12 ms·

Moderna has fewer breakthrough cases than Pfizer's, but higher myocarditis rates

53 points by NoRagrets 5y ago

dadboddilf2 5y ago
great, now hacker news is full of conspiracy theoriests too
vmception 5y ago
higher, but low, but higher have you seen the new psyop where vaccine holdouts now get the shot but believe they can quickly remove it, similar to reacting to venom? I’ve been starting to think of things like that at their level of comprehension. I’m getting better at it. Will be procedurally generating this benign nonsense soon. I started noticing someone was already doing it after the prior psyop was so obvious. Many anti vaxxers began believing could only avoid “shedded spike proteins of the vaccinated” by social distancing and masking up forever. Ironically gaining compliance with all guidelines but in a way they believed was original and never having to argue with them ever. Got to think like them! Similar to what comedians do.
- ifyoubuildit 5y ago
  > have you seen the new psyop where vaccine holdouts now get the shot but believe they can quickly remove it, similar to reacting to venom? I’ve been starting to think of things like that at their level of comprehension. I’m getting better at it. Will be procedurally generating this benign nonsense soon. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with anything you're saying here, but more and more I wish I had some kind of debugger that I could run on internet comments, and it would show me all of the inputs that a commenter saw that led to the comment in question. All the various social media threads, conversations with friends/family/doctors, published papers, news articles, every single input that factored into what was written. I say this because this comment to me seems like nonsense, because it doesn't line up with any of my inputs. Which of course doesn't mean it actually is nonsense, it just looks that way to me. I think if we had this capability, people would actually be able to understand each other. Instead we just have everyone thinking that the sum of their own inputs is the ground truth, and everyone else is a nutjob.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Haha Ive been advocating for something similar! And by advocating, I mean saving what people say and bringing it up to them months later for public shaming, to reveal how idiotic their influences are. Because right now everyone is just part of a gradient in a void, indistinguishable from the last person that said something similar to them.
    - ifyoubuildit 5y ago
      I personally think that shaming is mostly counterproductive. For it to be the right move, you have to 1) know you are 100% correct, and 2) have a pressing need to alter the persons behavior/understanding, and 3) know that shaming is the most effective way to achieve the result. Without those 3 things, I think there is a good chance that you're just antagonizing someone for little benefit to you or them.
      - vmception 5y ago
        It is applicable here as many of the conspiracies are time constrained, but by the time the event doesn't occur the person susceptible to believing that stuff is already being led on to the next variant without even noticing what happened with the last thing Doing a callback without offering any opinion or arguments helps them introspect about how incongruent their world is with reality. “<person that died while with covid> was still doing research?” “The last president didn’t get reinstated?” “I like hooking up with antivaxxers because you only have to pay child support for 5 years instead of 18. the mom/baby will still be doing research(tm)”
Scoundreller 5y ago
Not really a surprise, moderna has a much higher dose, mcg for mcg. 100 vs 30. At least where I am, booster doses using moderna are recommended at half doses (50mcg). They both use the same spike protein sequence. No idea how the excipients differ between the two, but neither has adjuvants.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Wow I didn't realize that about the dose difference, I wondered why they gave us a half dose for our booster
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    What’s interesting is that in the initial trials, moderna tested 50, 100 and 250mcg in humans and ultimately decided on 100mcg as the sweet spot. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-trial-evaluating-moderna-covid-19-variant-vaccine-begins https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-t... Meanwhile pfizer tested 10, 30 and 100 and ultimately settled on 30mcg as their sweet spot. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4 Was this due to differences in the vaccine itself, different study environments, or different tolerances for the balance between side effects and effectiveness?
- staticassertion 5y ago
  It's more than 'not really a surprise', it is obvious and I'm pretty sure this had already been widely discussed months ago.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    The problem is teasing out whether differences in vaccine effectiveness are due to the vaccine or which patients got which. I don’t think we’ve done any blinded head to head studies of one vs the other.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Obvious in what way? It wasn't obvious to governments. So far only the Nordics and France have banned Moderna (and only for the under 30s). And at the beginning, there was no mention of heart damage for anything.
tomp 5y ago
numbers: > Burton cited data from France on males ages 12 to 29. It showed there were 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 people for Moderna’s vaccine compared with 2.7 cases per 100,000 people for the Pfizer vaccine. > there were 86 breakthrough cases per 100,000 people for the Moderna vaccine. That compares to 135 breakthrough cases per 100,000 for Pfizer’s, he said Are the differences meaningful? Assuming the data is real, Pfizer does seem quite a bit safer!
- exegete 5y ago
  It’s a good question. Is there a statistical test that can be / has been done with the data? Are the numbers between Pfizer and Moderna statistically different (and are they different than the incident rate in the general population)?
  - contravariant 5y ago
    For things that happen with a small probability over lots of trials you can generally assume they're approximately Poisson distributed. Which on its own isn't too helpful but then you know that the standard deviation is equal to the square root of the average. In this case both values bracket 100 so the square root should be around 10 making this a difference of roughly 5 standard deviations. This isn't a Gaussian distribution so the 5-sigma limit used in physics can't be applied directly, but it's still a pretty big difference, especially for medical data. You could (and in some cases should) do the work to get a proper number for the significance but this back of the napkin estimate suggests it's a statistically meaningful difference. And this being a calculation that can be done at the top of one's head, it is useful when the news reports on a change in some statistic that isn't anywhere close to significant.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  I wouldn't draw that conclusion. That's a 50% increase in break through cases with Pfizer, which seems like a far greater threat than even a 5x increase of myocarditis. Especially when you take into account that your risk of developing myocarditis is higher if you get Covid.
