional, to imagine that we are going to change the current pillars of management, vaccines and restrictions.
I cannot see how a decent RCT can ever be conducted to elucidate the full relationships of Vitamin D to the disease, but I would like to see more analysis of all the observational data using better methods of reducing the confounding factors, like causal analysis using directed acyclic graphs. (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20087965v3.full.pdf)
I should have been clearer. “Total protection” meant “castle walls as well as garrison.” (Surely, a repeat covid infection is possible. My family experienced it. Results were about like the first time we were infected.)
If vitamin D levels tank, the castle walls will be in shambles.
“Editorial – Vitamin D status: a key modulator of innate immunity and natural defense from acute viral respiratory infections”
https://europeanreview.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/4048-4052.pdf
“Association of Vitamin D Status and COVID-19-Related Hospitalization and Mortality”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-021-07170-0
————————-
Maintaining the castle walls (for everyone, not just iank)
25OHD has a serum half-life of around 29 days and D3 supplementation is dilatory, yet the most common method of raising 25OHD levels…and 25OHD levels will tank after any infection, including colds and flu…direct supplementation with 25OHD after a viral infection looks like the best approach…and since D3 supplementation relies on the liver, it might not be a feasible approach for those who consume alcohol regularly or those with any kind of fatty liver disease. D3 uptake can be problematic for the elderly–and the obese will need higher doses of D3 than those with low BMI because adipose tissue competes with the liver for D3.
Zinc levels are also important for the castle walls and they can tank after a viral infection.
Thanks for your link to the July 2020 MedRxiv paper and comments about the weaknesses you see in papers. It would be helpful in the future to assign weight to the weaknesses on a 1-10 scale.
I know you are interested in the methods of medical research, so a couple of comments on the links you have posted.
https://europeanreview.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/4048-4052.pdf
Editorial. Notoriously easy to manipulate by cherry picking the references. The only reviews really worth reading are systematic reviews with full details of the methods that would enable you to replicate the review
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-021-07170-0
A few red flags here.
Retrospective cohort study.
Restricted to patients who had a serum 25(OH)D measurement 15-90 days before positive covid test. This will not be a representative population sample – why were the measurements done?
Statistics. Multiple pairwise comparisons. You can bury a lot of bodies in statistics, which they have done as they do not have enough data to use the appropriate technique, multivariate logistic regression.
Fig 2 and 3. The graphs show what the authors claim. The risk of hospitalisation and death decline as the blood concentrations of 25(OH)D increase. What struck me was that the absolute risks seem quite low whatever.
“I’d never heard of “mild” myocarditis pre-covid.”
Scar tissue on the heart will cause pumping issues and perhaps electrical issues. Myocarditis is likely a Sword of Damocles awaiting a trigger for a cardiac arrest. Jack O’Drain being a case in point.
I’m confused:
“Among people over the age of 40, there was no sign that the vaccines increased risk of myocarditis at all. A positive covid-19 test, on the other hand, increased the risk 12-fold in this group. So for people over the age of 40, the risk of myocarditis after infection was much higher than the risk after vaccination.”
But:
“Let’s remember that the the covid test is probably only catching half, at best, of all infections”
So is actual risk for >40 ~6 fold for cov +?
And what about after 2nd, 3rd dose?
The author is assuming that all of those who were infected by SARS-CoV-2 but weren’t confirmed as a case did not develop myocarditis. However, we know from the baseline that this isn’t true. The fact is, we can’t say anything about how to adjust for the difference between infections and cases. It may be that the risks are unchanged or the risk is made worse. Perhaps the most reasonable assumption is that the risk is unchanged. So we are left with, for the Pfizer vaccine, which I’m more interested in, an IRR of 3.4 for the second dose, in those under 40. The IRR for the same age group after a positive test is 4.06. This is a relative risk of 0.66 (i.e. if you’re under 40, you have a 2/3 greater chance of developing myocarditis, if you catch the virus, than if you have 2 doses of Pfizer). But the baseline number of myocarditis events is 120 for 12 million people. That’s a 1 in 100,000 chance of developing myocarditis, regardless of vaccination or COVID-19. So, for COVID-19 positive people, that chance becomes roughly 1 in 25,000, whilst, for those vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer, the chance is about 1 in 29,000.
