The big question is how quickly and completely can that layer restore itself? If damage accumulates over time and people are catching new variants every 3-4 months it is only a matter of time before mortality from cardiovascular issues in COVID negative formerly infected people goes much higher and much younger. We need studies on the cardiovascular recovery pace after COVID damage in different age groups, and after repeat COVID diagnosis from different variants.
I had Delta once. Prior to it I would ride 30 miles on my bike like it was a breezy day. When I'd take breaks to vacation or whatever I could pick back up easily. A year after COVID, I'm struggling to hit 20 miles and I lose my progress easily. I'm not sure it's COVID related, but nothing else has changed in my life.
This isn't really specific to COVID though, any serious illness can do a real number on you.
Anecdote: I'm an avid runner and cyclist, but after I had dengue fever, it took me months to regain my fitness. I used to run 10K's before breakfast, but the first time I attempted a 5 km walk afterwards, I was basically comatose for the rest of the day.
I was never an avid runner, but I would jog in the morning sometimes. It was supposed to be a habit, but never was.
I noticed a huge difference in performance before and after getting sick with Epstein Barr in 2017. Even years later I've never returned to the same performance. Maybe related, maybe not, but that's how it looks to me with my sample size of one.
When I got dengue I was really bad for a few days but quickly recovered and actually improved my fitness/health due to changing lifestyle (so it's biased). Wasn't it chikungunya?
Nope, confirmed with blood test. Dengue is quite weird though, it's asymptomatic for most people who get it, under a percent get hemorrhagic shock and end up in hospital, and the rest like me are anywhere in between.
Post-viral conditions happen, yeah, but the percentages coming out of long COVID studies as well as the sheer number of anecdotes everyone has seems fairly novel. At the very least, even if there's a similar prevalence of these issues for COVID, the sheer amount of infections is going to mean this is a larger concern for COVID than other viruses.
People talk about NEVER recovering their previous cardio performance after a COVID infection. No one expects anyone to be seriously sick, and then have anything resembling their previous performance levels when they first start back.
When I went to the gym when I was in my 20s and 30 I could notice the difference after a cold and flu. I'm by no means a body builder but I got to a comfortable point of weights for me.
If I had a cold it would set me back a day or two sometimes not at all but I didn't go to the gym when sick. If I had the flu even with a flu shot it knocked me off my weight routine for months. The effects of having the flu was very noticeable on me it set me back six months. I can't imagine what covid would be like.
I exercise 1.5 hours a day 6 days a week for long time now..agree colds/flu would knock me down, though i don't get them that often. I had covid a few times already and did not see any difference from just regular colds, well except i lost taste and smell which was a travesty not being able to taste all that bland chicken going down the chute :D But I am not seeing any effects in my performance or new gains. I guess everyone's different
Yeah for sure! It’s a great starter program that I did as well. Honestly most programs are decent - treat lifting like programming (constantly leaning) and you’ll do great. The good news is with lifting showing up and working hard can get you really far even with a bad program.
Thanks, I tried it before and kept going up in weight and injured myself in college. Guess I need to know my limits and not increase with every week, rather focus on form and strength then weight in the order!
I lost 20 pounds of fat/muscle in a month from Covid. I don’t doubt the bodybuilder having serious reductions there. It messed with my whole body in a way I still haven’t fully recovered from and that I can’t accurately describe to people.
Adding to this, I'm not sure I had COVID, but 1) I had cardiac troubles before the pandemic, 2) did many months of bike to gain back some average cardiovascular health 3) I got vaccinated in Jan, and now my heart is doing different things (less fatigue but more and larger skipped beats). It's hard to know what's causing what now. I assume a lot of people are in the same case.
Similar to me. I am (was?) a healthy mid-fifties life-long cyclist and the first dose (Moderna) caused 10+% PVCs that I'm now on beta blockers to try and manage. Both my doctor and now cardiologist have advised me against receiving the second shot.
Like you I was a 50km/30 mile wake up and go person regardless of baseline health before the pandemic. Since I got the original strain in March 2020, I struggle to break 10.
Professional triathlete Lucy Charles-Barclay had Covid in November 2020 and then won the Ironman 70.3 world championship 10 months later. Everyone is different.
Absolutely true. I only have weird smells sometimes, while my wife still suffers loss of appetite and a reduction of energy levels. It's been 6 months since we recovered.
Lockdowns have also broken everyone’s regular exercise and healthy habits. On charts we all assign this to Covid, but lockdowns were an artificial, additional decision.
I experienced the opposite effect described here, and I ascribe the positive effects to lockdown. Before COVID, I ran about 5km once a month, and I was pretty slow.
I got COVID early on in February 2020, and while it initially seemed mild, the tail end was severe. Pain that made me worry I might have been having a mini-stroke, and after that lung issues making it painful to take a shallow breath. After a week or so, it was just painful to breathe deeply but otherwise OK.
I started doing low heart-rate running, trying to keep my HR below 132. Initially, this was really hard, and even jogging slightly too fast could cause my HR to spike to 180 and stay there for 5 minutes. But over the next couple of weeks as my lungs improved again, it got better and better. Within a few months, I was doing at least 5km every time I went for a run, and running 3 or 4 times a week. I've got faster and faster as a result, and I've knocked a third off my 5km PB time from pre-COVID.
My health hasn't been better for many years, and that's only because the lockdown conditions meant that I was working from home so could take a long break at lunchtime, we were allowed out for exercise, but otherwise the streets were deserted. I think lockdown was the best thing that's ever happened to me in terms of exercise opportunities.
There certainly was some disruption in gyms as workout places, but I'd be cautious about systematic conclusions like "broken everyone's regular exercise and healthy habits" given observable factors like:
* increased personal time for workouts for anyone working remotely (or forgoing employment entirely)
* dramatically increased demand & prices for home exercise equipment
* shifts to cooking at home
March / April 2020 seemed to be marked by a lot of people going outside and running. Personally,
I shed over 35 lbs of bodyfat in 2020 and have had few comparable periods where I hiked as often or ate as cleanly, and I'm far from alone in my circle of acquaintances.
Absolutely. Sales of bike exercise equipment (plus Peloton’s share price), and outdoor sports gear went parabolic in 2020 and remain at record highs. The idea that “lockdowns” inhibited exercise while in many countries exercising outdoors is laughable.
Not nitpicking, because I hope you're correct. That said, sales doesn't equal actual sustained usage.
Anecdotal: I run almost every day. Don't get excited, only 2 to 4 miles :) Early in the pandemic I saw plenty of new faces - often couples - out exercising. Some running, mostly walking. I don't see many of those faces any more.
No doubt there were high sales of home exercise equipment - and running became more popular.
But there were some very cautious times during lockdown. Events like Parkrun were cancelled for months on end. Loads of races were cancelled. Gyms were closed. Indoor fitness activities like dance, yoga, pilates, and aerobics were cancelled (and their online alternatives much more sparsely attended). If the place you were doing swimming/squash/tennis/golf is closed, you're out of luck. Football, hockey and basketball aren't compatible with social distancing. Neither is boxing, judo or MMA. People who commuted by foot or bike started working from home.
Running and cycling were certainly winners, but I'm certain there were a lot of losers as well.
I ride a bike 3k+ miles a year, every year for the past 15 years, on the various trails near me and I can say with absolute certainty that the volume of people running, biking, walking, ... on those same trails more than tripled at the beginning of the pandemic and have yet to decrease back to baseline. I don't know about those individuals exercise habits prior to the pandemic, but they certainly weren't on the trails.
> attitudes and disciplines are also somewhat to blame.
This is how the disease will be dismissed. Why bother researching it when you can just blame the victim? It works for ME and endometriosis, and it's far cheaper than diagnosing and treating people.
Not sure it is accurate to say Sweden did not lock down. Afaik they had some measures in place, and were counting on people to behave sensibly in other aspects. So even though there were perhaps less lockdown rules, most people might still have adjusted their behavior.
As mentioned I think this really only applies on a macro scale.
Individual anecdotes (such as my personal friends who did not change behaviour), while unscientific, paint a similar picture to what is being presented as evidence, so it's an additional data point to consider.
So, at least there is some correlation with the sentiment, and by people whom I know have not adjusted their behaviour. (including myself)
Sweden's restrictions were excessively light, by the way, 8pm closing of restaurants and gyms is not exactly a big deal to people going to the gym after work.
In Göteborg SATS nor Friskis&Svettis were never closed during the pandemic. I also knew that Fitness24 was open all the way too. Which gym are you talking about?
My gym and pool area in the same building, run by the same company (medley). The pool was closed by the city and the gym was closed by proxy.
Fitness24/7 in town was so small that it was impossible to get in due to covid retrictions. Something like a maximum of 9 people which meant that it was impossible to get in during popular hours.
> "Lockdowns have also broken everyone’s regular exercise and healthy habits."
If anything, I think I actually got a bit healthier because of lockdown. Eating healthier due to fewer restaurant meals, drinking less due to not being able to go to pubs and parties etc.
Probably got more exercise too because for a while it was one of the few valid excuses to get out of the house!
> Lockdowns have also broken everyone’s regular exercise and healthy habits.
Why do you make assumptions about "everyone"? I'm sure there are as many diverse experiences during 'lockdowns' as there are people who experienced them. Obviously if you include the rare cases where people were actually kept indoors (how long did those actually last?), then healthy exercise might have been more difficult.
In my case, my health has improved immeasurably, as I no longer need to sit in an office all day, eat an unhealthy lunch and eat office-supplied snacks the way I did before.
I eat more healthily, get more fresh air, walk and cycle at lunchtimes - and even get more work done in fewer hours.
Lockdown was also in place for the control group so its effects should be accounted for. You could try to show a negative health effect of people in quarantine, but this is not possible if all infected are placed in quarantine.
All of the replies to this completely ignore those of us who have families, and especially young families. Good for you if the sudden removal of responsibilities gave you the freedom to get outside for long periods every day. However, frankly people like this were the main reason I had to quit Strava. While my wife and I struggled to hold our lives and jobs together when it became illegal to have anyone else look after our kids, I had to watch everyone else enjoy day-long rides and runs in the hills.
And before you come out with the usual "you just need to use more imagination and take your kids with you" - for a start, the situation I described above drained more energy and life than I care to remember. Also, there's only so much a 1 year old will put up with, when I am used to rides of up to 100 miles.
Personally, I am deeply embittered by the whole experience.
Childcare is definitely an issue in so many contexts, can definitely recognize that. Hopefully that's something more people are thinking about going forward with an eye towards the social value of it and the problems of people facing it in even non-epidemic situations.
But gains from no-commute / remote setups weren't limited to single/childless people. Some of the people I know who were taking rides / runs in the hills were couples with kids working schedules out with their partners, and I can think of families who demonstrated that reproduction doesn't bar one from buying home exercise equipment.
And "it became illegal to have anyone else look after our kids" -- I get that it's frustrating to have a service that you rely on closed. I can see that'd be especially hard with group daycare. I saw that frustration play out. I also saw people continue babysitting or au pair arrangements with whatever behavioral stipulations for epidemic-safety made sense to them, and that got easier as lots of people pulled out of service/retail labor force. Childcare was different but illegal seems like hyperbole.
I'm sure your experience was difficult or stressful; lots of people found adapting difficult in various ways (nor were single/childless people exempt, though the challenges might be different). But the idea that the parent poster forwarded that somehow civil policies generally "broke" people's health/exercise habits is a poor generalization... and whatever the truth about the difficulty of your particular situation, the idea that adapting was just impossible for people with kids and additionally that anyone pushing back on criticism of restrictions just isn't thinking about that doesn't hold up as a generalization either.
>I also saw people continue babysitting or au pair arrangements
I mean what I said. Where I live (Wales, UK), it was illegal to have people in your house (and obviously, that meant you also couldn't go into anyone else's house) until mid-2021. Obviously, we did not follow that law, as it was absurd and would have caused significant harm to me and those close to me.
