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> somehow because you are in good health the vaccine is a likely enough cause to file with VAERS, but your main issue is that the procedure around the reporting

> somehow because you are in good health the vaccine is a likely enough cause to file with VAERS, but your main issue is that the procedure around the reporting seemed incompetent? I'm actually not sure what you are asking me here. Could you clarify? The report made to VAERS was suggested and done by my cardiologists on my behalf, with my consent. I provided my anecdote here to relate my experience with possible/rare COVID vaccine-related complications and the reporting thereof. > With regards to the heart attack, probably just base rate fallacy. ostensibly healthy people have heart attacks at a surprisingly high rate (and it's also something easy to detect). Probably, but my point is that my experience with the competence and extreme skepticism of the folks of VAERS with whom I interacted also lead me to suspect that events are being under-reported. Also, my understanding is that my presentation is quite rare: 100% major blockage with no risk factors and no heart disease as observed by catheter. Could you cite the literature behind your statement? I am genuinely interested. > With regards to VAERS, I can imagine that they get an absurdly high number of prank calls and so they have to warn people not to break the law. I imagine that this is the case, but it doesn't change the fact that it may lead to under-reporting.

dekhn 5y ago
I think it's already well understood that VAERS is a combination of udner-reporting and over-reporting, as well as nearly every other sin of self-reported medical symptoms. They already have to deal with an overwhelming level of denial of service attacks. ANd it's a political football. Those things help explain your experience. What I am having trouble understanding is how the cardiologist quite reached the point that it made sense to report this as a potential adverse event when it's more likely explained by base rate fallacy. They are the doctor, they may get to make that call, but it just seems like there's no correlation between the two events and self-reporting it would just add even more noise to a very noisy metric. VAERS doesn't exist to detect ultra-rate events, or if it did, that ship sailed long ago when anti-vax got weaponized.
- throwaway_58456 5y ago
  > What I am having trouble understanding is how the cardiologist quite reached the point that it made sense to report this as a potential adverse event when it's more likely explained by base rate fallacy. Could you cite literature about the base rate to which you are referring? I have not encountered it. Most of what I see describes cases in which people don't have risk factors and have a heart attack, after which they discover significant heart disease (of which I have virtually none). Please pass it along, as I would like to learn more about cases like mine. Regarding reporting, quoting https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html: "Healthcare providers are strongly encouraged to report to VAERS: - Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether it is or is not clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event. - ..." "Healthcare providers who administer COVID-19 vaccines are required by law to report the following to VAERS: - A life-threatening AE - Inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization - A persistent or significant incapacity or substantial disruption of the ability to conduct normal life functions - ..." I think my case meets these standards easily. Again, I'm not terribly surprised by any of this (except the skepticism leveled at my distinguished cardiologist). I just wanted to share an anecdote about my personal experience with vaccination and reporting to give some color to the discussion.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I don't have any specific articles for you to read about heart attacks. It's more or less long-term established knowledge that heart attacks happen stochastically to ostensibly healthy people at a high enough rate that a "random" heart attack in an "otherwise healthy individual" is better explained by an unknown genetic or other health risk factor, or simply a rare failure of the underlying physics of the heart, than being caused by a recently noticed health condition. From the perspective of nearly every reliable systems designer everywhere, the human heart is a miracle: an absolutely critical component that must operate effectively perfectly in a challenging environment with variable loads over a long period of time. You would expect (and see) that hearts in a large population fail at some rate, across a risk distribution (age, diet, etc). Not all risks are known; it's possible in 10 years, some scientist will announce that people with genotypes similar to yours are 3% more likely than the average population to die of unpredictable heart attacks. If you feel truly wronged by the VAERS process (in that it didn't take your possible adverse event seriously even though you followed all the guidelines) I think there are ways to take this up. For example, stanford cardiologist writes polite article pointing out that we need to be careful and take this sort of data into account. however, like I said before, i think the noise around vaers is so large now that you're better to simply comply with the guidelines, note that it got ignored/misclassified, and then move on, ideally also with the cardiologist going over to the vaccine policy theorists a building over and politely suggesting that they comb through the millions of forms they get, in case they potentially missed a very rare side effect.

dekhn 5y ago

I think it's already well understood that VAERS is a combination of udner-reporting and over-reporting, as well as nearly every other sin of self-reported medical symptoms. They already have to deal with an overwhelming level of denial of service attacks. ANd it's a political football. Those things help explain your experience. What I am having trouble understanding is how the cardiologist quite reached the point that it made sense to report this as a potential adverse event when it's more likely explained by base rate fallacy. They are the doctor, they may get to make that call, but it just seems like there's no correlation between the two events and self-reporting it would just add even more noise to a very noisy metric. VAERS doesn't exist to detect ultra-rate events, or if it did, that ship sailed long ago when anti-vax got weaponized.

throwaway_58456 5y ago
> What I am having trouble understanding is how the cardiologist quite reached the point that it made sense to report this as a potential adverse event when it's more likely explained by base rate fallacy. Could you cite literature about the base rate to which you are referring? I have not encountered it. Most of what I see describes cases in which people don't have risk factors and have a heart attack, after which they discover significant heart disease (of which I have virtually none). Please pass it along, as I would like to learn more about cases like mine. Regarding reporting, quoting https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html: "Healthcare providers are strongly encouraged to report to VAERS: - Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether it is or is not clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event. - ..." "Healthcare providers who administer COVID-19 vaccines are required by law to report the following to VAERS: - A life-threatening AE - Inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization - A persistent or significant incapacity or substantial disruption of the ability to conduct normal life functions - ..." I think my case meets these standards easily. Again, I'm not terribly surprised by any of this (except the skepticism leveled at my distinguished cardiologist). I just wanted to share an anecdote about my personal experience with vaccination and reporting to give some color to the discussion.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I don't have any specific articles for you to read about heart attacks. It's more or less long-term established knowledge that heart attacks happen stochastically to ostensibly healthy people at a high enough rate that a "random" heart attack in an "otherwise healthy individual" is better explained by an unknown genetic or other health risk factor, or simply a rare failure of the underlying physics of the heart, than being caused by a recently noticed health condition. From the perspective of nearly every reliable systems designer everywhere, the human heart is a miracle: an absolutely critical component that must operate effectively perfectly in a challenging environment with variable loads over a long period of time. You would expect (and see) that hearts in a large population fail at some rate, across a risk distribution (age, diet, etc). Not all risks are known; it's possible in 10 years, some scientist will announce that people with genotypes similar to yours are 3% more likely than the average population to die of unpredictable heart attacks. If you feel truly wronged by the VAERS process (in that it didn't take your possible adverse event seriously even though you followed all the guidelines) I think there are ways to take this up. For example, stanford cardiologist writes polite article pointing out that we need to be careful and take this sort of data into account. however, like I said before, i think the noise around vaers is so large now that you're better to simply comply with the guidelines, note that it got ignored/misclassified, and then move on, ideally also with the cardiologist going over to the vaccine policy theorists a building over and politely suggesting that they comb through the millions of forms they get, in case they potentially missed a very rare side effect.