Of course, there are other factors to consider and it should be noted that everyone is likely to catch COVID-19 at some point, in some cases, multiple times. So this research still leaves it clear that it’s probably good to get vaccinated, even if you’re under 40, at least for up to two doses. This is not the case for the Moderna vaccine, though.
That is a good point. The myocarditis risk after asymptomatic or mild infection probably isn’t zero. It’s probably lower than it is after more severe disease though, since mild infection generally means that the virus is constrained to the upper respiratory tract, while more severe disease means it’s gotten much further in to the body, and mild disease by definition means less immune system activation. Though as you say, impossible to know at the moment.
A person may well catch Covid multiple times throughout their life (as a side note, my wife has never had the flu in almost 30 years of us being together, so it’s a fair assumption that many people will never get Covid), but if you vaccinate two or three times a year, you are guaranteed to expose yourself to risk every single year.
I don’t think that that is, yet, a fair assumption (that many people will never get COVID-19) but it is possible (depending on what is meant by “many”). Certainly, some people will die before they encounter the virus. I am often reading “experts” (usually epidemiologists) who state that almost everyone will get COVID-19 at some point.
From the available evidence, vaccines don’t prevent infection, so what is the point of getting vaccinated at all if you are seeking to reduce heart damage and myocarditis? Vaccines are theoretically totally avoidable even if getting exposed to covid is not.
Thank you Sebastian. It does answer my question regarding early treatments. If they are effective in making the infection milder, henceforth constraining the virus to the upper respiratory tract, they would reduce the risk of myocarditis making it lower than the vaccine’s risk in the group of over 40. But as you said, unfortunately there is no data to either confirm or deny it.
theasdgamer, there’s a difference between not preventing infection and reducing the risk of infection. The evidence and research shows that you are less likely to contract the virus if you’ve been vaccinated. Whether that’s important to you is another matter.
Mike Roberts,
“theasdgamer, there’s a difference between not preventing infection and reducing the risk of infection. The evidence and research shows that you are less likely to contract the virus if you’ve been vaccinated. Whether that’s important to you is another matter.”
Oh, I think that we’ve probably all been exposed to the covid virus by now. 99.9% have been infected already. I don’t think that the covid virus can roll back time. Can it reduce the risk of reinfection? Maybe the covid vaccine can delay reinfection for a time. The question seems quite irrelevant to me.
As to evidence, I think that we need the release of the FDA documents before we put any credence in the trial data. So far, an FDA document about the Pfizer trial data show no benefit for all-cause mortality, which is slightly important. That document states, without supporting evidence, that the covid vaccines were not considered to have caused the additional deaths in the vaccine arm. Bear in mind that no public health agency has explained how to investigate possible covid vaccine deaths, so how would anyone know if covid vaccines caused deaths? Only Arne Burkhardt has explained how to do autopsies when covid vaccines are suspected to have caused deaths, to my knowledge.
If you don’t want to know that covid vaccines caused deaths, don’t figure out how to investigate that in an autopsy.
Thanks again for, as always, interesting and valuable comments. For me personally I think it would however be easier to follow the text and understand the reasoning, if it was more straightforward. Less details and lengthy explanations. These could if thought necessary be referenced to in form of asterisks, after the main text.
Från artikeln i Nature…
” No association between ChAdOx1 vaccine and myocarditis or pericarditis has been reported.
Och..
” Our findings are relevant to the public, clinicians and policy makers. First, there was an increase in the risk of myocarditis within a week of receiving the first dose of both adenovirus and mRNA vaccines, and a higher increased risk after the second dose of both mRNA vaccines. In contrast, we found no evidence of an increase in the risk of pericarditis or cardiac arrhythmias following vaccination, except in the 1–28 days following a second dose of the mRNA-1273 vaccine. Second, in the same population, there was a greater risk of myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmia following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Third, the increased risk of myocarditis after vaccination was higher in persons aged under 40 years. We estimated extra myocarditis events to be between 1 and 10 per million persons in the month following vaccination, which was substantially lower than the 40 extra events per million persons observed following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
We assessed the temporal association between COVID-19 vaccination and cardiac adverse events using hospital admissions with diagnoses of myocarditis or pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias. Myocarditis is an inflammatory disorder of the myocardium that commonly results from viral infection, systemic immune-mediated diseases or immunomodulatory treatments7. It occurs more commonly in men, which may be a consequence of different effects of sex hormones on the immune system8. Several cases have been reported in patients hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 infection, and screening for cardiac involvement using cardiac troponin testing has demonstrated that myocardial injury is common and associated with poor outcomes9. Irrespective of the underlying etiology of myocarditis, those who develop important ventricular impairment are at increased risk of cardiogenic shock and mortality10, highlighting the importance of ascertaining whether myocarditis may be temporally associated with vaccination for SARS-CoV-2.
