12 ms·

Increased cardiovascular events in Israel during vaccine rollout and third wave

110 points by johntfella 5y ago

ryandamm 5y ago
Can anyone offer insights to how reliable this article is? I don’t know the field and am reduced to looking at superficial signals, like: I see business school bylines and the “see additional publications by this author” links don’t turn up anything… but the Nature imprint seems impressive? Can anyone weigh in on the methodology or data? (Interesting to note that the linked page puts this article in something like the 99th percentile for how much it’s tweeted, which I would put squarely in the “reduces my confidence” category…)
- netsharc 5y ago
  I guess many anti-vax people confirmation-biased this article and are tweeting about it, and if I can guess, you're pro-vax and your confirmation bias is skeptical about it (if it was an article that touted how good the vaccines are, you'de be less skeptical about it, and less critical pro-vax minds would be on Twitter saying "See, I was right!").
  - johanneswu 5y ago
    I don't know ryandamm, so I can't judge whether he is pro- or anti-vax, but you should be fact checking every article before sharing it. Doing basic checks like "what else did the authors publish" seem fairly sensible.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      Actually it isn't really since the scientific community regularly has the problem of ostracising those that offer much progress. It is a decent method in practice but ultimately fallacious. The corpus of published works is far too massive so it is a compromise. A bad one, because the pressure to publish has a negative effect on scientific rigour.
- buildbot 5y ago
  I am leaning to towards not reliable, as they claim the trend started in Jan 2021, which is a little early for when Israel was vaccinating that population: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/israel-covid-vaccination-data-offers-hope-exit-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/israel-covid-v... It seems like the authors probably went into this with a conclusion in mind…
  - cft 5y ago
    - buildbot 4y ago
      Please follow HN guidelines when responding, you could have simply stated, "Looking at figure 1b, it seems like there was time delay between the first dose and the increase in rates".
      - cft 4y ago
        This is a wrong venue to condescendingly teach other people how to write comments. The goal of this forum is to contribute information or insights. If you you think I violated HN guidelines, please downvote and report to dang.
        buildbot 4y ago
        Respectfully, it is exactly the right venue? I sorta thought that was the point here. And sure, done.
    - alimov 5y ago
      I’m not very knowledgeable about this, but I was wondering if MIT (professor?) co-authorship precludes papers from coming to the wrong conclusions? Or is it we’ll know that when a co-author is from MIT that the paper is as rigorous and objective as possible?
      - 5y ago
- raxxorraxor 5y ago
  Don't know in general but there is another study with the same statement for young people with increased heart problems. Cannot find it, but it is just a few weeks old and I think the country of study was Denmark. Not sure though.
- mpfundstein 5y ago
  on the page, there is a link to his google scholar page He is a serious scientist: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RBSyaTIAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RBSyaTIAAAAJ&hl=en
- folli 5y ago
  > but the Nature imprint seems impressive It's Scientific Reports from the same publisher, but not Nature, the journal itself. Scientific Reports has a very high acceptance rate, i.e. they publish pretty much anything that passes peer review.
  - jrapdx3 4y ago
    Traditional paper-bound journals are intrinsically limited re: number of articles that can be published. OTOH online publications aren't so restricted, so why not publish all that are worthy? I think the real question is the quality of peer review. A "high rate of acceptance" isn't bad if accepting an article happens only after good quality peer review. But a high rate of acceptance without adequate peer review would be a big source of concern. Not sure which of these publishing considerations applies to this article. I'll have to go over it again in detail when I'm more rested, anyway on quick overview I didn't spot any glaring problems in it.
- scantis 5y ago
  Looks like a straight forward article. Instead of a conclusion you are left with a discussion, which sadly is quite weak, but this seems to be the point. (As I understand it after skimming through it) Basically you have a data set and some statistical evaluation. The gabs are filled with some medical and statistical "Mumbo Jambo" I didn't read. Seems professional, the graphs are pretty clear cut, which is nice. The discussion basically states that the data is flawed for the purpose of making clear connections and urges the necessity to provide better data in the future. They aren't even able to make their derived call data public, due to privacy laws in this case. They are absolute right and have a valid point here. No reason not to publish this and it conveys some important messages. We should gather better data and find a way to share it, without touching on the privacy of individuals. A very difficult topic I personally wouldn't touch with a stick.