Do not patronise me, by suggesting I should have "planned better" or "adjusted quicker". Saying such things is incredibly demeaning to the effort we did have to go to, to do our best as a family. Trust me, once I realised that no-one else was looking out for us, I did plenty to ensure that those closest to me would be ok (and mostly, that consisted of breaking newly-passed Covid laws, including the one I already mentioned. It was also illegal for me to go to our nearby woodland, because we were not allowed to leave the county we live in and I live in a city that is its own county.). I am proud to say that my two young kids will probably have no memory of Covid, and am very proud to say that we have also not succumbed to the new parenting norm of allowing kids of almost any age to spend as much time as they like staring at screens. In doing so, selfish pursuits like my cycling and other hobbies have had to take a back seat.
> Where I live (Wales, UK), it was illegal to have anyone in your house (and obviously, that meant you also couldn't go into anyone else's house) until mid-2021.
Maybe lead with that specific, then. You know, the idea that people weren't properly accounting for Wales, rather than what you said, which was that people weren't properly accounting for those with children.
Though if we're accounting for Wales, my understanding is that like the rest of the UK (and similar to many other western countries) it had established "alert levels" as described here:
with restrictions that varied over time. Looking at the alert levels for early 2021 via the wayback machine, it seems like up through Alert Level 3 [0], it's hard to read the restrictions as "illegal to have anyone in your house" so I don't know what to make of that. Even if we're saying Alert Level 4 [1] was simply constant from 2020 onset through mid 2021, the language under that seems to have some wiggle room in it.
If acknowledgement that there were genuine struggles alongside examining the shortcomings in generalizations within your comment feels patronizing, I can drop the empathy. Would that be better for you, or would you like us to stick with politely allowing that regrettable difficulty and acceptable adaptation could actually overlap?
Thank you for quickly googling my lived experience. Yes, we had "Alert Levels". The actual laws and guidelines in place at any one time also did not bear much resemblance to the supposed "Alert Level". FYI, it was June 7th 2021 when we were allowed to have other people inside our houses.
I appreciate that I have lived through a particularly draconian and frankly absurd set of restrictions since 2020. However, my comments on being a parent over this time are still valid. It has been especially tough, and I doubt that anyone I referenced in my original comment has kids of their own.
Count me with the "more healthy" crowd. Work from home has made it much easier to keep a healthy lifestyle. Eating at home with food I cook. No time commuting to work. No temptation to go out to some restaurant for tasty, but horrible for me, food and a couple of cocktails.
I have a good deal of empathy for those who don't get to work from home, but I'm the opposite of "healthy habits got worse."
Oh no. I have created a new exercise habit thanks to lockdown. I got on the "get exercise equipment" train early. I'm MUCH healthier now thanks to lockdown; lost about 5 kg, can do 13 pull-ups, lift weights 5 days a week, etc.
The US lock down was a joke. Most places barely shut down gyms and that still leaves exercising at home and outdoor recreation as an option. We know that these people contracted a disease that damages the cardiovascular system. It stretches credibility past the breaking point to surmise that lock downs resulted in a meaningful portion of this mortality or morbidity.
Yes, I did. I have both shots and a booster. That said, this all started before the vaccines. The day before I got COVID I returned from a 30 mile trip with my buddy. I had COVID in January, and vaccines were available until months later, so I don't think it's really vaccine related.
Anything. There seems to be this (unproven) belief that the drugs and methods used to treat Covid do no harm, and that it must be the virus, and only the virus.
The fact is, this is the first time in a long time that we've had a substantial sample size of infected humans, as well as a spotlight on the topic. The point being, there could be previous history with regard to treatment / solutions used for Covid and we've never bothered to look and see. That's not being critical. We had no reason to look. People survived and that we moved on.
But now we have a significant amount of data, yet we seem to be presuming - again, without proof - that the cause of "long Covid" is exclusively due to the virus. Simply put, that assumption isn't supported with science. It's based on assumption and narrative.
Hospitals are frequently using anti-viral and mono-clonal antibody treatments for severe cases. They are not using drugs that have been shown ineffective.
It's not a question of ineffectivrness. It's a question of treating a large number of people, with a spot light on them, and then blaming the illness for "long Covid". Maybe it is the virus? But maybe it's the treatment? Or a combo of both? Or a combo plus some other factor?
Two examples that might help frame things:
1) Chemo. It's toxic.
2) A couple of yrs ago a family member was hospitalized from a stroke. They needed to be put on assisted breathing. Well that helped, but it also led to a lung infection. And then that required treatment. Fair enough, it prevented death.
The point is, not every treatment is without sidside effects. But with Covid, evidently there are no longer comorbidies, and the treatments have no side effects.
Many of the treatments listed in the official NIH guidelines have significant negative side effects. Those are clearly acknowledged so I don't understand why you seem to think they're being hidden? In fact some of the treatments are only recommended for more severe cases partly due to the risk of side effects.
Mechanical ventilation was overused early in the pandemic and likely killed quite a few patients. Now less invasive therapies are preferred and ventilators are only used as a salvage therapy when all else has failed.
I didn't say nor imply they are being hidden. What I'm questioning is the attribution of so called long Covid strictly to the virus and not to any of the treatments and/or people's general state of health prior to getting sick. It's the mono-lens. It's the thumb on the scale narrative.
Sure there are outliers (i.e., people in very good health getting long Covid) and the media is great in highlighting them. It makes for profitable "news." But the typical American doesn't exercise enough, and doesn't eat particularly well. These things impact health. They impact recovery (from any illness or injury). Yet we continue to be stuck with leadership and a narrative that is afraid to discuss such things.
Back in my 40s I broke my leg: a simple tib-fib fracture. Without any artificial fixation it took 3 years to recover. There's plenty of tissues in a human body that can take more than 1 year to fully regenerate.
The vaccine antigen is only a small part of the virus. Furthermore is was modified and is inert.
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behi...
Because of international pharmacovigilance we know that ARNm vaccine induce some myocarditis and pericarditis, at a much lower rate than the virus and less severe.
There is not evidence that heart inflammation after vaccination is less common or severe than after COVID-19 infection. For instance: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v... suggests rates several fold higher for vaccination than infection. Not to say that on balance vaccination is anything but preferable to naive infection, but it's not a side effect free panacea.
Thanks for that link. It contradicts previous studies that put the risk of myocarditis from unvaccinated COVID infection at between 6 and 15 times higher than that from vaccination (and 30x general baseline rate).
So I read through it and in fact, it doesn't say what you assert to say it does. This is comparing vaccinated Vs vaccinated+COVID. See the comments from vepe for full explanation.
Is it comparing vaccinated vs vaccinated + infection or simply vaccinated vs infection (regardless of vaccination)?
Do we have data on specifically unvaccinated infections?
Otherwise we can only speculate on whether the long side effects of infection are less severe with vaccines than without. Considering the general hospitalization rate between unvaccinated vs vaccinated, I know what my guess would be.
> The free-floating Spike proteins synthetized by cells targeted by vaccine and destroyed by the immune response circulate in the blood and systematically interact with angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors expressed by a variety of cells including platelets, thereby promoting ACE2 internalization and degradation. These reactions may ultimately lead to platelet aggregation, thrombosis and inflammation mediated by several mechanisms including platelet ACE2 receptors. Whereas Phase III vaccine trials generally excluded participants with previous immunization, vaccination of huge populations in the real life will inevitably include individuals with preexisting immunity. This might lead to excessively enhanced inflammatory and thrombotic reactions in occasional subjects. Further research is urgently needed in this area.
In the case of vaccine only / no infection, is vaccine-mediated inflammation long lasting and damaging? These effects in the paper (platelet aggregation, thrombosis) seem to be capable of causing permanent harm. Platelet aggregation seems like it would cause small amounts of systemic endothelial damage, atherosclerosis, thombrosis, ...
The level of inflammation no doubt varies on a case by case / individual basis, but is it possible that nobody gets out of the pandemic without some level of stress on their pulmonary and circulatory systems?
To state this succinctly, did Covid (whether infected or vaccinated) shave a few days off of all of our lives?
That paper was interesting and the bit about clinical trials is important, but they don’t really offer much evidence that there are substantial concentrations of free floating spike proteins in the blood following vaccination, or that this would be the cause of the inflammatory and thrombotic reactions, vs just the more general immune response
As far as I can tell they’re just citing this one paper about the ACE2 degradation, and the study doesn’t directly address SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination at all.
50% and lower rate (the hk children myocarditis study) isn't a "much lower rate". Factor in omnicron and the clear difference between vaccinating everyone and 10% of society getting the virus and unsolvable questions should begin to arise.
the CDC quite likely skews low, given the political ramifications. i've heard non-governmental estimates as high as 80% at this point. my expectation is that 2/3 of americans have had it, which is roughly borne out in my anecdotal experience, particularly since omicron. i think that's why we're seeing the mediopolitical machine starting to relent on covid policy in the past few weeks (that, and it's an election year).
But that's just an assumption. Many people seem to have pre-existing immunity. A study was done in which unvaccinated, non previously infected volunteers actually lay down in bed for a while with SARS-CoV-2 infected liquid in their noses (eww). So they were unequivocally exposed to a massive dose but only about half got COVID. There is no explanation for this within the bounds of the assumptions made by authorities.
In reality, even if you get Omicron now it's so mild it's unlikely to cause any more heart damage than any other common cold. The danger has passed. Except that, almost everyone decided to massively expose themselves to spike protein over and over. So if spikes cause heart damage and they do, especially when the vaccine gets into the bloodstream, then the vaccines will do more damage than the virus could ever do simply because nobody has pre-existing immunity to it.
Many patients who are exposed to SARS-CoV-2 quickly fight off the infection with an innate immune response before the adaptive immune response really engages. That can happen with no pre-existing immunity. Some people just have better immune systems.
Are you trying to define an immune system that can fight off SARS-CoV-2 without having seen it before is not "pre-existing immunity"? If so isn't that merely playing with words? You seem to be agreeing with what I'm saying but arguing that the terminology should be different.
"She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations."
The clotting issues would presumably come from the spike protein binding with your ACE2 receptors and downregulating them. Of course it's kind of moot, since empirically we know that getting the vaccine has a hugely positive expected value.
I think this should be researched further. There are countries that are more or less unvaccinated and can serve as a control group. Without that you simply cannot answer the question.
Obviously, but you need people to be not vaccinated. But it still is the only way to sensibly differentiate effects of Covid and the vaccine itself if the spike protein causes damage.
I don't believe that we empirically know the positives either and it is the only way to reliably test. There is no alternative to this and it should have been done before any mandates came up in my opinion.
> I don't believe that we empirically know the positives either and it is the only way to reliably test.
There are already studies comparing the mortality risk of those who got the vaccines against those who didn't, among only people who didn't get COVID. If you're worried about the vaccines, just take them 8 weeks apart instead of 3, and/or take an ACE inhibitor first to up-regulate your ACE2 receptors.
I have already takes 3 doses. These studies are insufficient and have to be conducted long term. It is about isolating the effects of the components. I don't think it is disputed that the vaccines did not have the expected safety profile. Further research will give us a clearer answers.
Useless anecdotal evidence from my wife’s hairdresser, she has just been diagnosed with Myocarditis after having a Moderna booster, she thinks it’s linked…
Just to clarify my point here (which has been deservedly down voted), I found it interesting that someone who is fully vaxed (as am I) and believes in the vaccines thinks they may have had a significant adverse effect. I think this shows how people are approaching it. They are excepting of the fact that they may have adverse reaction in incredibly rare cases but understand that the vaccine is needed.
The possibility, albeit incredibly unlikely, of as adverse affect has been accepted by the public as ok.
In her case she actually has some other health concerns that may well turn out to be the cause.
The PCR test will not detect the vaccine, so all we have to accept here is hundreds of thousands of faked PCR results.
Why stop there? Maybe no one has died of anything but the vaccine since the start of 2021? We can't possibly know since apparently the medical fraud is omnipresent.
For that to happen, COVID would have to either kill nobody in 2020 so it could continue that in 2021, or abruptly stop killing people in 2021 (by what mechanism?) as soon as vaccines were rolled out anywhere (but not in places where they weren’t rolled out, how would it know?), and all vaccines would have to have the same effect despite working in different ways.