Whereas myocarditis is a specific form of cardiac inflammation, pericarditis reflects inflammation localized to the pericardium, and the occurrence of cardiac arrhythmias, although associated with both, is not a specific indictor of cardiac inflammation. Thus, neither pericarditis nor any category of cardiac arrhythmia were associated specifically with COVID-19 vaccination10,11,12. Myocarditis is underdiagnosed in practice13, with clinical bias being directed towards myocardial ischemia or infarction. Thus, our use of diagnostic codes for myocarditis from routine data suggest that the ascertainment of cardiac inflammation after COVID-19 vaccination is likely to be under- rather than over-represented14,15.
Although no cases of myocarditis were observed in the randomized trials of vaccine, this condition is uncommon, and postmarket authorization surveillance may be required. Our observation of an increased risk within 7 days of receiving the vaccine is consistent with the presentation of viral myocarditis, where viral symptoms are often reported in the week leading up to presentation. Furthermore, myocarditis following vaccination has been reported with other vaccines, for example, in healthy adults after receipt of live vaccinia virus vaccines16,17 Whilst the mechanisms of myocarditis following exposure to SARS-CoV2 infection and vaccination are not known, it seems likely that systemic complications of infection are a consequence of an immune-mediated, virus-independent immunopathologic process18. However, vaccine mediated expression of SARS-CoV-2 surface spike protein on the surface of cardiomyocytes could potentially trigger an immunologic response resulting in organ-specific cell death19,20”….
” Our findings extend these observations by including 38 million adults in England receiving both mRNA and adenovirus-mediated vaccine. There were 1,615 myocarditis events in our study population, enabling a granular evaluation of subgroups and the temporal association in the weeks following vaccination. We observed a small excess in myocarditis events after both the first and second dose of vaccine, but this risk was restricted to a 7-day period following vaccination. This observation was not limited to the mRNA vaccines as we also found an excess in myocarditis events following the first dose of ChAdOx1 vaccine.”…
” Whilst myocarditis can be life-threatening, most vaccine-associated myocarditis events have been mild and self-limiting22. The risk observed here is small and confined to the 7-day period following vaccination, whereas the lifetime risk of morbidity and mortality following SARS-CoV-2 infection is substantial.”
I’d prefer if you actually make some type of argument rather than just copy-pasting from an article’s conclusion section. A few points:
1. The ChAdOx1 vaccine is the Astra-Zeneca vaccine. The increased risk of myocarditis is seen with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
2. Although the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines don’t appear to markedly increase risk of myocarditis overall, that is because there is no increased risk in people over the age of 40. If you restrict the analysis to people under the age of 40, then you see that there is a marked increase in risk. You would know this if you had actually read my article above.
3. You would learn more if you looked directly at evidence yourself (in this case the results section in the Nature Medicine article), instead of just copy-pasting other people’s opinions. Article conclusions almost always align with whatever the dominant narrative is at the time of writing, and therefore cannot be relied on (because if the conclusion went against the dominant narrative, then the article wouldn’t get published in a peer-reviewed journal). You need to look at the actual results.
So having read the study, I’m struggling a bit with my interpretation. As a layman, all I can see from the study is a greater risk following actual infection, the smaller risk being from the vaccines. I’d appreciate some clarification!
The study says –
“We estimated an extra two … myocarditis events per 1 million people vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively, in the 28 days following a first dose and an extra ten myocarditis events per 1 million vaccinated in the 28 days after a second dose of mRNA-1273. This compares with an extra 40 myocarditis events per 1 million patients in the 28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. ”
So 2 or 10 per million for vaccine and 40 for infection?
