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So vaccinated Nordic ancestry young males have roughly 9 to 28 times more incidents of myocarditis. These same young males have virtually zero risk from Covid.

So vaccinated Nordic ancestry young males have roughly 9 to 28 times more incidents of myocarditis. These same young males have virtually zero risk from Covid. If a young Nordic male has already had Covid and has natural immunity, the mRNA shots add risk with no benefit.

radford-neal 5y ago
Roughly correct, but a bit high as far as I can see. The papers says risk ratio of 5.31 for Pfizer and 13.83 for Moderna. Not sure where you got 9 and 28. It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
- labster 5y ago
  > young male already immune due to having had Covid Citation needed on the “already immune” bit. So far studies have shown that immunity to the corona wears off, and most people can be reinfected months to a year later.
  - radford-neal 5y ago
    Yeah, they can be infected agains, but that's also true if they've been vaccinated, or both vaccinated and had Covid. The incremental benefit of a healthy young person getting vaccinated after already having had Covid may be quite small. Plus the incidence of myocarditis in this group (vaccinated after having had Covid) could well be higher than it is in people getting vaccinated who haven't had Covid. (This is plausible, since as seen in this study, the risk is higher for the second shot, when the immune system has already been stimulated before.)
    - kadoban 5y ago
      It's also very possible that the risks for covid in each possible circumstance are higher than that for the vaccine. Quite likely even.
  - renaudg 5y ago
    The shortest documented timeframe between infections is actually 20 days !
- arinlen 5y ago
  > It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid (...) There is no such thing as "already immune due to having had COVID". Unvaccinated individuals were observed to have far higher reinfection rates than vaccinated individuals (over 5-fold higher chances). https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfection.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe... > (...) would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine. This assertion is not only entirely baseless but also completely ignores the fact that a) unvaccinated individuals are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to die from COVID, b) the myocarditis issue pinned to vaccines is benign and transitory, and estimated to be at most less than 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinnees. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm
  - peteradio 5y ago
    Pretty misleading citation source there, you must be implying the Kentucky study which is infected+vaccinated compared to infected only (not infected to vaccinated as most would read your sentence). You apparently ignore the New York/California study in the same link. All this completely ignores the age factor as well which reduces the absolute risk for youths to essentially negligible.
    - radford-neal 5y ago
      Yes. Even taking the Kentucky study at face value, the estimate odds ratio (probably similar to relative risk, given reinfection is fairly unlikely) is 2.34 (confidence interval 1.58 to 3.47), not "over 5-fold higher chances". However, as they say, "...persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated."
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Why would we take advice from YOU that is contrary to what every nations medical experts are advising?
  - radford-neal 5y ago
    Well, you shouldn't just take advice from a random person on the internet. But neither should you just take advice from medical experts and official government sources. There is no substitute for thinking. One thing to think about is that "every nations medical experts" are heavily committed to a narrative that vaccines are good, and hence may be disinclined to admit there are exceptions to this (such as healthy young males who have already had covid). They may think that the vaccine is good for most people, and that they should therefore pretend that it's good for everyone to avoid "confusion"...
_vertigo 5y ago
9 to 28 times? I figured “excess events per 100,000” means if the control rate is e.g. 200 events per 100,000 then the observed rate after vaccination was 209 to 228.
- kurupt213 5y ago
  that's an increase of 4.5-14% that is huge, especially when you include that the high risk group has virtually no risk from covid infection.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    In the US, the rate of Covid deaths in 18-29s is something like 10/100,000. So if that is virtually no risk, so is 20 cases of myocarditis (that aren't all lethal) per 100,000. (I used 6100 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... divided by 53 million to get 10/100,00).
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Myocarditis in young people post vaccination rather than being (not all lethal) is virtually never lethal.
- radford-neal 5y ago
  They give the excess events for vaccinated individuals compared to those not vaccinated, per 100,000 vaccinations. For males age 16 to 24, the excess per 100,000 vaccinations is 5.55 for Pfizer and 18.39 for Moderna. These numbers might be useful if you were comparing the badness of these events with the goodness of whatever you think is the number of Covid infections prevented per 100,000 vaccinations (which obviously depends on the general prevalence of Covid). They also give a ratio, which could also be interesting, and which you can't deduce from the excess events without knowing the number of events in the reference group.
thomassmith65 5y ago
I don't know what to make of a "virtually zero risk"? Is it high enough that one also could say the vaccinated have a "virtually zero risk" of Myocarditis? It would shed more light to know the delta between unvaccinated and vaccinated for those dead from heart problems vs dead from Covid.