According to Steve Kirsch the medical fraud is so omnipresent even the researchers he directly funded were guilty of it because their data stubbornly disagreed with him about the cures he wanted to find!
> The injections have most likely injured or killed hundreds of thousands of people just in the US, never mind the entire world. But the stats have been carefully rigged by policy since the beginning.
This is false, please stop posting false information.
its interesting that you ask me for burden of proof.
The central claim is that vaccine manufacturers have not provided sufficient burden of proof that it is safe (for those not accepting). That should be logical for any product. You seem to inverse it.
Several of the vaccines claims are falling apart, further stoking the fears. When people write about this, rather than showing why they are wrong, they are cancelled out. This leads to further suspicion, and the cycle continues.
> Several of the vaccines claims are falling apart, further stoking the fears. When people write about this, rather than showing why they are wrong, they are cancelled out. This leads to further suspicion, and the cycle continues.
This is not happening, though. It's all false.
The vaccines are proven to be safe and effective - billions of doses administered, very few adverse reactions, easily as safe as any other vaccine available.
Funny enough, one of the original MRNA treatments developed my Moderna was something that would temporarily activate stem cell generation around heart tissue. Sounds like in testing, the mice that got the treatment after having a heart attack were much less likely to have subsequent heart attacks.
I was going to ask if anyone knew how they found mice for these studies. Do they choose mice they have on hand that naturally have had heart attacks? Would those mice be involved in other studies too?
But I ended up googling it and sort of wish I didn’t ask the question.
I saw that it's mostly severe infection that results in high levels of auto-antibodies. But the studies I saw seemed to indicate that they only focused on acute infection. I wonder what the prevalence of anti-autobodies are in mild cases and how that correlates with the main article's finding of cardiovascular risk increase even in mild cases. Specifically, if these individuals already had auto-antibodies or some other outlying issue, or if this reaction is representative of the entire group.
It could take years for some autoimmune issues to arise. It would be quite concerning if this affects nearly everyone infected, including asymptomatic or mild infections following vaccination.
Many of the "Covid-19 increases risk of XYZ" popular media articles lack baseline comparisons to other virus infections. (Disclaimer: Yes, we know Covid-19 isn't the flu, and it's more deadly.) My point is: how much does heart-disease risk increase post-Covid compared to say post-Influenza? Is it comparable or is the risk magnitudes larger than with other virus infections? This is an important benchmark, I understand scientific journals don't cater to laypeople but popular media does.
From CDC website: "Studies have shown that flu illness is associated with an increase in heart attacks and stroke. A 2018 study found that the risk of having a heart attack was 6 times higher within a week of a confirmed flu infection."
> Yes, we know Covid-19 isn't the flu, and it's more deadly.
This isn't a true statement. It depends on the age group. Flu is far more deadly to young children whereas COVID rarely even results in a cold in younger children.
But to your point, basically any infection that causes systemic inflammation can increase heart disease risk. Even the common cold is dangerous for people at high risk of heart disease.
The CDC reports 16.3 flu/pneumonia deaths per 100,000 [0]. That's 0.0163 percent.
Johns Hopkins University reports covid-19 has 278.89 deaths per 100,000 - a 1.2% mortality rate in the US [1].
That would put covid-19 at 278.89/16.3 = ~17 times more deadly than the flu. Just because the numbers don't hold for a particular age group doesn't make the aggregate statement false. In fact, it would be misleading to categorize "17 times more deadly" as anything other than "more deadly."
Edit: I made a mistake dividing the percentages the first go around, reporting covid-19 as 73 times more deadly than influenza. I have updated the 3rd paragraph to show the calculations directly.
The JHU site that’s linked is reporting case fatality rates, not infection fatality rates
It’s also not estimating case under-reporting like CDC is
I think jumping straight to misinformation is a bit strong here, but it’s important to make fair comparisons and discuss the context of the stats along with the raw numbers
The only study that I've seen compare Covid-19 to the flu is one related to long-covid. You can have long-covid-like symptoms after the flu, but it is about twice more likely with Covid-19 than with the flu.
Think a study should consider duration of symptoms as well as how often they occur.
I have had post-viral symptoms after flu a few years ago and long-covid now. Recovery after flu was about 6 months, I'm coming up to two years with long-covid.
It's taken most of flu's market share the last couple of years. On the plus side it may spur us to improve air quality like we improved water quality a century or two ago.
It's best to remeber that even if covid was in all aspects identical to flu, it will not replace flu. We'll have covid and flu. So even in the best case scenario (which isn't real) we are facing doubling of dmg from seasonal flu.
Given that different variants of the same virus outcompete each other (very evident with Covid), why would that not apply to different viruses of similar nature? SARS-CoV2 and Influenza both effectively compete for the same vulnerable population, and abide similar epidemiological dynamics. There is also some level of cross-immunity for corona viruses.
So even though they are both contagious respiratory illnesses, they are caused by completely different viruses.
The reason we've seen far fewer influenza cases these past 2 years isn't related to the 2 viruses out competing eachother.
It's much more likely that the pandemic measures we've had in place, over most of the world, like social distancing, mask wearing, lockdowns, closed borders, etc., has had a greater impact on the flu, because it isn't as contagious as covid.
When we remove the pandemic measures, we're probably going to see the usual flu numbers again.
Maybe even worse than normal, for the first couple of seasons. Since we haven't been as exposed to the flu for 2 years.
Different strains of Covid compete with each other because antibodies that block one version are very effective at blocking another. If you've recently had Omicron, your body is well prepared to fight off Delta.
If you've already had the flu, your body might have some level of preparedness against a Covid variant, but it's nowhere near the same level. Plenty of people who died from Covid had already experienced the flu at some point in their life. Covid variants compete with each other far more than they do with flu variants.
Influenza is not a coronavirus. There is no cross-immunity.
My guess is that the reason why we've seen a drop in cases of Flu during the Covid pandemic is strictly related to lockdowns and Flu being less infectious than Covid. In other words, the lockdowns were very effective against Flu.
they're not identical but they're also not totally independent. There is a certain percentage of the population that is very vulnerable to both illnesses, yet they can't die twice.
Yeah, a lot of these viruses seem to do damage to the heart. I saw this study recently [1] about the flu vaccine reducing mortality in those with cardiovascular disease and I wonder if it would apply more generally in reducing risk of CVD in those who don’t have it?
Figure 5 is "Risk and 6-month excess burden of post-acute sequelae by organ system in people who were hospitalized during the acute phase of breakthrough COVID-19 compared to those hospitalized with seasonal influenza "
If I'm reading Figure 5 right in the original paper*, it looks like the biggest cardiac impact is on people who were hospitalized or went to the ICU for covid, and the effect on people who were not hospitalized is present but relatively small. Am I interpreting the data correctly?
Almost all of these factors are significantly elevated over the control groups, and their attempts to normalize the data (ST2) do not eliminate the problem. We're talking about tiny differences in small numbers, and their population is biased toward the sick and the old. It's already clear from the main paper that most of the signal comes from the oldest, sickest cohort, but once you know that pretty much everyone in the study was old and sick, it's clearly difficult to generalize from this.
This thread is awash with 20-somethings pontificating about heart damage based on a paper about elderly veterans. Simply irresponsible reporting.
Relatively small compared to the impact for severe cases, but it looks very relevant if you consider the amount of people that are getting COVID and that many governments and societies are basically throwing the towel and accepting that people should just catch it.
Covid infections aren't the only thing that happened. Lives changed and access to medical care was reduced. Both could easily explain the slight increase in health risks.
I also didn't see them compare the contemporary control group to 2017. The majority of the contemporary control group probably were infected with Covid. If there were a significant impact they should have different outcomes than the 2017 group.
This isn't a representative sample of the general public. Per supplementary tables 1-2, the average age of the participant was over 60, and had multiple co-morbidities. We know that age is the #1 risk factor.
The people in the "hospitalized" cohort, in particular, were quite old and sick prior to the disease.
But that is what the paper says, or am I reading it wrong?
That is having a case of Covid that leads to hospitalization will also put you at 30 to 60 times more likely to have a heart-disease.
These numbers are exceptionally high on aggregate. From the article: "out of every 1,000 people studied, there were around 4 more people in the COVID-19 group than in the control group who experienced stroke."
This means that for every million people who got COVID-19, we would expect 4,000 more strokes. Using a lower-bound estimate that 50% of the population will get COVID-19 at some point, this would mean roughly 650,000 more cases in the US alone (~330 million people), and this is in addition to baseline. A totally devastating pandemic.
Life insurers are already seeing it play out too, there was a 40% increase in life insurance claims for working age adults in the last couple years: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/58... A significant amount of people are dying unexpectedly early.
...and that's a generously low lower bound, because at this point, the only thing that could prevent a percentage approaching 100% would be a (near) extinction event like an asteroid strike or an all-out nuclear war.
New Zealand has been basically isolated and Covid free for the past year. Their population is approaching 95% vaccinated. It would be interesting to see statistics on heart disease rates in their population over the past year, as we could then be certain any increase is vaccine related and not Covid related.
> It's already known that vaccines increase rates of Myocarditis, especially amongst young males.
An Israeli study showed an incidence rate of 2.13 cases/100k people [1] - the common incidence rate for myocarditis in the US is ~22/100k [2].
COVID-19 itself has a 146/100k incidence of myocarditis, in contrast [3].
So please, stop spreading that "vaccines increase the rate of myocarditis", there is no evidence that supports this. And especially, get vaccinated because the complications from COVID-19 are way worse both in severity and rate.
I personally know a young man without health complications who developed significant lasting cardiac symptoms strongly correlated with each dose of vaccine who has struggled so far to get a diagnosis after months, quite doubtful he even ended up one of those statistics.
Please stop trying to silence people because you don’t want what they suggest to be true.
I am not at all an anti vaccine person but after I had some inflammation in one of my eyes hours after my second dose, I won’t be getting any more without significant evidence addressing safety concerns.
I am also not a statistic because I did not make an appointment with an ophthalmologist, I didn’t feel like waiting weeks or paying thousands of dollars unless my symptoms persisted (they didn’t).
It is not that implausible that the vaccine is triggering autoimmune damage to some organs, often at initially subclinical extents. It is also not implausible that vaccine morality is making researchers and doctors overly conservative about researching and sharing information about this.
We cannot let anecdotal evidence dictate anything. You're free to not get the vaccine, but at large we cannot base any recommendations on "I know someone that ..." stories.
Most of the western world has free health care and people report any small sign of unexpected side effects and they do count in this statistic. An especially during this pandemic people have been very good at contacting their doctor with adverse side effects.
> The risks are more evenly balanced in younger persons aged up to 40 years, where we estimated the excess in myocarditis events following SARS-CoV-2 infection to be 10 per million with the excess following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine being 15 per million
So according to this study, if you're under 40 and have taken the Moderna vaccine, you are more likely to develop Myocarditis than after a Covid infection.
I think increase in myocarditis in young males could be fully explained by how they changed their (social) behavior after getting their second dose after a year of lockdowns. Exposing themselves to additional risks including covid which we know the vaccine doesn't protect completely against.
My anecdotal experience doesn’t chime with this. I got myocarditis with a covid infection in Apr 2020. Then again, starting almost exactly 24 hours after my first vaccine dose just as other flu-like symptoms kicked in.
The rates are low, but I’m pretty sure it can have this effect.
I think any immune response could trigger miocarditis in you. You got it after a covid vaccine but you might have gotten it after another vaccine or a flu or a cold.
Probably prior infection to covid put you at greater risk of getting miocarditis for any reason.
I hope it'll get better for you in the long run. Take care.
It's not necessary to trust the numbers. If they had large outbreaks, we would know. We are talking about a country of 1.4 billion people which has plenty of contact with the outside world, it's not North Korea. They could cook the numbers but it would just be impossible to hide widespread community spread.
And we can be darn sure the CIA would be screaming from the rooftops of all its propaganda outlets the perceived failings or weaknesses in China's COVID response. The silence there is all you need to hear to know what's up.