Then –
“Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 in adults was associated with a small increase in the risk of myocarditis …,. By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantial increase in the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmia”
So where am I reading this incorrectly?
Many thanks
Go and look in the results table instead of just reading the text. The results table breaks it down by age, and shows clearly that the risk is greater after vaccination than after infection in people under the age of 40. The tables are always the hardest place for authors to manipulate data, so that should be the first place you go to for information. In the text section it’s easy to hide data that is uncomfortable or goes against the dominant narrative.
Got it, table 2 – thanks for taking the time to clarify Dr.R
– as you and Dr Kendrick always remind us, the authors can muddy the water in the narrative, but the data is the data!
Since the vaccines are not preventing infection, but rather merely reducing the symptoms for some period of time, it is actually unfair to compare vaccine induced myocarditis vs infection induced one as they would be mutually exclusive events.
In the most simple case, for a specific time period say 1 Year, you should compare on one side
1. Probability of infection without vaccination * Probability of Infection induced Myocarditis
and on the other side
2. Probability of Vaccine induced myocarditis + Probability of infection post Vaccination * Probability of Infection induced Myocarditis
Now since the UK data strongly suggests the vaccination even increases the chance of infection then there can be only a downside, regarding myocarditis, in taking the vaccine. I mean if ‘Probability of infection post Vaccination’ is at par or even greater than ‘Probability of infection without vaccination’ then it is all just bollocks. I am actually stunned that an analysis based on so obviously flawed assumptions is being published in nature.
If you want to model time properly you would have to include the probability of vaccine induced myocarditis after recurrent yearly/semiannually/quarterly boosters and still factor in the very high chances of infection despite vaccination. I cannot see how that can turn favourable for the vaccines even in the short term 1 year modelling approach.
” The objective of the study was to see what the risk of myocarditis was within 28 days of vaccination vs infection, and relate that to the background rate of myocarditis.”
I hope they do a follow-up paper covering the risk of myocarditis within six months of vaccination or infection.
Is there any particular reason to suppose that myocarditis, or any other nasty side-effect, must show up within 28 days?
According to this analysis, spikes may be circulating for up to 4 months after the 2nd injection:
https://doctors4covidethics.org/long-term-persistence-of-the-sars-cov-2-spike-protein-evidence-and-implications-2/
Hello,
Myocarditis is a big topic as a vaccine side effect, but what do you say about the other effects that have been studied, such as changes in hemoglobin A1c levels, decreased potassium levels, shortened blood clotting time, increased cholesterol and creatinine levels, decrease in CD8+ T cells and an increase in classic monocyte content, increased NF-κB signaling, and decreased type I interferon response?
Individuals with pre-existing conditions in particular appear to have higher risks and side effects from vaccination, including the severity of covid disease, although it is constantly said otherwise.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34697287/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-021-00329-3
Very interesting indeed. Thank you for more information about other side effects of the covid jab.
I have read your post and gone through the study mentioned, I find many things and assumption you do troubling and I won’t go in to them all. But I was curious about the number 74 you put out with a big! When I read the study I find that in most cases the risks of the events that the study concentrate on is far worse if you get the infection versus the vaccine. The only case where there seems to be a similiar risk is in the young with the mrna vaccine, luckily we have many diffrernt vaccines.
But back to the number 74, I’m guessing it is from table 3b in the supplementary information, this is based on less then 5 events and probably why the authors didn’t put much emphasis on it. The HUGE confidence interval should be a red flag. You/they are in this number basically saying that you are 95% sure the incidence rate ratio is between 5.28 and 1048.75. In other words only way to make the statement quite certain is to make the range ridiculous big. This is what you are basing your thoughts on… The numbers were based on less than 11 cases in under 40 yo. in the mrna group and 17 cases in the sarscov-2 group under 40 yo (table 2) the n for these groups were 970 103 and 1 312 880 (table 1).
74 is the best estimate based on the data available. It could be anywhere between 5 times increased risk and over 1,000 times increased risk. That is for the 16-29 age group.