- kurupt213 5y ago
  there must be a public record of the number of 16-24 y.o. who died from covid in norway
- kadoban 5y ago
  > Is it high enough that one also could say the vaccinated have a "virtually zero risk" of Myocarditis? Yes. The risk of myocarditis from covid is higher than this, even if there were zero other effects to consider.
  - IdEntities 5y ago
    But the vaccines don't prevent Covid infection. If the infection rates from Ontario and the UK were to be believed (before the UK stopped publishing the vaccinated vs unvaccinated breakdowns, that is), being vaccinated might even make you more likely to be infected.
    - moistly 5y ago
      The vaccine was effective against the more dangerous Alpha and Delta variants, where we saw the unvaccinated overwhelming the hospitals. The vaccine is not effective against the less dangerous Omicron variant, and the hospitals are not overwhelmed.
    - kadoban 5y ago
      > being vaccinated might even make you more likely to be infected. That would certainly seem unlikely. Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior. Which is somewhat likely, but then you're not really comparing the effects of the vaccine anymore. Everything I've seen has shown the obvious, fewer and less serious cases.
icegreentea2 5y ago
Need data on myocarditis risk (minimally occurance, and ideally a sense of distribution relative severity) of COVID infection in same population. There's some fuzzy outlines of that data here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm).
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The better comparison is the total risk after vaccination vs the total risk from infection without vaccination. Given the infectiousness of the recent variants, it's reasonable to assume very high probability of eventual infection. (Myocarditis appears to be the more common severe side effect of vaccination, even though it is still quite rare. Hospitalization rates from infection (a reasonable proxy for a severe infection) in the similar age groups are probably higher.)
- dham 5y ago
  Yea I'd like to see that data too. I've seen that Myocarditis risk is higher with Covid than vaccine. The main downside I see is you're going to get Covid anyway so you're basically increasing your risk of Myocarditis once with vaccine and then again after catching it.
  - renaudg 5y ago
    No, because the disease is much less likely to progress as severely once vaccinated, which lowers your risk of Covid-induced myocarditis. In any case : vaccine-induced myocarditis is almost always benign and resolves without treatment, and while there's been a lot of focus on it in the press and in antivaxxer circles, it's really a footnote in the list of Covid-related health issues. It's many orders of magnitude less frequent than Long Covid, for example.
    - IdEntities 5y ago
      > the disease is much less likely to progress as severely once vaccinated There's really no solid data to back this up. The only randomized controlled trials that were ever conducted ended when the EUAs were granted and the placebo groups were immediately vaccinated, long before the Delta variant even existed, let alone Omicron. Everything else is observational studies subject to selection bias and other confounding variables. And even there, the proportion of vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths from Omicron (where good data is available) does not suggest high levels of protection from the vaccine.
metta2uall 5y ago
I don't think it's "virtually zero risk" because there is "long Covid". Regarding myocarditis it seems important to know the prognosis, i.e. how many people quickly recover from myocarditis with apparently no long-term effects?
renaudg 5y ago
> These same young males have virtually zero risk from Covid. This is a 2 years old belief that's convenient to politicians but has been utterly, comprehensively destroyed by science by now. It needs to die, yesterday. For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. The latter also overwhelmingly resolves in a few days without treatment. For another, there appears to be no such thing as durable "natural immunity" with Omicron. Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart ! Finally, not a single week goes by these days without a new study being released that describes "yet another creative way SARS-CoV-2 f*cks up the human body, yay!". This week I suppose the most interesting development is a new meta-analysis reporting that HALF of people infected with Covid still have symptoms at least four months later (aka Long Covid) https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiac136/6569364 https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf... In the UK, an estimated 1.3 million people had long Covid as of early 2022, growing by 200K each month. It was estimated that nearly a quarter million people had dropped out of the job market completely as a result : https://www.ft.com/content/33444f29-bab1-4655-85b5-c0b1f68d9653 https://www.ft.com/content/33444f29-bab1-4655-85b5-c0b1f68d9... https://www.ft.com/content/8b9166af-2e85-4429-ab1f-362c189e46f2 https://www.ft.com/content/8b9166af-2e85-4429-ab1f-362c189e4... Covid isn't going to immediately kill us all, but it's pretty obvious by now that it's already a mass disabling event, the main unknown being how reversible the neurological + cardio vascular damage is going to be in the long term.
- greenyoda 5y ago
  Archives of the above ft.com articles, to bypass the paywall: https://archive.ph/qcO5H https://archive.ph/qcO5H https://archive.ph/AHv1W https://archive.ph/AHv1W
- IdEntities 5y ago
  > For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. If only the vaccines would prevent infection, so these risks would be mutually exclusive, instead of cumulative. > Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart ! How soon has an infection been documented after becoming "fully vaccinated"?