First off, accusations of being a shill go against HN rules.
Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail.
Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case.
The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports.
Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening.
So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
/r/China has unfortunately become increasingly dominated by Americans who have little to no knowledge of China. It's one of the most bizarre national subreddits, in that it's become a forum for people outside the country to hate on the country.
I speak Chinese and know lots of people in China. That's how I know what's going on. I'm not reliant on Reddit threads. My friends in China have been doing normal things throughout the pandemic, like going to restaurants with their elderly relatives or going to crowded tourist venues (inside China). They can't easily travel internationally, because they will have to quarantine on returning to China, but they can live a pretty normal life inside the country.
I can back you up on this. I lived in China in 2017-2018 and have friends in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. As skeptical as I am of Chinese reportings, it really does sound like they've kept Covid under control for the last year and a half. Everyone I know there is doing normal things and has moved on with their lives, with the caveat that -- as you said -- international travel is all but impossible. A few of my friends who went on vacation outside of China during Chinese New Year 2020 have still not been allowed to go back.
A few months ago, a Shenzhen friend said she had to go on a business trip to Shanghai, and was a little worried because there had been 2 reported Covid cases in the last few weeks. Another friend, earlier in the pandemic, would mockingly send me US statistics of million of Americans getting Covid, and that it's nearly eradicated China.
It frightens me to think of what means they took to get these ends, but I really do believe they have it under control.
Really? They've made it 2 years now with small outbreaks in the low hundreds of cases. It seems they are adapting and keeping up their quarantine measures just fine.
Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
China's approach has been interesting. For any given city or area they are in one of two states:
1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal.
2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns.
They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
I'll add a bit of nuance here: something that is underappreciated is that China does extremely good contact tracing.
Cities do not go into full-on lockdown over a single case. The first reaction is to rapidly do contact tracing, and to quarantine and PCR test all close contacts of the infected person. This is done within hours. The building or neighborhood in which the person lives might be locked down, and there will be testing in the neighborhood.
After doing this contract-tracing work, it sometimes becomes clear that there is a larger outbreak that has gone unnoticed. If the public health authorities think they can't control the outbreak with contact-tracing alone, that's when larger-scale lockdowns occur.
The recent outbreak in Baise is a good example of this: one person tested positive, but it became clear that they had been infected for a week or more, and that they had gone to all sorts of mass gatherings. That's why the city locked down.
On the other end of the scale, Shanghai had some Omicron cases recently, but they were extremely targeted in their response, like shutting down individual buildings. They were able to end the outbreak without shutting down the city.
It's amazing how good a totalitarian government can be at tracking and controlling the movement of their citizens. Don't get me wrong for the most part the average Chinese citizen gets a pretty good deal from the government. It's just scary how much power the government has and how little freedom the people could have should the government wish it.
Taiwan and South Korea also do a lot of cellphone tracking.
So does the NSA, but for completely different reasons...
> how little freedom the people could have should the government wish it.
In some ways, yes, but even the Chinese government is subject to pressure from public opinion. A major reason why the government continues the zero-CoVID policy is that it's popular. There are also scandals that force a change in policy: for example, changes to how the Xi'an lockdown was implemented after a number of highly publicized stories of individuals who suffered because of rigidly enforced rules.
First, a "half dozen cities" is nothing in China. Currently, the largest city under lockdown is an out-of-the-way city near the border with Vietnam that almost nobody outside of China has even heard of (I'd wager most people in China aren't even familiar with the city): Baise (百色市). All the major cities are open.
Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over.
There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
I remember Zhong Nanshan, China's Dr Fauci equivalent saying, in Feb/Mar 2020 I think, that if the rest of the world followed China's policies covid would be eliminated by June (2020). I wish we'd actually done that.
Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
I'm not as familiar with Taiwan's measures, but the biggest difference between mainland China and New Zealand, in my view, is that China does mass testing.
When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland.
In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection.
What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
China has applied the rules to everyone(although you get really fancy quarantine facilities if you're important). There is also interprovince quarantine requirements.
Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.
Yeah my wife went back to China to visit family recently, and on arriving in Shanghai had a 21 day quarantine. To even be able to fly there she had two COVID tests prior to leaving UK, and one when she arrived in Finland (on way to China).
That's certainly an important year over year comparison that would be very illuminating about the actual heart-related risks of the vaccine. It is important though that we focus this comparison on New Zealand itself, as far too many studies have been comparing countries with disparate ages and obesity rates while using vaccinate rates as the only relevant metric.
Would you mind to be more specific? What do you mean by 'until open borders'? Air and/or sea? How were domestic and international related infections different? Were containment measures different for both?
Pre-omicron, it did. Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination, before even getting much third dose coverage or vaccinating children.
Omicron is sufficiently immune-escaping that it changed that, but I continue to be surprised how many people don't realise that the vaccines were actually very effective at preventing infection and transmission for pre-omicron variants.
Edit: I don't mean they prevented infection and transmission 100%, obviously. But for two doses the total reduction in transmission was like 80%, and higher still for three doses. This is more than most people (other than Australians and NZers who watched vaccination bend the curves in real time) realise, from the way people talk you'd think the vaccines barely reduced infection and transmission at all.
> Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination.
This is false and shows you don't understand how the covid vaccines work, and you don't know what happened in Australia.
I live in Australia and we suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Cases were kept low because states closed their borders, not allowing anyone in. People were locked down in their homes, not allowing anyone out.
This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.
We had strict curfews; we had 5km travel limits enforced by cops and "ring of steel" checkpoints. It was illegal to go the beach; it was illegal to take your kids to the park; it was lawful for cops to chase and attack people for not wearing masks outside. We had overzealous state premiers granting themselves new powers. We had propaganda campaigns of fear - our government hired young actors to die slowly on ventilators... (https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4)... when the rest of world chose constructive public health messaging, we went for "shock and awe" to scare people into not going outside.
Yet, here you are claiming we had "herd immunity"! Do you realise that not everyone takes the vaccine at the same time, and that only a small proportion of vaccinated people at any given time have the full protection offered before the vaccine fades? That window of time being as little as 4 months? Herd immunity was never more than wishful thinking.
I'm in Australia too so I'm not just watching from afar and making stuff up. You might even recognise my username from the Australian COVID subreddit. I'm fully aware how harsh the lockdowns were - I'm in Melbourne, even.
But I'm not sure what you're talking about. Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination. Yes they were long, because for most of the pandemic we didn't have vaccines.
> This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.
That's not the case. There have been a few short and localised lockdowns since vaccination levels were high, but still mostly in specific locations where vaccination levels were lower. Certainly not anything for hundreds of days. It hasn't even been 100 days since the country got to 90% of 12+ double-dosed - it's been 57 days. The lockdowns in VIC and NSW ended around 80% double-dose coverage.
> "Yes they were long, because for most of the pandemic we didn't have vaccines."
You're just repeating the Vic government's explanation for their unreasonably long lockdowns. If I wanted that, I'd go to the Vic gov website, or turn on commercial TV news.
Sounds like you fully support the harsh lockdown policies, and believe the explanation for the lockdowns comes from irrefutable scientific reasoning. But even the federal government was telling Victoria to back off with lockdowns. Not all experts agree with each other.
But the "united front" is important for public perception, so they did a lot of work to make sure the message was consistent, even if outdated. Consistency trumps validity in Australian politics.
Here's the problem: transmission remained high, even in highly vaccinated countries before Omicron. Then when Omicron landed, transmission went up again, making a mockery of advice that insisted transmission was reduced.
Reduction of severe illness is how the vaccines earn their green tick, not transmission reduction.
The Vic chief health officer is still insisting transmission can be "stopped" (he used that word the other day). That was his justification for why children still need to wear masks at school until they're vaccinated!
The reasoning is about "vaccine perception" not public health. Perhaps they're wanting to prepare people for a life of repeated, mandated jabs and checking in everywhere. The "vaccinated economy".
When Novak was booted out, it wasn't because he was a health risk. It was because "perception". Are you talking about the role perception plays in covid rules and regulations on your subreddit? Or is it just "anti-vaxxers bad, lockdowns good" kind of thing?
> "Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination."
No. The lockdowns ended because those making the rules decided to end the lockdowns. If it were because of vaccination, we'd be locked down again because double-dose vaccination is no longer considered good protection.
Underscoring the hypocrisy of the rules, your old and waned double vax from last year still gets you into hairdressers and restaurants, yet unvaccinated people are banned from those places. There would be zero risk difference, but because the government wants everyone vaccinated to the amount they dictate, the rules remain in place. Not because of science, but because of perception and behavioral control over the population.
Politicians and their side-kick health officers use blunt instruments like mandates because they don't know what else to do, so they throw kitchen sink and tell people it's science and "keeping people safe".
There were breakthrough cases pre-omicron, but apparently less.
What was very dishonest in the way this whole thing has been handled and portrayed is that Coronavirus vaccine escape-variants were completely foreseeable and therefore no surprise.
And still, the best backtrace we can find for omicron leads far away from any vaccinated populations. Just pointing out because your words seem to lean suggestively towards implying a causal relationship.
You know what might, perhaps have prevented omicron? The whole world going "China" January/February/March 2020. But only perhaps, because OG SarsCov2 was so capable of jumping between species that it would have likely just held out across any length of lockdown in animal populations. Try putting squirrels on lockdown...
Speaking of species, I'd love to see numbers about cross-species infection about delta and omicron: are they still jack of trades or did they lose that capability while acing human microbiology?
You need to provide sources. Even before Omnicron, protection against Delta infection and transmission wasn’t that great. And Delta started to spread before vaccines were widely available. It was unavoidable.
I guess with new omicron specific vaccines we may get back to that. Bit late for much of the world but it could help in areas where it hasn't really happened yet.
Why is this downvoted? It's technically correct and supported by studies (look it up). Vaccinated people can and do get and transmit the virus. Frequently without even realizing it.
It doesn't mean vaccination isn't required as it's proven to significantly reduce mortality especially among the older population.
That doesn't prevent it from being misleading. Both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can get and transmit the virus in the same sense that both I and Sidney Crosby can play hockey.
That failure to acknowledge anything besides "complete prevention" v. "not complete prevention", as if to imply that vaccination is entirely useless for preventing infection and transmission, is why people - myself included - are downvoting the above comment. To assert that vaccinated people can transmit COVID without providing the necessary context re: actual probability of that happening relative to unvaccinated persons is to lie by omission.
People are downvoting this because something like 2-4 weeks ago The Science said this was disinformation. It takes time for the reverse in course to propagate.
This Danish study (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...) of Omicron household secondary attack rates found a 52% reduction in susceptibility for boosted individuals and a 51% reduction in transmissibility from boosted individuals.
In other words, if both the infected person and the household member were boosted, the likelihood of a household member becoming infected was reduced by 74% compared to if both were unvaccinated. (This number is for Omicron, for Delta the reduction is even higher at 92%.)
In other words, while you are technically correct that the vaccines do not completely prevent infection or transmission, they do, in fact, significantly reduce the likelihood.
It probably does reduce transmission because it helps your body defeat it more rapidly, in some cases so quickly that you don't even notice you had it. More rapidly = less time to transmit it to other people.
I've seen reports that say that if you have Covid, you transmit it as easily as anyone else, regardless of vaccination status.
That is why we see so many people saying that the vaccines don't prevent you from spreading it.
However, if you're vaccinated, you're less likely to get it in the first place, so from a standing start, you're less likely to transmit it. And since at some point everyone was covid-free, this is the important scenario.
Nobody who knows they have the virus should knowingly go near another person except in an emergency. Nothing you do will protect that other person.
> I've seen reports that say that if you have Covid, you transmit it as easily as anyone else, regardless of vaccination status.
While you're indeed infected, yes. If that duration for vaccinated persons is shorter than the duration for unvaccinated persons, then the obvious deduction would be that the shortened duration results in a lowered overall chance of spread - even if (indeed, especially if) the viral loads are equal (as vaccine-skeptics like to assert as if it's some sort of "gotcha"). Transmission is a function of viral load × time, so shorter time = shorter window of transmission = less risk of transmission.