Tagbert 5y ago
My understanding is that the incidence of myocarditis is much higher in a COVID infection than from any of the vaccines.
- gfosco 5y ago
  Any source available on this?
  - aemreunal 5y ago
    You can easily find sources with a simple Google search. I searched for "myocarditis risk of covid vs covid vaccine" and the second organic result is from Nature [1] and states: > Previous research co-authored by Balicer found that in this age group, becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 made a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis — a much more significant risk than is observed following vaccination. Sources are in the article. You can easily find sources for COVID, please try searching it yourself first. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y
    - beaned 5y ago
      Might depend partly on age as well: "Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-risk-from-pfizer-jab-side-effect-than-covid-suggests-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...
      - nojokes 5y ago
        One of the authors, Tracy Beth Høeg, was clearly against any children vaccination way before authoring this biased and heavily criticized paper.
      - goblin89 5y ago
        > Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim. Anecdata from another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29122896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29122896
bool3max 5y ago
Why people are willingly injecting themselves with something that carries a chance of myocarditis (however tiny it may be) and provides no benefits (apart from escaping the artificial authoritarian restrictions imposed by government morons) is beyond me.
- akmarinov 5y ago
  It’s the part where you say that it provides no benefits - that’s where you’re wrong and your whole argument falls apart.
- aemreunal 5y ago
  > provides no benefits It's obvious that the science and health reasons are beyond you.
  - philjohn 5y ago
    And incidence of myocarditis if you get Covid is even higher than if you have the vaccine ... who'd have thought it.
    - aemreunal 5y ago
      Indeed. These sorts of discussions always reminds me of Penn & Teller's 'Bullshit!' episode on vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhk7-5eBCrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhk7-5eBCrs
bigodbiel 5y ago
Meanwhile the mechanism behind peri/myocarditis and why it mainly affects young males is still unknown. Needle aspiration, LNP, spike protein exosome... ? this all being bleeding edge technology and applied at such scale is really is amazing.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  Without being applied at massive scale we probably wouldn't even be able to link the two. 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 (moderna) or 2.7 cases per 100,000 (pfizer) would be very hard to detect if we weren't giving out billions of doses. For perspective, the global before-covid rate of myocarditis was something like 1.5 cases per 100,000.
  - mrbadideas 5y ago
    Is it possible for cases of myocarditis to go undetected? For instance can people just ignore the symptoms and go without treatment?
    - kyleee 5y ago
      Yes, especially in men
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      I am in no way an expert, but I would guess it can. Wikipedia says: > Symptoms can include shortness of breath, chest pain, decreased ability to exercise, and an irregular heartbeat.[1] The duration of problems can vary from hours to months. That's the kind of thing people often ignore. Especially if it only happens once. _Especially_ when getting healthcare is expensive.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Is this something an Apple Watch could detect? Seems like a wearable with diagnostic capabilities is uniquely positioned to detect this at scale at no cost. If you use Apple Health, I believe it may also have access to your digital vaccination record depending on jurisdiction and if you’ve granted Apple access to it (which would allow segmenting by vaccine manufacturer and correlation with heart anomaly detection).
narrator 5y ago
Lots and lots of flagged and deleted posts here. I thought Hacker News was outside of what Eric Weinstein likes to call the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex[1]. That the DISC is deeeeeply troubled by the comments on this story should tell you everything you need to know about this topic. Speaking of which, is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN? [1] https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression_Complex_(The_DISC) https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression...
- jbd28 5y ago
  Plenty of independent ideas are also nonsensical
- ahevia 5y ago
  One of the deleted comments was calling HN a breeding ground for conspiracies for sharing an CNBC article? Another was spewing a complaint about having to wear masks. It isn’t censorship or suppression to delete comments that insult a community and provide nothing constructive to a conversation. I also don’t care to define what “constructive” is in this context.The HN Mods can handle that.
- loonster 5y ago
  For popular controversial posts like this, the mods often override the flags and show everything.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  There are tons of flagged and deleted posts on every HN thread because there are tons of really bad posters on HN. Honestly I think some of the absolute dumbest things I've ever read on the internet were on this site. Thank god we can flag the really low signal garbage. > is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN? Not for deleted but you can "show dead" in your HN settings.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  >Lots and lots of flagged and deleted posts here. No there are not. Your account is old enough to have known that there aren't even that many comments at all on this page. IIRC, comments never get deleted, only flagged. >That the DISC is deeeeeply troubled by the comments on this story should tell you everything you need to know about this topic. Even accepting your premise of the "DISC" from contrarian podcaster on a wiki with few citations of any claims: No, one little "clue" doesn't tell anyone "everything they need to know" about a topic. >Speaking of which, is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN? I'm not aware of one.