We are talking about a relatively rare adverse event here, so the absolute numbers will of necessity be small. If you expected big numbers then you would only ever catch common adverse events. By the way, the claim that the Pfizer vaccine reduces severe disease was based on events in 10 people in the original trial. In medical science, it is common for conclusions to be drawn based on small absolute numbers when we are looking at rare events.
What you appear to miss is that severe disease from covid is extremely rare in healthy young adults, so it is not clear which risk is greater for that group – the risk from the vaccine or the risk from the virus.
As to ”many different vaccines” – in many countries the mRNA vaccines are the only vaccines available.
Good point about the confidence interval. I hadn’t spotted that only the Moderna vaccine data had a very wide confidence interval. That may make the Moderna IRR very unreliable, given that it the data makes it quite possible that the risk of myocarditis after two doses of the Moderna vaccine is significantly less than the risk after testing positive.
Overall, the study doesn’t seem to support the idea that the vaccines are worse than COVID-19 in respect of myocarditis, with that caveat on Moderna where more data is needed.
Here’s my vote for an update on Long Covid, which I see is returning as a fear talking point soon as people discuss the lack of severity of Omicron.
Hi, Sebastian,
At first a short report on a multiple-disease-friend, age 82. This friend of mine has been extremely resistant to all kinds of breaking down caused by his many traumas; a mix over the years of medical and surgical traumas. As an example, during the last two years he was close to dying twice in sepsis. And at the end of summer -21, he received his second anticovid jab (Pfizer or Moderna, I’m not sure which). At 14 hours after jab #2, he was brought to hospital, again almost dying, with a blood pressure of 60 systolic. Recently he received his #3 jab. Exactly 14 hours after this jab he again lost his blood pressure and was brought to hospital in ambulance, but survived. Sebastian, will you comment on this?
Secondly a question: Why has the use of vitamins D3 and C , to strengthen our immune defence, never been seriously mentioned or discussed on TV, by our experts, who have appeared over and over again? I believe that, if all those people had been really honest, they had, at an early stage of the pandemic, appealed to the entire population to every day take high doses of vitamins D3 and C, awaiting the saving vaccine; cheap, no taxpayers’ money spent, exceedingly small medical risk. Sebastian, your comment?
Lars Bölander, MD.
Thank you for an excellent article. My 25 year old son has had two Pfizer and I have suggested he does not have an mRNA booster unless mandated in Canada, where he works. He is concerned that his risk of myocarditis is higher from infection than vaccine. I will send him your article. However, I wonder whether the new data on omicron and its lesser severity would actually strengthen your argument for the under 40s being more at risk from the vaccine?
Is there any data available on the new myocarditis risk from omicron versus delta? Many thanks again.
Ever wondered why almost all “experts” and government officials sound like parrots and use the same empty phrase and mumbo jumbo when they talk about the pandemic and the vaccines? Well, probably they have been instructed to follow the guidelines in The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook, a multilingual product, meant to be “A practical guide for improving vaccine communication and fighting misinformation”. Please note that the handbook includes link to an extensive Wiki, with more detailed information and arguments. Would have been great to have your comment on the handbook Sebastian!
hackmd.io/@scibehC19vax/home
But do we have any early signals about if an infection of omicron should be the safest way to gain immunity. I think i am totally “poisonous spike clean”, 71 years young and in absolutely perfect health. Now trying actively to catch omicron. (just in case I even have IVM, couldn’t hurt)
Let me add:
I just saw this film with the fantastic Drbeen, regarding “the” California study (he made more exiting films from this study b.t.w.)
Pfizer, WHO, politicians, MSM and all the other “fear mongers” must face the fact: THE “Halloween” PARTY IS OVER NOW!!!
We are now dealing with SARS-COV-3 (omicron) and COVID-21 as this is a totally new decease. The only connection is that this decease acts like a totally superior vaccine regarding the outcompeted Covid-19.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFOZivjs4
It is horrible that people now take boosters, this should be restricted to a small number of vounerables.
Do we have any stats on reduced risk of myocarditis in males from omicron v delta?
Sebastien,
Thank you for your balanced analysis.