Factor in the reduced chance of being infected in the first place (as you point out), and it becomes obvious on both fronts that vaccination reduces the spread of COVID, Omicron included.
On the third hand, if you're unvaccinated this long after vaccines have become generally available, that tends to correlate with ignoring symptoms as "allergies" or "seasonal cold" and ignoring the possibility that you're infected. The people dragging their feet on getting vaccinated ain't typically the ones taking quarantines seriously.
What I would like to know is, for young males (i.e. those who are most at risk of myocarditis after the vaccine), does the vaccine lessen cardiac risks in a subsequent infection or not?
I am 31 and got a heart attack caused by a blood clot last year. Had to undergo double bypass surgery. This happened two months after my second shot so every doctor dismissed the fact of it being related to the vaccine.
I was fit and healthy, no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, and exercising regularly with no family history.
I never had symptoms but maybe at some point I caught covid without knowing despite going out very rarely and always observing precautions.
My brother passed away at 35 from an undiagnosed heart condition. He was in incredible physical shape and had run a half-marathon a few weeks earlier. He had never smoked, he drank moderately and he was a vegetarian. He had no history of any kind of heart problems (or any serious medical problems, in fact), but one day he felt dizzy and had trouble staying upright, so he took a sick day from work, took a nap and never woke up. This was in 2017.
It's certainly rare, but young fit people do have heart problems. You can't conclude that this had anything to do with the vaccine, this is not how science works. Certainly the long-term health effects of the vaccines should be studied, but bandying about these kinds of anecdotes is dangerous: it's the same kind of thing that has (wrongly!) convinced so many people that vaccines cause autism.
By the way, this is not to minimize what you went through, I cannot imagine how scary or painful it must've been. I hope you will have a strong path to recovery, and I wish you all the best.
That's terrible, I hope you're recovering to the best possible.
Do you happen to know what was your blood pressure prior to the heart attack, and/or your apob level?
At least you should have it checked now (I assume that's what have been prescribe by your doctors).
It is my understanding that it is more statistically sound to point the cause of a heart attack at your age to genetic/epigenetic factors instead of a potential coronavirus infection with no symptoms.
"It is my understanding that it is more statistically sound to point the cause of a heart attack at your age to genetic/epigenetic factors instead of a potential coronavirus infection with no symptoms."
He's saying that he has an effect 2 months after the vaccine. Is that not also worthy of consideration, or do you include it as an epigenetic factor?
Well, in my mind `epigenetic = biological age * food intake`, where `food intake` is 'is he eating a consistent healthy diet, given that a typical person not eating healthy will surely says that she's eating healthy'. It's (unfortunately) enough to be >30yo, having bad genes around cholesterol handling pathways and eating a standard american diet (even without significant overweight) to be in the danger zone in terms of cardiovascular risks.
ApoB in the golden (and recent) blood test here. OP: given that you have experienced chest pains, and if it's not the case already, go have your ApoB checked and ask for statins if needed: your 60yo you will thank you.
And, in my own and non-important opinion: don't waste your time even thinking about potential link between your condition and covid/vaccine, this is a path that leads nowhere in terms of prevention of futures attacks.
My cholesterol level are OK and I am Italian, so I surely don't follow an average American diet xD My gf and I love cooking and baking and all our food is freshly, with plenty of fruit and veggies, low salt in favour of spices, low sugar and plant based alternatives for butter and such :)
Sorry I should point out I had pains even before the first dose but every doctor or specialist I consulted thought they were muscular pains (right chest and shoulder area). So it's likely a vaccine is not the cause but there are so many factors and cofactors to consider it's very hard to make a diagnosis. Other blood tests in March will hopefully clear some of this out --
Consider the billions of shots being taken. Consider the time frame of 2 months. Consider the fact that it was the second shot. Meaning it could have happened within 2 months of the first shot, and then there's a 4 month window of consideration.
What do you think is the prevalence of something happening to someone in a pool of, let's say, 4 billion people in 4 months.
I'm sure 2 separate people had a potted plant land on their head. Is it worth considering its relation to the vaccine?
I'm not saying it can't be related to vaccines, but as an anecdote it's useless until it's shown in statistics, or proven causality by his doctors.
Thank you, I recovered well and am now able to walk more than one hour each day. I don't know what my pressure was prior to heart attack but now it's kept on the lower side by medications (115/60)
The rate of myocarditis is much higher if you get Covid than if you get the vaccine . So indirectly getting vaccine will lower your risk since of heart disease as everyone will eventually get covid.
Unfortunately this study's message is quite obfuscating, probably intentionally. They mean exactly what they say though: covid-induced myocarditis rate is higher than vaccine-induced myocarditis rate, but it says nothing about covid-induced myocarditis rate in relation to vaccination status.
> The rate of myocarditis is much higher if you get Covid than if you get the vaccine .
What are you basing this on? There was a recent UK study (preprint, last I checked) of 40 million people that showed that the risk of myocarditis was definitively higher compared to Covid in the Moderna sample and higher (albeit statistically insignificant) in the Pfizer sampler for young men.
> So indirectly getting vaccine will lower your risk since of heart disease as everyone will eventually get covid.
This is a separate claim about the conditional probability, which I haven't seen data on. The unconditional probability does not inform the conditional probability.
As I read the text of the study (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...) it directly says:
"First, we confirm and extend our previous findings in more than 42 million persons that the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis following COVID-19 infection is higher than the risk associated with vaccination in the overall population." Is it another study you have where the risk [] is higher after Moderna/Pfizer than after COVID?
Only % risk is misleading. From the conclusion of the PDF linked:
> In summary, the risk of hospital admission or death from myocarditis is greater following COVID-19 infection than following vaccination and remains modest following sequential doses of mRNA vaccine including a third booster dose of BNT162b in the overall population. However, the risk of myocarditis following vaccination is consistently higher in younger males, particularly following a second dose of RNA mRNA-1273 vaccine
This concurs with what OP is saying, but the statement is in effect misleading. The vaccine induced myocarditis risk is higher in young males. The numbers also indicate this is even higher than the risk from COVID-19 infection in that group. However, in the population in aggregate the vaccine is less likely to cause this side effect than infection.
My pet hypothesis: people who are into one of the many athletic pastimes, particularly those with a competitive component, will all do exactly one thing when faced with an appointment that comes with an attached "take a rest from exercising afterwards": they will schedule a particularly intensive workout the day before so that those rest days "don't go to waste". (source: I'm one of those and very few in my social circle don't match that pattern)
But the risk association might very well be not so much the exercise happening while under immune stress but the processes that happen during recovery doing their thing while under immune stress. Usually immune stress means infection and we don't get to schedule our infections, so this distinction (exercise time vs recovery time) will be very much unexplored.
Young males tend to be more into performance-oriented training (competitive, or focused on metrics, or both) than other population groups, and with an actual infection it might even be that the relevant immune stress does not really start before more direct symptoms suggest taking a break. Could be as simple as shifting the "no sports" instruction that comes with the jab a few days backwards.
The point is that it is misleading (or at least, premature) to say that myocarditis is more likely with the virus than with the vaccine, given that the context of this discussion is usually around young men and there is recent data that suggests the opposite for this cohort under Moderna (and perhaps Pfizer).
Also, what you say is not the case in every country. Many countries are jabbing young men with Moderna.
You keep quoting this research like it is something special. The EMA has know this for quite some time to be in the 1-10 in 100000 and more prevailant in males aging 12-35. It either goes away by itself or with medication though you are advised to seek medical attention if you feel anything strange. At least where I live no cases are known of death due this in stark contrast to the actual desease.
From the paper, 3rd paragraph from the end in the "Main" section:
> "First, we confirm and extend our previous findings in more than 42 million persons that the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis following COVID-19 infection is higher than the risk associated with vaccination in the overall population."
Quick edit: while I was skimming the paper someone else commented exactly this excerpt, hehe.
Everyone will eventually be exposed to covid (probably repeatedly). It's possible with vaccinations that not everyone will be infected with covid however, as even against omicron it appears 3 doses of vaccine (especially a mix of pfizer and moderna) provide efficacy of 60%+ for at least 15 weeks. Omicron-specific versions of the mRNA vaccines are also already in testing, so I would hope those will be available for future boosters. (Of course there will be future variants as well, but it seems likely those would branch off of Omicron, so an updated vaccine would likely still prove more effective than the current ones would.)
I suppose for some version of "eventually" then everyone would likely expect to get a breakthrough case eventually, but even so the vaccines should drastically reduce the number of times one expects to be infected, so still risk would be reduced, even if it wasn't for breakthrough cases (although it appears that vaccines reduce the risk there as well).
Related to your "exposed to" vs "infected" point, I've been wanting to check my understanding on something, and hopefully someone here can provide a more informed opinion. Immunity can be boosted through exposure, right?
For instance, if someone was vaccinated, but then exposed and was lucky enough not to develop an infection from their exposure, are they immunologically better off as a result of that exposure? I think they probably are, because my understanding is that's how the earliest vaccines worked (exposure on a small enough innoculum to avoid infection) but I'm not an expert, so would love to hear more about this & whether there's a name for such an immune effect when it happens in the wild.
Immunity can be boosted through exposure (indeed, this is one of the reasons why we may be seeing higher rates of shingles in young people, or why we see occasional outbreaks of pertussis in people who were vaccinated awhile back).
But for that, you are, at most, looking for the occasional transient exposure - not the bombardment that one is getting right now.
I saw a blurb about tests of a two part vaccine on mine. First dose an mRNA vaccine injection. Second dose is intranasal naked spike protein. Provided good protection when the mice were challenged. The spike protein isn't infectious. Part of the motivation behind intranasal vaccines is the hope that mucosal immunity provides better protection.
Also read a summary of influenza challenge studies. People exposed to low doses often seroconverted asymptomatically.
I feel it's plausible small exposures after vaccination would build more protection.
It also depends on how many particles it takes to get you sick. Norovirus is only 7, which is insane and also why it spreads so easily. Hard to have just an exposure to that!
China can't stay locked down to the extent they are forever. Hopefully they will have a chance to get their population substantially vaccinated before most there are exposed though.
As I read the text of the study (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...) it directly says: "First, we confirm and extend our previous findings in more than 42 million persons that the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis following COVID-19 infection is higher than the risk associated with vaccination in the overall population." Is it another study you have where the risk [] is higher after Moderna/Pfizer than after COVID?
"in the overall population" does a lot of heavy lifting there. Young males are both more vulnerable to vaccine-induced myocarditis and far less vulnerable to severe covid than the general population.
While there are several problems with that paper, it should be noted, as an epidemiologist, that the publication timelines for COVID-19 papers have gone well and truly pear shaped.
Are there any problems with that paper that would invalidate their conclusion that myocarditis is more likely in young men who get Moderna than young men who get Covid?
My biggest concern is the studies that have been comparing myocarditis induced by the vaccine vs. those with MIS-C from COVID-19 that show that they're not necessarily directly comparable - the vaccine-induced version is also milder.
It is elevated, but the implications of that depend wildly on things like case rates, as events/vaccine doses is static, and events/cases is dynamic. A conclusion reached in Sept., 2021 misses a huge upswing in cases in young men from Omicron, which while milder on a per-case bases has also caused a lot more cases (to use a gaming analogy, making better saving throws, but making a lot of them).
Do you have a source on the vaccine-induced myocarditis being milder? If that's true then it is indeed a crucial thing to keep in mind when interpreting these results.
It was posted less than two months ago, that’s a pretty normal time frame for a paper to stay in review depending on the field and journal. Often there are two rounds of review even if the reviews only call for minor revisions
Honest question: is myocarditis and "heart disease" exactly equivalent for purposes of that assertion? In any case, you would have to subtract the percentage of people who get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, before deciding on the net benefit.
> Because severe disease increased the risk of complications much more than mild disease, Ardehali wrote, “it is important that those who are not vaccinated get their vaccine immediately”.
We're trying to isolate just one single claim. A claim about myocarditis alone. An article saying that the vaccine reduces complications overall, and is therefore a good choice, does not address the question of myocarditis in particular, and if it is reduced in the vaccinated population.