53 points by NoRagrets 5y ago

great, now hacker news is full of conspiracy theoriests too

higher, but low, but higher have you seen the new psyop where vaccine holdouts now get the shot but believe they can quickly remove it, similar to reacting to venom? I’ve been starting to think of things like that at their level of comprehension. I’m getting better at it. Will be procedurally generating this benign nonsense soon. I started noticing someone was already doing it after the prior psyop was so obvious. Many anti vaxxers began believing could only avoid “shedded spike proteins of the vaccinated” by social distancing and masking up forever. Ironically gaining compliance with all guidelines but in a way they believed was original and never having to argue with them ever. Got to think like them! Similar to what comedians do.

ifyoubuildit 5y ago
> have you seen the new psyop where vaccine holdouts now get the shot but believe they can quickly remove it, similar to reacting to venom? I’ve been starting to think of things like that at their level of comprehension. I’m getting better at it. Will be procedurally generating this benign nonsense soon. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with anything you're saying here, but more and more I wish I had some kind of debugger that I could run on internet comments, and it would show me all of the inputs that a commenter saw that led to the comment in question. All the various social media threads, conversations with friends/family/doctors, published papers, news articles, every single input that factored into what was written. I say this because this comment to me seems like nonsense, because it doesn't line up with any of my inputs. Which of course doesn't mean it actually is nonsense, it just looks that way to me. I think if we had this capability, people would actually be able to understand each other. Instead we just have everyone thinking that the sum of their own inputs is the ground truth, and everyone else is a nutjob.
- vmception 5y ago
  Haha Ive been advocating for something similar! And by advocating, I mean saving what people say and bringing it up to them months later for public shaming, to reveal how idiotic their influences are. Because right now everyone is just part of a gradient in a void, indistinguishable from the last person that said something similar to them.
  - ifyoubuildit 5y ago
    I personally think that shaming is mostly counterproductive. For it to be the right move, you have to 1) know you are 100% correct, and 2) have a pressing need to alter the persons behavior/understanding, and 3) know that shaming is the most effective way to achieve the result. Without those 3 things, I think there is a good chance that you're just antagonizing someone for little benefit to you or them.
    - vmception 5y ago
      It is applicable here as many of the conspiracies are time constrained, but by the time the event doesn't occur the person susceptible to believing that stuff is already being led on to the next variant without even noticing what happened with the last thing Doing a callback without offering any opinion or arguments helps them introspect about how incongruent their world is with reality. “<person that died while with covid> was still doing research?” “The last president didn’t get reinstated?” “I like hooking up with antivaxxers because you only have to pay child support for 5 years instead of 18. the mom/baby will still be doing research(tm)”