I do have one concern, though: Why is it that — apparently — the risk for myocarditis in the vaccinated over-40 age group seems to mysteriously disappear or, rather, even out? This sharp cut-off gets my “spidey senses” tingling… Could this be because there are too many confounders because in the over-40 age group, there are more heart problems?
The data in Eudravigilance suggest otherwise…..
Autopsy confirms death from covid vaccine in 26 yo man.
https://noqreport.com/2022/01/12/autopsy-confirms-26-year-olds-death-from-myocarditis-directly-caused-by-pfizer-covid-vaccine/
Why are so many people assuming that they should or must take the vaccine? Well, except in Australia, which seems to have been taken over by thugs…
Omicron has a IFR of 0.04% according to recent figures. That sounds like a severe common cold; these infections kill ‘frail oldies’ sometimes. The UK abandoned the search for a common cold vaccine 40 years ago.
I gather that in medicine, if in doubt, doing nothing is often a safer policy than doing something.
Treaties like the Declaration of Helsinki seem to protect all human beings from being forced to take experimental medications and they state that ethics always override any notional ‘common good’. These came in after WW2, in about the following 20 years.
The whole point was: ‘never again’. Now, 80 years later, people seem to be capitulating to whatever ‘the authorities’ want to inject into their bodies, even if it has secret ingredients and the producers have gained immunity from all legal liability. This seems medical fascism to me.
In common law countries, like England, we do seem to have an inalienable right to bodily autonomy. We are born with certain rights; they are not given to us by the state.
I am hoping that this UK reluctance to contemplate forced medical treatment will result in at least 10-15% of refuseniks in the population, who decline the stuff until the day they die. There is http://www.vaxcontrolgroup.com if anyone wants to join the control group.
I am not ‘anti-vax’ but purely ‘evidence-based’ and ‘pro-choice’. I awoke to the extent of the problems with the ‘medical industry’ after reading Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s book ‘Doctoring Data’.
If you want a short statement of the problems emerging, listen to the 1 min. interview with Dr. Aseem Malhotra on GB News. He’s an NHS and private consultant cardiologist.
Just a quick point about the vaccine and Omicron. I’m not sure where you are getting your figures from but Omicron is one variant of SARS-CoV-2 which seems to produce severe disease in far fewer people than other variants. However, some of that reduction may be because more people have some immunity gained from previous infection or from vaccination. In addition, prior to Omicron, the closed case fatality rate was about 2% (to say nothing of other impacts) and other variants are likely to emerge, especially with far more people replicating the virus. A different strategy may be appropriate if Omicron was the only variant and no more variants would emerge. Neither of these statements is true.
I think that it’s more helpful to look only at those people where the risk (from covid or vaccines) is higher than the risk of dying in a car accident on your way to work.
And that would be people 80+ yo.
As I recall, the hospitalization rate for covid in 2020 was about 2.5%, so I question your 2% ccfr, which seems _very_ high. I would expect the ccfr to be around 0.9%. If you would be so kind as to provide a reference to your figure….
The closed case fatality rate comes from the figures given on the worldometers.info site. If you have alternative figures, I’d be happy to look at those. I don’t know where to get figures for hospitalised cases.
Yes, risk from the disease itself is higher in the older population (but note that, here in New Zealand, the main variant is Delta and the average age of hospitalisations has hovered about 50 years old – sometimes down to 48) but remember that everyone who has the disease catches it from someone else. So part of the decision process is how likely am I to spread it to someone more vulnerable? That seems to be an impossible calculation (because it may not be a direct transmission). I know some people claim no benefit for transmission but there have been studies showing that, at least for non-Omicron variants, transmission is decreased by the vaccines. So there may be a case for making a decision on a society-wide basis.
Somewhere along the way, I saw a few articles about omicron being an impossible evolutionary extension of SARS-CoV-2 because of the “unusual” number of gene-level differences between the two. Prior to omicron, ALL of the “data” was and has been suspect as has been the official narrative. Wrong tests, improperly used tests, and no isolated virus, only alleged pieces of once-existent viruses. HIV scam all over again. So now, we have the “possibility” that another new “lab leak” is circulating that is different enough to do what? Broadly neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 “variants”? Or to render SARS-CoV-2, in total, neutral, leaving only the extremely sick who will no longer be tested for covid and be lost in the statistics for their specific diseases. This data will also make injection damages disappear in the broad range of deaths pre-covid. Looks to me like all of the arguing about this covid and that covid, so far, is mere noise compared to the epidemic of post-injection diseases already appearing in the post-vaccine, covid and non-covid surges overloading (intentionally?) short-staffed hospitals … Add the emerging information about inconsistency among lots / doses and the possibility that injections can be targeted… All to generate the fodder for the next disinformation misdirection as we are driven deeper into the corral chutes and closer to the slaugherhouse doors.