radford-neal 5y ago

Roughly correct, but a bit high as far as I can see. The papers says risk ratio of 5.31 for Pfizer and 13.83 for Moderna. Not sure where you got 9 and 28. It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.

labster 5y ago
> young male already immune due to having had Covid Citation needed on the “already immune” bit. So far studies have shown that immunity to the corona wears off, and most people can be reinfected months to a year later.
- radford-neal 5y ago
  Yeah, they can be infected agains, but that's also true if they've been vaccinated, or both vaccinated and had Covid. The incremental benefit of a healthy young person getting vaccinated after already having had Covid may be quite small. Plus the incidence of myocarditis in this group (vaccinated after having had Covid) could well be higher than it is in people getting vaccinated who haven't had Covid. (This is plausible, since as seen in this study, the risk is higher for the second shot, when the immune system has already been stimulated before.)
  - kadoban 5y ago
    It's also very possible that the risks for covid in each possible circumstance are higher than that for the vaccine. Quite likely even.
- renaudg 5y ago
  The shortest documented timeframe between infections is actually 20 days !
arinlen 5y ago
> It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid (...) There is no such thing as "already immune due to having had COVID". Unvaccinated individuals were observed to have far higher reinfection rates than vaccinated individuals (over 5-fold higher chances). https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfection.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe... > (...) would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine. This assertion is not only entirely baseless but also completely ignores the fact that a) unvaccinated individuals are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to die from COVID, b) the myocarditis issue pinned to vaccines is benign and transitory, and estimated to be at most less than 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinnees. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm
- peteradio 5y ago
  Pretty misleading citation source there, you must be implying the Kentucky study which is infected+vaccinated compared to infected only (not infected to vaccinated as most would read your sentence). You apparently ignore the New York/California study in the same link. All this completely ignores the age factor as well which reduces the absolute risk for youths to essentially negligible.
  - radford-neal 5y ago
    Yes. Even taking the Kentucky study at face value, the estimate odds ratio (probably similar to relative risk, given reinfection is fairly unlikely) is 2.34 (confidence interval 1.58 to 3.47), not "over 5-fold higher chances". However, as they say, "...persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated."
michaelmrose 5y ago
Why would we take advice from YOU that is contrary to what every nations medical experts are advising?
- radford-neal 5y ago
  Well, you shouldn't just take advice from a random person on the internet. But neither should you just take advice from medical experts and official government sources. There is no substitute for thinking. One thing to think about is that "every nations medical experts" are heavily committed to a narrative that vaccines are good, and hence may be disinclined to admit there are exceptions to this (such as healthy young males who have already had covid). They may think that the vaccine is good for most people, and that they should therefore pretend that it's good for everyone to avoid "confusion"...

_vertigo 5y ago

9 to 28 times? I figured “excess events per 100,000” means if the control rate is e.g. 200 events per 100,000 then the observed rate after vaccination was 209 to 228.

kurupt213 5y ago
that's an increase of 4.5-14% that is huge, especially when you include that the high risk group has virtually no risk from covid infection.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  In the US, the rate of Covid deaths in 18-29s is something like 10/100,000. So if that is virtually no risk, so is 20 cases of myocarditis (that aren't all lethal) per 100,000. (I used 6100 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... divided by 53 million to get 10/100,00).
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Myocarditis in young people post vaccination rather than being (not all lethal) is virtually never lethal.
radford-neal 5y ago
They give the excess events for vaccinated individuals compared to those not vaccinated, per 100,000 vaccinations. For males age 16 to 24, the excess per 100,000 vaccinations is 5.55 for Pfizer and 18.39 for Moderna. These numbers might be useful if you were comparing the badness of these events with the goodness of whatever you think is the number of Covid infections prevented per 100,000 vaccinations (which obviously depends on the general prevalence of Covid). They also give a ratio, which could also be interesting, and which you can't deduce from the excess events without knowing the number of events in the reference group.

thomassmith65 5y ago

I don't know what to make of a "virtually zero risk"? Is it high enough that one also could say the vaccinated have a "virtually zero risk" of Myocarditis? It would shed more light to know the delta between unvaccinated and vaccinated for those dead from heart problems vs dead from Covid.