Scoundreller 5y ago

Not really a surprise, moderna has a much higher dose, mcg for mcg. 100 vs 30. At least where I am, booster doses using moderna are recommended at half doses (50mcg). They both use the same spike protein sequence. No idea how the excipients differ between the two, but neither has adjuvants.

brundolf 5y ago
Wow I didn't realize that about the dose difference, I wondered why they gave us a half dose for our booster
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  What’s interesting is that in the initial trials, moderna tested 50, 100 and 250mcg in humans and ultimately decided on 100mcg as the sweet spot. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-trial-evaluating-moderna-covid-19-variant-vaccine-begins https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-t... Meanwhile pfizer tested 10, 30 and 100 and ultimately settled on 30mcg as their sweet spot. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4 Was this due to differences in the vaccine itself, different study environments, or different tolerances for the balance between side effects and effectiveness?
staticassertion 5y ago
It's more than 'not really a surprise', it is obvious and I'm pretty sure this had already been widely discussed months ago.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  The problem is teasing out whether differences in vaccine effectiveness are due to the vaccine or which patients got which. I don’t think we’ve done any blinded head to head studies of one vs the other.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Obvious in what way? It wasn't obvious to governments. So far only the Nordics and France have banned Moderna (and only for the under 30s). And at the beginning, there was no mention of heart damage for anything.

tomp 5y ago

numbers: > Burton cited data from France on males ages 12 to 29. It showed there were 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 people for Moderna’s vaccine compared with 2.7 cases per 100,000 people for the Pfizer vaccine. > there were 86 breakthrough cases per 100,000 people for the Moderna vaccine. That compares to 135 breakthrough cases per 100,000 for Pfizer’s, he said Are the differences meaningful? Assuming the data is real, Pfizer does seem quite a bit safer!

exegete 5y ago
It’s a good question. Is there a statistical test that can be / has been done with the data? Are the numbers between Pfizer and Moderna statistically different (and are they different than the incident rate in the general population)?
- contravariant 5y ago
  For things that happen with a small probability over lots of trials you can generally assume they're approximately Poisson distributed. Which on its own isn't too helpful but then you know that the standard deviation is equal to the square root of the average. In this case both values bracket 100 so the square root should be around 10 making this a difference of roughly 5 standard deviations. This isn't a Gaussian distribution so the 5-sigma limit used in physics can't be applied directly, but it's still a pretty big difference, especially for medical data. You could (and in some cases should) do the work to get a proper number for the significance but this back of the napkin estimate suggests it's a statistically meaningful difference. And this being a calculation that can be done at the top of one's head, it is useful when the news reports on a change in some statistic that isn't anywhere close to significant.
staticassertion 5y ago
I wouldn't draw that conclusion. That's a 50% increase in break through cases with Pfizer, which seems like a far greater threat than even a 5x increase of myocarditis. Especially when you take into account that your risk of developing myocarditis is higher if you get Covid.