You've found the only sentence in the entire article about vaccination and attached you own meaning to it. If Ardheli wished to convey that severe disease increased the risk of complications much more than mild disease Ardheli could have and should have stated so.
I'm not saying your point is invalid, I'm just saying it's not addressed in the article in question. Please be more careful. It's OK to just admit you we're wrong. It's not OK to twist quotations to support your position not matter how valid or righteous you believe it to be.
That's the point. You're still going to get Covid, so the question is, does having the vaccine reduce the prevalence of myocarditis in Covid patients? If it's the same as in the unvaccinated population, then (ignoring other actual benefits for a moment) taking the vaccine may actually increase your risk of myocarditis, since there is the risk with the vaccine itself, plus the risk once you get Covid.
It makes no sense to only look at the risk of myocarditis. What you really want to know is how likely people in your age group and with similar predispositions are going to have serious health problems or die (i) if they are vaccinated and boostered and are exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and (ii) if they are not vaccinated and are exposed to SARRS-CoV-2. The tricky part is the "exposed to" - if you interpret this as a symptomatic breakthrough infection, then you'll bias the study a little bit against vaccination because it seems likely that fully vaccinated people who get breakthrough cases of Covid have previously undiscovered health deficiencies in contrast to those who are vaccinated, exposed to the virus and do not show any symptoms. (I'm talking about a statistical tendency, of course, not all of those people.)
So in the end the most interesting data is still how many vaccinated get serious health problems or die versus how many unvaccinated get serious health problems or die in a time and place where both groups are likely to be exposed to the virus. If the group is large enough and randomly selected, then this should be fairly indicative. Of course, the meaning of "serious" needs to be defined and quantified.
AFAIK, myocarditis can be treated very well when its diagnosed, that alone makes the focus on it strange. Maybe the lesson to draw from the debate is that patients should be informed better so they can identify symptoms of myocarditis and seek medical help early. Just an idea...
I don't see anywhere in that article where it states that myocarditis is less prevalent in patients who subsequently get Covid. Would you mind quoting the relevant bit?
> Based on a study out of Israel, the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis is 2.13 cases per 100,000 vaccinated, which is within the range usually seen in the general population
Because the vaccinated are not immune to the virus, some of them must have gotten covid. The overall risk of this sample still falls with-in the normal range for myocarditis.
Epidemiologically, endemic is that the rates of disease are within expectation - for example, there's a statistical threshold for flu every year. There can still be swings - seasonal diseases for example.
There is no sane universe where COVID-19 is endemic from an epidemiological standpoint.
It also doesn't imply that we should stop doing things.
The change in conditional probability though likely flips when considering the third dose - the third dose is most likely to cause myocarditis, and least likely to protect against severe covid causing myocarditis (because the first two doses are already providing a high level of protection).
Nope. For the control group to be valid, it must be drawn from the same reference class as the treatment.
You could of course argue that in all respects that matter for the risk of heart disease, people who take vaccines are the same as people who don't. I would disagree, and only a bet could settle the difference.
> "This is the figure, and it shows really clearly, that when you look at myocarditis just in this group, men under the age of 40, it is crystal clear, pfizer dose 2, pfizer dose 3, moderna dose 1, moderna dose 2, have rates of myocarditis greater than the rate of myocarditis post SARS-CoV-2 infection"
This comment will probably get flagged, but I am genuinely curious from a scientific lens. What is the distribution of post-COVID heart disease conditional on having taken the vaccine?
This is actually the best reason to have people remain unvaccinated, and to not strictly mandate vaccines.
I'm pro-vax (god, why do I have to say that?) but what's seriously pissed me off about this whole COVID thing is how quickly it became political. At the beginning there was a real sense of "we're in this together" but now you can be pretty certain of someones political affiliation if they choose not to wear a mask.
Vaccines prevent you getting the worst of the illness, they don't really prevent you catching and infecting others, so vaccines are a "cure" for overwhelmed healthcare systems and a protection for the individual.
So why do you need to have a vaccine pass to go places? You can still carry the virus and infect people.
Having unvaccinated parts of the population means we can track if it was the wise decision or not, hindsight is 20-20 and it seems obvious to me now that we should vaccinate.. But it also seemed obvious in the 50s that fireproofing buildings with asbestos was the right decision too.
now you can be pretty certain of someones political affiliation if they choose not to wear a mask
Arguably it's the other way around. Not wearing a mask (if voluntary) is the normal and natural choice, which should tell you nothing about a person at all. Choosing to wear one even when not required, on the other hand, tells you a lot about that person and their perception of risks/expert status etc.
I think this offhand and flippant, even if I personally believe what you're saying is true.
The largest issue with COVID was the over saturation of healthcare facilities, that's the only reason the UK locked down at all.
Oversaturated healthcare is a problem for people who have the worst effects of COVID and people who otherwise need beds, since their bed may be taken up by a person with COVID.
Vaccines lowering the spread of the virus may be true, not really going to argue that point, I'm more pointing out that vaccines do not halt the spread and thus a vaccine pass is a poor way of saying it won't spread.
Instead you just prevent the non-vaccinated from participating in society, when in reality we probably need people to remain unvaccinated due to underlying health conditions or to understand health complications that can arise through the vaccine and/or the virus when unmitigated.
I'm not claiming "anti-vax rights", though it might sound like that, it's just not very scientific to have no control population.
I agree, and we've always had an anti-vax minority, in every country. The problem with covid wasn't primarily what you describe though, but that that anti-vax sentiment exploded enough that healthcare everywhere choked more than it should have. Then stronger measures were needed as a response to that. Which is unfortunate in just the manner you describe.
There's always been "unconventional" (diplomatically) ideas, and that's great since some fraction of them do turn out correct. But with the last decade or two of ubiquitous social media use, the fringe ideas that aren't dangerous in 0.1% of people, are very dangerous if they reach 5 or 10%.
This is not a defense of authoritarianism on ideas, but merely describing the practical effects.
Regardless of your position - pro-vax - I love that you point out the political elements to this.
The politics goes deeper: the definitions of the terms 'vaccine' and 'virus' were changed, governments have undertaken the biggest advertising campaign in history effectively bankrolling the media, people who died of unrelated causes but had a positive test were counted as covid deaths which plainly skews statistics, governmental psychological units were given a few rein, large corporations were allowed to remain open but small businesses were not, etc.
These are examples of how this was handled not in a neutral way, but to advance a political agenda. Especially when you consider that most western countries were implementing the same measures in a coordinated way.
> So why do you need to have a vaccine pass to go places? You can still carry the virus and infect people.
Even if they aren't 100% effective, vaccines still reduce both the likelihood that you will become infected and also the likelihood that you will transmit the virus to others.
It is important to note that given the timeline in the study (March 2020 to Jan 2021) most of the COVID-19 group was likely unvaccinated. It remains to be seen whether vaccination protects against these same risks.
Edit: This is confirmed in the supplementary data. Only 347 (0.23%) of the 162,690 people in the COVID-19 group were vaccinated prior to infection. That being said, a reasonably large percentage (61.93%) were vaccinated by the end of the follow up period, which would seemingly indicate that vaccination post-infection doesn't help all that much against these risks.
I'm not sure how that contradicts what I said? Most of the people in the COVID-19 group tested positive before the vaccines were approved in December 2020. Yes, they might have been vaccinated afterwards, but my point is they did not have vaccine-induced antibodies at the time of their infections.
This is how Science work old studies and new studies can come to contrast conclusion. Why? Because of time, better understanding, more data and many more facts. So yeah we will probably see more long covid problems in the next 2 years.
Did not mean to "dismiss" the conclusions in the new study per se. For example, one potential source of the contrast is that many of the studies in the Stat News article were focused on young (or young-ish) athletes, while the VA study is entirely military veterans.
Those 3,000 cases were actively monitored for cardiac issues, while the VA study is purely passive and observational (which the article itself raises as a caveat). It's not just a matter of comparing raw sample sizes.
I find it weird that there's no mentions of variants, but I assume based on the timeline it's probably Delta and older.
Seems impossible to tell if this holds for omicron as well, given that it's replication behavior and general outcome is a bit different and usually more mild.
I’m Danish, like everyone of my fellows I had my 3 shots and a case of Omniwhatever. I’m 39 and in relatively decent shape, I can run 5km in 25 minutes and I do 20-30 minute of semi-cardio every day as I walk an 3km steep incline going home from work.
Post covid (two months now) I feel the burn so much faster. Completely anecdotal but it had my doctor worried enough that she send me to an EKG and for blood testing (which was normal) leave her with no answer other than “who knows”.
I had COVID and even exercised with it. I noticed a higher level of muscle soreness, and in fact that and anosmia tipped us off to what was happening. This was one of the early variants where flu like symptoms were rare.
In my N=1, any one of the myriad other common colds that I've had caused similar symptoms. The degree of muscle soreness was strange. Along with another person in my bubble who also got infected, we both measured increases in red blood cell count outside of the normal range several months after. It wasn't clear if this was due to COVID-19 or being athletes. I didn't have a baseline unfortunately.
I had a dramatically different experience with a flu that I got in December 2019. My resting HR was up by 10bpm for a month after. My exercise regime was broken, and it took almost two months to fully recover.
I truly hope that COVID-19 is just a window into these infection disease processes that are going on all the time, damaging our bodies without giving us clear feedback. This massive pulse of naive infection is a unique opportunity to understand this. I fear that we will not be able to generalize these lessons. And I understand why. COVID is very weird...
Probably what we need to do is figure out what COVID has in common with the other viral infections (esp. how they affect the body long term, which wasn't a huge thing people were talking about or researching pre-COVID), and then we from there we can figure out what is unique about this virus (and its variants).
I ran a marathon last time in September. In January I caught Omicron and now I feel a slight leg burn, when walking the stairs to second floor. This has never happened before.
>Flu doesn't usually have this sort of impact, people fully recover.
I legitimately cannot stand this flu meme any more. I'll quote Charles Stross:
"Remember, this isn't a simple pneumonia bug. It's a virus that attacks the RAAS/ACE2 system, in particular all the epithelial tissues, and any other cells that express ACE2 receptors on their surfaces. It can mess with your kidneys. It can mess with fat cells, changing their response to insulin. It apparently shows up in brain tissue. Viral RNA can be found in all of these cells many months after recovery from the acute infection: it may have long-term sequelae, like Shingles, which only show up years to decades later. We do know long COVID effects up to 15% of people who are diagnosed with an infection, and can last months to years. We know that immunity is short-lived, and people can get repeat infections (currently mostly by new strains, but reinfection with an old strain is not impossible)."
The ace2 system that covid-19 attacks plays a vital role in the regulation of the cardiovascular system, and this has been known since 2020.
I rarely get true flu, but if I do, my physical fitness is compromised for weeks.
After real Covid (alpha, pre-vaccination times, a mild case), I was getting back to normal for some six months. Heart palpitations never seen before, muscle twitches never seen before. A cardiology checkup revealed a lot of extrasystoles.
All those problems went away after half a year or so. I now got something that looked like a weak cold and might have been Omicron. No strange effects at all, just a running nose.
That may be so but feels tangential to my point. Perhaps address the parent to my comment? They're the one who believes that this is a symptom not present in the flu.
> It's worth considering that the treatment could also be the cause of the blood clotting though. Do you agree?
No, the vaccine, being made from the virus, can give some side effects. Usually, these are the same but lesser side effects as the virus it self. This applies in this case too:
From [0] and [1]:
> There would be around 107 additional cases of thrombocytopenia—a form of rare blood clotting—and 66 cases of venous blood clots for every 10 million having their first AstraZeneca shot, according to the data, versus around 934 and 12,614 extra cases respectively for the same number of people after a Covid-19 infection.
191 times more likely to get venous blood clots from covid than from (in this study) Pfizer.
While this was a case of omicron (which is more flu-like in terms of which parts of the human body it targets), pre-omicron variants of Covid were certainly very different from the flu, and in particular more likely to target the nervous system.