One major issue: You state the rate of myocarditis with infection is probably overstated, but likewise, the filing of myocarditis (or any AE) reports in VAERS etc. is likely highly under-reported. Potentially by a factor of 10 to 100.
Addendum: Why was there a huge increase in athletes having heart issues in 2021 over 2020? Delayed effect from infection perhaps, but vaccination is another explanation.
I don’t think it’s possible to give any estimate of underreporting of myocarditis in VAERS. I’ve seen an estimate of 10%, from around 2010, for overall percentage of events but there is no reason to think that the 10% applies to serious and minor events equally. It seems more likely that serious effects would be reported than minor effects. It wouldn’t suprise me if closer to 80% or more of serious events would be reported especially as health professionals are required to report effects that may be related to the COVID-19 vaccines.
1. The docs / nurses have to know about VAERS and that they are required to report adverse impacts, and that does not appear to be the case at all. 2. The doc / nurse has to have the time to do the report which is said to take at least a half-hour if the VAERS system does not kick you out and make you start over again during the process. 3. Docs/nurses conditioned to believe that the vaccines do not / cannot cause serious harm; failure to make the connection even to the degree to “suspect there might be.” 4. Discouragement from hospital administrations for whatever reasons. 5. Fear of being branded an “antivaxxer” and/or caught up in the all too prevalent “cancel culture”. 6. Malfeasance. 7. Ineptitude. 8. All of the above.
The population in this study seemed to have been comprised of only vaccinated people, the some did test positive prior to vaccination but wouldn’t it be better to also look at an unvaccinated population and see the risk of myocarditis with covid there?
Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people in USA is 2.7.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&hideControls=true&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~USA
The number of cases of myocarditis due to vaccination per million is 8.4.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35076665/
Did I count correctly?
The report didn’t say that the myocarditis cases were due to the vaccine, as they didn’t investigate each report. As for the rate, remember that there are roughly twice the number of doses given as there were people who were vaccinated. So one could say that the rate is 4.2 per million doses. No overall expected figure was given, though this is broken down in a table. However, this probably wouldn’t alter the overall rate much, let’s say 4 per million doses. I’m not sure why you appear to compare deaths to cases of myocarditis, since almost all of those who reported myocarditis some time after vaccination did not die.
It looks similar to another study from the UK which showed no increased risk of myocarditis in the over 40s and a doubled risk for under 40s. However, the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 was much higher.
It’s not useful to compare risk of myocarditis from infection to the risk of myocarditis in the vaccinated who haven’t been infected, since covid is endemic and everyone will be continually exposed to covid, including the vaccinated. This is an easy mistake to make and it is made quite often in the literature.
What you have to do is to look at whether vaccines enhance the risk of myocarditis. For men in a VA study published in Nature in Feb. 2022 by Xu, et. al., the unvaccinated risk of myocarditis from covid was 0.00037, while the vaccinated risk was 0.00058. About a 50% increase in relative risk for the VA cohort.
h/t Clare Craig, published in dailysceptic “Heart Problems After Covid Are Much Worse for the Vaccinated, Nature Study Shows – But It’s Hidden in the Appendix”
Antagandet att alla ovaccinerade skall få Covid är väldigt konservativ. Om så bara några få undgår ohälsan så tippar vågskålen över än mer.
Hallo Sebastian,
Thanks so much for your observations.
I’m writing you as member of a team that’s looking into excess deaths and its possible causes. We’re now trying to find out whether coutries have aspiration instructions or not. It’s not easy but maybe we’re looking into the wrong places.
Can you tell us if Sweden aspirates?
And – if have a few minutes, do you happen to have more info or sources that might be helpful for us?
Thank you in advance!