kurupt213 5y ago
there must be a public record of the number of 16-24 y.o. who died from covid in norway
kadoban 5y ago
> Is it high enough that one also could say the vaccinated have a "virtually zero risk" of Myocarditis? Yes. The risk of myocarditis from covid is higher than this, even if there were zero other effects to consider.
- IdEntities 5y ago
  But the vaccines don't prevent Covid infection. If the infection rates from Ontario and the UK were to be believed (before the UK stopped publishing the vaccinated vs unvaccinated breakdowns, that is), being vaccinated might even make you more likely to be infected.
  - moistly 5y ago
    The vaccine was effective against the more dangerous Alpha and Delta variants, where we saw the unvaccinated overwhelming the hospitals. The vaccine is not effective against the less dangerous Omicron variant, and the hospitals are not overwhelmed.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    > being vaccinated might even make you more likely to be infected. That would certainly seem unlikely. Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior. Which is somewhat likely, but then you're not really comparing the effects of the vaccine anymore. Everything I've seen has shown the obvious, fewer and less serious cases.

icegreentea2 5y ago

Need data on myocarditis risk (minimally occurance, and ideally a sense of distribution relative severity) of COVID infection in same population. There's some fuzzy outlines of that data here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm).

maxerickson 5y ago
The better comparison is the total risk after vaccination vs the total risk from infection without vaccination. Given the infectiousness of the recent variants, it's reasonable to assume very high probability of eventual infection. (Myocarditis appears to be the more common severe side effect of vaccination, even though it is still quite rare. Hospitalization rates from infection (a reasonable proxy for a severe infection) in the similar age groups are probably higher.)
dham 5y ago
Yea I'd like to see that data too. I've seen that Myocarditis risk is higher with Covid than vaccine. The main downside I see is you're going to get Covid anyway so you're basically increasing your risk of Myocarditis once with vaccine and then again after catching it.
- renaudg 5y ago
  No, because the disease is much less likely to progress as severely once vaccinated, which lowers your risk of Covid-induced myocarditis. In any case : vaccine-induced myocarditis is almost always benign and resolves without treatment, and while there's been a lot of focus on it in the press and in antivaxxer circles, it's really a footnote in the list of Covid-related health issues. It's many orders of magnitude less frequent than Long Covid, for example.
  - IdEntities 5y ago
    > the disease is much less likely to progress as severely once vaccinated There's really no solid data to back this up. The only randomized controlled trials that were ever conducted ended when the EUAs were granted and the placebo groups were immediately vaccinated, long before the Delta variant even existed, let alone Omicron. Everything else is observational studies subject to selection bias and other confounding variables. And even there, the proportion of vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths from Omicron (where good data is available) does not suggest high levels of protection from the vaccine.

metta2uall 5y ago

I don't think it's "virtually zero risk" because there is "long Covid". Regarding myocarditis it seems important to know the prognosis, i.e. how many people quickly recover from myocarditis with apparently no long-term effects?

renaudg 5y ago

> These same young males have virtually zero risk from Covid. This is a 2 years old belief that's convenient to politicians but has been utterly, comprehensively destroyed by science by now. It needs to die, yesterday. For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. The latter also overwhelmingly resolves in a few days without treatment. For another, there appears to be no such thing as durable "natural immunity" with Omicron. Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart ! Finally, not a single week goes by these days without a new study being released that describes "yet another creative way SARS-CoV-2 f*cks up the human body, yay!". This week I suppose the most interesting development is a new meta-analysis reporting that HALF of people infected with Covid still have symptoms at least four months later (aka Long Covid) https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiac136/6569364 https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf... In the UK, an estimated 1.3 million people had long Covid as of early 2022, growing by 200K each month. It was estimated that nearly a quarter million people had dropped out of the job market completely as a result : https://www.ft.com/content/33444f29-bab1-4655-85b5-c0b1f68d9653 https://www.ft.com/content/33444f29-bab1-4655-85b5-c0b1f68d9... https://www.ft.com/content/8b9166af-2e85-4429-ab1f-362c189e46f2 https://www.ft.com/content/8b9166af-2e85-4429-ab1f-362c189e4... Covid isn't going to immediately kill us all, but it's pretty obvious by now that it's already a mass disabling event, the main unknown being how reversible the neurological + cardio vascular damage is going to be in the long term.

greenyoda 5y ago
Archives of the above ft.com articles, to bypass the paywall: https://archive.ph/qcO5H https://archive.ph/qcO5H https://archive.ph/AHv1W https://archive.ph/AHv1W
IdEntities 5y ago
> For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. If only the vaccines would prevent infection, so these risks would be mutually exclusive, instead of cumulative. > Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart ! How soon has an infection been documented after becoming "fully vaccinated"?