And a lot of respiratory viruses (both flu and other influenza-like viruses) do cause major effects on the human body sometimes. E.g. when I got hit with the flu in 2009 (might have been H1N1), it took me months my lungs to get back to normal.
As to treatment, most people who get Covid don't receive any treatment.
It's an illness of the epithelial tissues, - ie the surfaces of your organs, especially the insides of the vascular system that pumps the blood around your body - sure there's a lot of epithelial tissues in your lungs but they are all through your body, especially in the circulatory system and heart - it's not really surprising that damaging that results in strokes and heart attacks.
It's also not surprising that it results in the virus travelling through the entire body
Not sure if this will improve your mood, but I know the feeling. I had Covid in November (despite being vaccinated), and I got it from my father (86, also vaccinated). So I alternated between (mostly) worrying about him and also a bit about myself ("does it still count as a mild case if you lose your sense of smell? Will it come back?"). But I am happy to say that we both got through it ok. Although articles like this are scary for me too...
> For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections.
How doesn't this completely invalidate the title? If we aren't actually comparing between a group that provably did not have COVID and one that did, we can't possibly draw any conclusions about the effect of having COVID compared to not having it at all.
Isn't it the opposite? If there's a strong effect in "had COVID" vs "probably did not have COVID", doesn't that prove that there would be an even stronger effect in "had COVID" vs "definitely did not have COVID"?
But where did "probably did not get" come from? It is highly likely that COVID numbers are far higher than we know about due to many mild and asymptomatic cases that go undetected.
That makes the case even stronger. Not sure where you're going with this. Unless you want to imply that everyone has had COVID already, the argument works the same.
Notable point from the actual paper, that adds clarity to the "even with a mild case" title: "These risks and burdens were evident even among individuals who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the infection and increased in a graded fashion according to the care setting during the acute phase (non-hospitalized, hospitalized and admitted to intensive care)." You can see the effects of covid severity in this figure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3/figures/5
“Ardehali cautions that the study’s observational nature comes with some limitations. For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections. And because the authors considered only VA patients — a group that’s predominantly white and male — their results might not translate to all populations.”
This might sound like minor information, but it calls the conclusions and broad claims into question. In fact, it’s a very narrow study.
After recovering from covid, my resting heartbeat has gone up from 60-70 to 90-100 BPM. And I now cannot eat food without a glass of water because my throat gets so dry that I have the sensation of getting choked all the time.
I think I mentioned this before but I had the strangest Covid experience - for years I've struggled with Opiates/Cocaine & to a lesser degree Alcohol. I got Covid early on & since recovering have little to no desire for that stuff - so I've stopped drinking, dont use anymore & am (slowly) coming off my maintanence medication. I'm only one person of course but I find it the strangest thing..
"it is important that those who are not vaccinated get their vaccine immediately."
Sounds like another biased article to promote experimental vaccines. Curiously right after so many studies about increased hear failures, myocarditis and pericarditis in healthy population and dying athletes in front of the cameras.
> Ardehali cautions that the study’s observational nature comes with some limitations. For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections.
Let’s just say that there are some statistical issues with this study design.
I should presume you all enjoy hearing members of the public explain how easily [your domains of competence] can be understood through intuition and cursory 'research', and that you yourselves are more serious about [critical systems you are responsible for] largely due to some sort of amorphous nefarious evil or incompetence on your own parts?
Anecdotally, a friend of mine in his early 40s got covid, recovered fully, had a fatal heart attack a month later. Seems we will see an uptick in deaths from this for some time.
This is the worst conclusion to jump to by the way. I had a heart attack last year at 39 with no larger cause that could be established. No chronic heart disease, exercised regularly, no family history and so on. It’s just one of those things that can happen. I then went on to get vaccinated, have COVID and get a booster all without issue.
Just some heart flutters I hadn't had before that I in hindsight should have probably got checked out. They continued after I had the heart attack but have disappeared completely now. But lots of people also have them and they're completely benign so who knows really.
I was swimming hard 5x a week and didn't notice anything during that and the weekend before was hiking about the countryside carrying my kids on my shoulders so it feels a bit of a mystery. I'm pretty sure, again in hindsight that I had a milder attack/angina on the Thursday before which I chalked up as heartburn. Because it was during the night I sort of soldiered through it and fell asleep again. Which could have been very bad.
The actual heart attack I had whilst swimming and because I'm an idiot, just slowed down a bit and finished another 30 minutes of swimming. It only got very painful after I was chilling after my swim. I got out and dry heaved a couple of times in the bath room and walked home. Lay down, took some antacids, that did nothing and it was painful so got my wife to take me to the hospital. They seemed pretty skeptical that there was much wrong with me until they hooked me up to an EKG and then I got filled full of drugs and ambulanced straight into surgery. Ended up with a stent as the main left artery feeding the heart was totally blocked. It's an amazing experience as you're totally conscious for the surgery and get to watch whats happening on a monitor. The only really painful part was a lower branch getting collapsed, I got some morphine for that but am not 100% convinced it did much of anything. Instant relief once it was opened again.
Scary. I know heart disease runs in my family; my dad had a heart attack around 39 as well... but he was also a heavy smoker at the time, was living an almost entirely sedentary lifestyle (walk to the car drive to work, sit at a desk for eight hours, drive home, then sit on a couch until bedtime). His brother had died early of some congenital heart defect. You'd think a heart attack would have been a kick in the keester to start living better but he's still mostly living the same way almost 20 years later (minus the smoking- he swapped that for nicotine gum which I don't think is really much better)
I'm 30 now and with every year I tell myself "I really need to eat better/exercise more/etc or else I'll have a heart attack like dad". It's stories like this that make me even more scared haha. Lesson learned: listen to your body.
Yeah I’m not going to lie, it’s taken quite a bit of time not to be anxious every time I have any sort of chest pain. I even went back to the ER one time which turned out to be nothing. I’m back exercising and living relatively healthily so hopefully get many more years in but this was so random that I’ve lost a sense of trust of my own body. It seems like a drag but take care of yourself!
Without the Apple watch monitoring your heart rate: you don't see the warning signs early enough and have a fatal heart attack, once.
With the Apple watch: you get alerted earlier, get to hospital and survive your heart attack. So you can go on to have another, and another, and another. All contributing to the "heart attacks while wearing Apple watches" statistic ;)
Every COVID story here is an interesting little glimpse into how a seemingly normal forum has their latent political views exploited into adopting a conspiracy theory, re: anti-vaccine rhetoric. It becomes a little more extreme every day.
This study has nothing to do with the vaccine, and yet this is what HN clamors for. I wonder how many people here understand what kind of ride they're being taken for.
That's not an accurate reflection of HN. It would be more accurate to say that the topic is divisive and so has blocks of strongly-feeling users on all sides of the topic. That's true of every divisive topic and it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise.
Honestly I do not find it surprising. I've seen it called "engineer's disease": the tendency of engineers to believe that expertise in their technical field gives them a superior insight into other technical fields. Or that their research and systematization habits transfer to other fields where they readily yield greater insight than direct experience.
This way of thinking really feels rampant in our field. I've seen developers read a Wikipedia page or blog post and suddenly think they know better than mathematicians, lawyers, doctors, research scientists, economists, ethicists etc. No topic is too niche or trivial to be safe from this effect. A little while ago the topic of Geometric Algebra swept through HN and engineers with no math theory background were posting sensationalist takes about how GA was destined to supersede the orthodoxy.
I sometimes wonder if a mild COVID infection could also cause behavioral and psychological changes like more aggression, risk taking, depression, or even schizophrenia and could it be driving some of the conspiracies? If you think about it any kind of behavior change that avoids vaccination, masking, or other precautions would be selective pressure on the virus to further evolve in that direction.
How would you even begin to understand and deal with this kind of situation on a massive, global scale... it's an interesting problem.
Makes you think about the sudden and almost unexplainable push from aggressive, vocal experts to have the public unmask and drop all COVID mitigations immediately after the latest surge too...
This, and I don't understand why there isn't more scrutiny from the moderators. Especially the one-day old accounts are the most annoying part. If you have hottakes at least have the curtousy to do it with your primary account so we know who to ignore afterwards.
If your “opinion” is contrary to observable facts and puts others in danger, yes. Pretty straightforward actually. Those posting this nonsense ignore the facts, so ignoring them seems prudent.
"puts others in danger", "threat to public security", "views incompatible with society" have been used by authoritarians to excuse their actions since forever.
>If your “opinion” is contrary to observable facts
I'm sure that is the same reason why many once people believed the earth was flat, or that the earth was at the center of the universe.
It's very arrogant to think that "the science" and "the facts" are always right. Any scientist worth their money understands the importance of challenging the status quo. Unfortunately nowadays, especially on the topic of COVID, challenging the status quo is enough to be considered a pariah by narrow-minded people like yourself.
> I'm sure that is the same reason why many once people believed the earth was flat, or that the earth was at the center of the universe.
Observably at the time, the earth was flat, and then you got better ways to observe it, and it was spherical. Then you got even better ways, and now it's an oblate spheroid.
That doesn't negate the science used before, but it gets more correct each iteration.
Asimov described this wonderfully in a letter, below:
This should be part of our discourse going forward about transparency in clinical trials, but you do not need to rely on this data to make a rational decision to take the vaccine. There is loads of evidence from many different countries now, and there is enough granular evidence to weigh the potential downsides as well (i.e. take the lower dose mRNA if you’re young)
Can people make a rational decision of balancing out their personal risks then? For a young and healthy person there is little upside in taking a dose of mRNA
Yes, based on your personal risk. The vaccine substantially decreases your risk of severe disease from SARS-CoV-2 infection, even if you think that is a low baseline risk.
As a young person this comes with a slightly elevated risk of myocarditis, which can be mitigated by taking BNT (30 ug dose) or a half dose of moderna (50 dose). The UK study being discussed elsewhere in here estimates that risk (for young people) on par with risk of myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection
If you have had a confirmed infection in the past then you have some immunity so the calculus is a bit different. Probably you should still get one vaccine dose, especially if your infection was pre-omicron
My main point is, there is plenty of data available for people to make this assessment for themselves, and holding out for FDA release is not going to provide meaningfully better insight into this risk assessment
Even if you don't want to and even if you are a hermit in the mountain you are still part of the society. Your decision is not personal it never was and there are now protein based vaccines available so at least you can't use the mrna cop out anymore.
60% seems quite high, given that the CDC director says that the vaccines cannot prevent transmission anymore, but I haven't seen any confirmed numbers for Omicron transmission so far.
I despise smokers, fat goblins as much as antivaxxers like you. The whole argument about preventing transmission is only 2-3 months old what was the hesitation for the rest of the 1 1/2 years we have vaccines available? Cop out after cop out :)
Not antivaxer, had my jab recently. I just respect other people's choice. Science has been settled a bit too many times in the last two years so I can understand some degree of distrust
I like how I can figure out your hobbies by omissions. Have fun riding and drinking, not at the same time though ;)
Yeah, assumptions, slight of hand remarks at least you are sticking to the stereo type. Thankfully I never have to deal with people like you in a real rnd environment. surplus people.
There are enough idiots like you in this threads that spread lies or comment stupid shit like "If YoUr OpInIoN iS dIfFerEnT fRoM mInE, i WiLl IgNoRe YoU" that I don't want myself to be associated with them or you so you are absolutely right. You are ignored.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. It's not ok to post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Ok, let’s say serious versions of those side effects were actually happening at a rate even vaguely comparable to covid 19 complications. Let’s try to prove it.
Choose any site like https://covid19.healthdata.org/ where you can graph excess mortality, hospitalization and vaccination rates over time.
There are a few periods where 60-80% of various populations got vaccinated in the same month. The mass vaccination events aren’t followed by spikes in deaths or hospitalizations.
Som the vaccine is mostly fine, or there’s a big international conspiracy at play. Millions of deaths were somehow uncounted in public records. That’s a lot of missing coroner reports (and a lot of colluding coroners). What happened to the relatives, creditors, etc?