Tagbert 5y ago

My understanding is that the incidence of myocarditis is much higher in a COVID infection than from any of the vaccines.

gfosco 5y ago
Any source available on this?
- aemreunal 5y ago
  You can easily find sources with a simple Google search. I searched for "myocarditis risk of covid vs covid vaccine" and the second organic result is from Nature [1] and states: > Previous research co-authored by Balicer found that in this age group, becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 made a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis — a much more significant risk than is observed following vaccination. Sources are in the article. You can easily find sources for COVID, please try searching it yourself first. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y
  - beaned 5y ago
    Might depend partly on age as well: "Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-risk-from-pfizer-jab-side-effect-than-covid-suggests-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...
    - nojokes 5y ago
      One of the authors, Tracy Beth Høeg, was clearly against any children vaccination way before authoring this biased and heavily criticized paper.
    - goblin89 5y ago
      > Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim. Anecdata from another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29122896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29122896

bool3max 5y ago

Why people are willingly injecting themselves with something that carries a chance of myocarditis (however tiny it may be) and provides no benefits (apart from escaping the artificial authoritarian restrictions imposed by government morons) is beyond me.

akmarinov 5y ago
It’s the part where you say that it provides no benefits - that’s where you’re wrong and your whole argument falls apart.
aemreunal 5y ago
> provides no benefits It's obvious that the science and health reasons are beyond you.
- philjohn 5y ago
  And incidence of myocarditis if you get Covid is even higher than if you have the vaccine ... who'd have thought it.
  - aemreunal 5y ago
    Indeed. These sorts of discussions always reminds me of Penn & Teller's 'Bullshit!' episode on vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhk7-5eBCrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhk7-5eBCrs

bigodbiel 5y ago

Meanwhile the mechanism behind peri/myocarditis and why it mainly affects young males is still unknown. Needle aspiration, LNP, spike protein exosome... ? this all being bleeding edge technology and applied at such scale is really is amazing.

kennywinker 5y ago
Without being applied at massive scale we probably wouldn't even be able to link the two. 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 (moderna) or 2.7 cases per 100,000 (pfizer) would be very hard to detect if we weren't giving out billions of doses. For perspective, the global before-covid rate of myocarditis was something like 1.5 cases per 100,000.
- mrbadideas 5y ago
  Is it possible for cases of myocarditis to go undetected? For instance can people just ignore the symptoms and go without treatment?
  - kyleee 5y ago
    Yes, especially in men
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    I am in no way an expert, but I would guess it can. Wikipedia says: > Symptoms can include shortness of breath, chest pain, decreased ability to exercise, and an irregular heartbeat.[1] The duration of problems can vary from hours to months. That's the kind of thing people often ignore. Especially if it only happens once. _Especially_ when getting healthcare is expensive.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Is this something an Apple Watch could detect? Seems like a wearable with diagnostic capabilities is uniquely positioned to detect this at scale at no cost. If you use Apple Health, I believe it may also have access to your digital vaccination record depending on jurisdiction and if you’ve granted Apple access to it (which would allow segmenting by vaccine manufacturer and correlation with heart anomaly detection).

narrator 5y ago

Lots and lots of flagged and deleted posts here. I thought Hacker News was outside of what Eric Weinstein likes to call the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex[1]. That the DISC is deeeeeply troubled by the comments on this story should tell you everything you need to know about this topic. Speaking of which, is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN? [1] https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression_Complex_(The_DISC) https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression...

jbd28 5y ago
Plenty of independent ideas are also nonsensical
ahevia 5y ago
One of the deleted comments was calling HN a breeding ground for conspiracies for sharing an CNBC article? Another was spewing a complaint about having to wear masks. It isn’t censorship or suppression to delete comments that insult a community and provide nothing constructive to a conversation. I also don’t care to define what “constructive” is in this context.The HN Mods can handle that.
loonster 5y ago
For popular controversial posts like this, the mods often override the flags and show everything.
staticassertion 5y ago
There are tons of flagged and deleted posts on every HN thread because there are tons of really bad posters on HN. Honestly I think some of the absolute dumbest things I've ever read on the internet were on this site. Thank god we can flag the really low signal garbage. > is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN? Not for deleted but you can "show dead" in your HN settings.
unethical_ban 5y ago
>Lots and lots of flagged and deleted posts here. No there are not. Your account is old enough to have known that there aren't even that many comments at all on this page. IIRC, comments never get deleted, only flagged. >That the DISC is deeeeeply troubled by the comments on this story should tell you everything you need to know about this topic. Even accepting your premise of the "DISC" from contrarian podcaster on a wiki with few citations of any claims: No, one little "clue" doesn't tell anyone "everything they need to know" about a topic. >Speaking of which, is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN? I'm not aware of one.