People spontaneously cooperate all the time based on their selfinterests. I don't intend to argue for the commenters position, but this blanket argument against everything that even remotely resembles a 'conspiracy' is not correct.
My point is, if every (or almost every) actor does the same thing, and someone argues that's bad/damaging/not the best course of action, the only explanations are either:
* All actors are anti-rational (not just irrational, which leads sometimes to seemingly rational actions).
* There's something else pressuring them into taking an anti-rational decision.
I'd be surprised if it's the first, so I ask about the second. Unless the commenter means that killing your own citizens is in self-interest of the state, then leaving COVID run rampant would have been better option anyway.
There is a principal-agent conflict. The payoff matrix for the general public is not the same as that for health authorities. In addition, since we have eschewed some of the longer-term testing that is possible for new medicines, much of the payoff matrix for the general public is currently unknown.
I think you overestimate the influence of the FDA around the world.
To point an example, the FDA approved oxycodone for oral administration (and trusted patients with the dosage of a strong opioid). Meanwhile in most European countries it's rarely prescribed, and often only given IV/IM form (i.e. in the hospital).
Anecdotally, a typical post in "Expat in XXX" groups on FB involves Americans shocked that their medicine isn't approved abroad, and looking for alternatives.
> To point an example, the FDA approved oxycodone for oral administration (and trusted patients with the dosage of a strong opioid). Meanwhile in most European countries it's rarely prescribed, and often only given IV/IM form (i.e. in the hospital).
So you take the exception to make a case? Around the world most regulatory bodies look at what the FDA has approved and take it from there to elaborate their own opinions. Oxycodone was an exception because it's an opoid and most countries knew better than to accept such classes of drugs because of well known experiences with such drugs in the past.
Why first time in history? Iraqi WMD? From Fox to NYT, all supported the invasion. Steele Dossier? All major media outlets (except Fox and OANN) supported its claims and took Russiagate as fact.
The literal Secretary-General of the UN said it was illegal[0], along with dozens of countries. You can't get more high profile disagreement than that, especially considering the rationale of the US was to enforce UN SCR 1441.
Somewhat off-topic, but my favorite game now is one upping the COVID conspiracy theorists. Whenever they talk about the pandemic being engineered by the world elites, I say: “You really think it has been created here on Earth? Oh, poor you! It obviously has extraterrestrial origin!”.
Optics. That's the true name of the evil overlord.
Government cares about "looking" like they are doing the right thing. Because they want to get public support.
Then there is corruption. But I will say that's a secondary issue. Anyways, I am pretty sure once govt changes were I am from, former politicians will find a job easily in pharma. Again this is secondary and will always happen.
Bulgaria has been quite conformant to the EU/US narrative both in terms of government and mass media. After the last elections there is even a joke circulating around, that next time we shall vote for an US ambassador.
Yes, I think if you apply a medical treatment approved on emergency grounds to most of the population it would be a good idea to track their health and raise an alarm if something changes, or "correlates" as you say. Maybe even have control groups just in case.
I think these vaccines are already held to an incredibly high standard. AZ use was put on hold here in Europe after just couple cases of blood clotting. Same for Moderna when there’s been the cases of heart issues.
Oh so authorities in most countries are NOT pushing for vaccines no matter what? Please provide me some context that I am missing, it seems like we are not living in the same world or something.
> They are, as are most pushing for bike helmets, seat belts, food safety, etc.
So, vaccines with unknown long term safety are the same as bike helmets, seat belts and food safety. Perfect analogies, thank you, you have clearly solved my concerns.
Who's the football player with heart failure after getting vaccinated? We have multiple instances of players getting Covid and having complications from that ( Kimmich, Aubemayang, Davies, the first one of which is certainly unvaccinated, no idea about the rest), but i haven't heard of heart failure after vaccination. If you mean Christian Eriksen, he wasn't vaccinated at that time.
Incredibly fit young people sometimes die of heart attacks. They had no diagnosible heart condition prior. There are a couple hundred ways the heart can fail, and only the common ones are tested for.
I.e. being fit and healthy will reduce the odds of a heart attack, but will never eliminate the possibility.
Might have made the results less convincing to a peer review. Simple bucketing creates large exposure to confounders in a retrospective analysis which is why researchers turn to more complex models to adjust for e.g. vaccination status in this case.
Assuming you are a software engineer. You know how sometimes a manager, layperson or junior says something like "Why are you making things so complicated by using git. We can just share the code on Dropbox?" Or maybe a student says "Why do arrays start at 0? It's so much simpler to start at 1." Well other professions have their own version of that situation. As a non-researcher it is not always going to be obvious why research methodology seems more complicated or specific than it needs to be.
Not sure if it is a good control group. How much was the flu or other coronaviruses a thing in Africa before Covid? They may be climatic or other factors that make Covid irrelevant there.
If you want a control group I'd assume it's always better if it's randomized and similar to the non-control group.
> Suddenly vaccinated people are dropping dead left and right
I'm curious how you would describe the amount of people who have died of COVID itself if that's how you describe this (unspecific and unsourced) vaccine death rate.
More people died in hospitals after hospitals were invented. Doesn't mean that hospitals were killing people.
We're 2 years into a pandemic, it's obvious we're going to be learning more about long term effects; because it's not like we could know long term effects before people had been infected a long time ago.
"I'm probably going to get downvoted which proves my points" is.. not a good argument, you'll be downvoted for not applying even a modicum of critical thinking to your statements, it just comes across as anti-science.
There are very intelligent people on HN, but this weird obsession with data and scholarly articles is honestly stupid. We're not talking about events that occurred 100 years ago, we are all living this right NOW!
Personal and eyewitness testimonies count for nothing now? You're going to pretend that data is not manipulated? If you knew any history, you would know how common it is that data is manipulated.
Tell me, do you not see ANYTHING suspicious about what has been going on for the past 3 or even 6 years?
> Personal and eyewitness testimonies count for nothing now?
Can't see your original comment, but assuming this refers to side effects with sub-percent occurrences, then the answer is "no, random testimonies have no statistical significance without a base rate to compare to".
You could put hundreds of people into the same room whose testimonies show that eating bread is deadly - you just have to find enough celiacs. That doesn't make the baking industry a big conspiracy.
I’d say the same to you, if you didn’t see reports of heart problems before the vaccine were you living under a rock? Either you weren’t reading much or your filter bubble was removing that news, perhaps because the media you were reading was trying to minimise its impact at the time. It was very widely covered where I am. There was even a widely watched documentary in the UK of a well known science/health presenter who had heart problems after a Covid infection in early 2020. You can probably look it, it was called “Surviving the Virus: My Brother & Me“
> There are very intelligent people on HN, but this weird obsession with data and scholarly articles is honestly stupid. We're not talking about events that occurred 100 years ago, we are all living this right NOW!
I would just like to see data that supports what you propose in your original remarks. It doesn't have to be an encyclopedia of references. It's okay if there isn't data - I'll just assume you're sharing your opinion (which is totally cool as well of course).
Well, I guess all those football players and kids got unlucky then, right?
People were dying all the time, but suddenly when the vaccines came, we started seeing videos of football players dropping dead on the fields. What a coincidence right?
Well to be fair, we did see people shaking on the ground and convulsing in China and other places in the very early days of the pandemic. I'm sure that wasn't just bullshit right? It just stopped happening because... reasons...
The only thing that changed recently is that the list now includes players that played in like the 3rd league in Indonesia, and neither the player nor the club they're playing for are relevant enough to have a Wikipedia page.
There actually is an significant increase in heart problem for young people. Especially in young women and it is assumed that it is connected to uptake of the pill in very early years.
Malone isn't worse than the standard CNN toyboy and the Atlantic isn't too reliable either. At least the online version.
Maybe you should listen to him instead of reading what The Atlantic wants you to believe about him? Have we not learned already that mainstream media is lying to us a lot?
Anyone who has followed politics since 2016 and has half a brain would not trust anything these people say.
Also, Dr. Robert Malone is just one of many who were censored.
>One thing is clear about the revelation of the 2021 military epidemiological data and the military’s response to it: There is undoubtedly a public health and national security crisis in the military, and the Pentagon’s reaction only seems to be concerned with exonerating the vaccine, not fixing its own alleged problem.
Are there statistics on the football players? I've heard about them, but without statistics it is hard to tell if that really happened more frequently, or was just reported more frequently.
I've not seen anyone drop dead around me and everyone who I know had been vaccinated including myself and my entire family.
Have you got any news links which you could add to your comment which support the claim that healthy football players and young children have been dropping dead after taking the vaccine?
I've seen a ton of videos on social media. I didn't save the links to the videos, or the news articles about the incidents, but surely you can find them easily?
I know vaccinated people as well, and non-vaccinated people, both who have had covid, and all are doing fine.
if you're not trolling: you might want to seek some help.
These are not convincing arguments, though I don't doubt you believe them sincerely.
One of the most troubling things about our society right now is that there's a lot of easily refutable lies spread via social media; but people are unable or unwilling to question them.
The energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to spread it.
If we can't trust empirical data and instead rely on gut feelings and rumour, we're all fucked.
1) Was it real or not? Was it a video of someone getting a hernia in 2005? How did you verify it was real?
2) If it was real, what's the sample size? I'm assuming every occurence that's filmed in the world would show up. Can you make a video of half of them? A quarter? 4.23B people are vaccinated, did you see 50 videos? That's statistically insignificant. ~1000 people died from lightning strikes in the last year. Those aren't vaccine related either.
You distrust mainstream media, but you trust videos on social media? That's a terrible recipe for information consumption.
And lung cancer risk soars with a few cigarettes. Stop living in fear! Accept that you are going to die at some point! Make decisions rationally and then move on and live!!!
I don't think the author of this article has interpreted this study correctly. She appears to be comparing the myocarditis rates in Supplementary Table 21 vs Table 22 to get the numbers of 370 per million vs 500 per million, but those two tables represent two fundamentally different cohorts and cannot be compared straight across like that.
Table 21 removes individuals from the cohort once they become vaccinated, whereas Table 22 continues to follow up with those individuals until the 12 month mark. It is entirely possible that many of the individuals that were removed from Table 21's cohort did go on to develop myocarditis, but they aren't included in the measured rate by virtue of being censored from the analysis. In other words, you would naturally expect the numbers in Table 21 to be lower than the numbers in Table 22 simply based on the fact that they are measuring two different things, and this has nothing to do with the actual risk of vaccination because this study wasn't trying to measure that in the first place.
Given the above, the napkin math performed by the author pretty much comes across as nonsense. You can't play with the numbers like that because they don't actually mean what you think they mean.
> Heart Problems After Covid Are Much Worse for the Vaccinated, Nature Study Shows
It might as well be that those who are vaccinated and still get sick are just predisposed to heart complications. Saying they get those because they were vaccinated is a fallacy.
Didn't even request his "findings" to be peer reviewed. Or ask the authors to clarify his questions. Just assumes some stuff and hits it out with a catchy headline.
Yeah. The “analysis” hurt my head. There’s lots of extrapolation from a table in someone else’s supplementary results. Maybe there were flaws in the original paper’s statistics (didn’t read it), but that doesn’t imply some implausible and tangentially related theory is correct.
> > > This blog post argues that the risk is even higher for COVID after vaccine.
(Argues so poorly that it doesn't really deserve a response, but I'll follow this digression)
> > It might as well be that those who are vaccinated and still get sick are just predisposed to heart complications.
> No, it's based on a study with a sample size of 42 million
If someone is in poor health, they may be
A) more likely to get COVID, despite being vaccinated, AND
B) more likely to have heart problems
In turn, it doesn't matter what the sample size of your study is. A & B will be correlated, even though there's no causal relationship between vaccination+covid->heart problems; the causal relationship is between "poor health" and "heart problems".
The big question is how quickly and completely can that layer restore itself? If damage accumulates over time and people are catching new variants every 3-4 months it is only a matter of time before mortality from cardiovascular issues in COVID negative formerly infected people goes much higher and much younger. We need studies on the cardiovascular recovery pace after COVID damage in different age groups, and after repeat COVID diagnosis from different variants.