  - logifail 5y ago
    > A very difficult topic I personally wouldn't touch with a stick Agree completely. This topic has got so ideological that if (when) it comes up in conversation I tend to demur and politely change the subject. Perhaps at some point there will be a genuine attempt to gather more data on just who genuinely benefits from vaccination (obese/elderly/other comorbidities?), and who doesn't (young/healthy). One thing we can be sure of is that no such study will ever be funded by Big Pharma.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    Of all the parts of the paper to gloss over, the medical and statistical "Mumbo Jambo" is the most important one to evaluate!
    - scantis 4y ago
      Would you like to discuss why they use Spearman instead of Kendall and if this negative binomial distrubition asumption is valid in this case? It won't have any effect on the final result, which basically states that the data set is insufficient.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tylermauthe 5y ago
mrfinn 5y ago
linkgoron 5y ago
The result looks relatively weak IMO. The numbers are less impressive then what they seem, and IMO the numbers look like they were computed in a way that resulted in what the authors wanted. For example, weekly counts of cardiac arrest calls are computed using a five-week centered moving-average, and COVID-19 and vaccination doses are computed using a three-week centered moving-average. I'd assume that using three weeks for cardiac arrest calls, the numbers would look less correlated.
- jimmont 5y ago
  Consider submitting this feedback to Nature. It’s generally a reliable source. I’d be curious to see how they respond to your review.
  - fock 4y ago
    You know this is published in Nature ... Scientific Reports. And there goes the reliability!
  - schiffern 4y ago
    Note that this journal is Scientific Reports (a Nature Portfolio journal), not Nature. Confusing I know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports > Scientific Reports is an online peer-reviewed open access scientific mega journal published by Nature Portfolio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_journal > A mega journal (also mega-journal and megajournal) is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE. This "very lucrative publishing model" was soon emulated by other publishers. Basically it's bunk-for-hire.
  - someotherperson 4y ago
    The domain is a bit misleading. It's not Nature, it's Scientific Reports, and it's not exactly a great journal[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports#Controversi...
zentr1c 5y ago
A Berlin News paper reports of the public inquiry of firefighters and emergency personnel to investigate the root cause of a rise in different "heart issue calls" of 27-31% in 2021 (40k calls) compared to 2018/2019. In german: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-feuerwehr-herzprobleme-und-schlaganfaelle-zahl-der-rettungseinsaetze-steigt-stark-an-li.222431 https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-feuerwehr-herzpr... They argue to change from mandatory vaccination to optional vaccination for their profession. Evolution will tell what the right choice was. I am having popcorn while watching the extremists battle each others position.
- linkgoron 5y ago
  Maybe it has something to do with a new virus going around, there was also an increase in 2020... There's a reason why they're comparing 2021 to 2018/2019 and not to 2020.
  - lbj 4y ago
    Correlation between rollouts and virus-infections respectively, show that the mRNA vaccine is almost twice as likely to cause a cardiovascular event. So Covid is indeed dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as the vaccine it seems.
    - WithinReason 4y ago
      The risk-benefit calculation is strongly age dependent. For old people there's no question about the benefit of the vaccines. For healthy children it's close.
      - lbj 4y ago
        It's very, very, very far from close. The most recent study from Christine Stabell out of Copenhagen showed that even if you're in the age group where the vaccine cuts covid mortality in half, you're overall 7% more likely to die by taking the vaccine. We need to get back to the drawing board on this one.
cassepipe 5y ago
Disclaimer : I have no competencies whatsoever on judging the matter but there are other studies that conclude to increased risk of some kind of cardiac failure, even for young people as a consequence of COVID (something the the first line of the article acknowledges). What possible mechanism could play in even more risk after vaccination ? The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination. But I know biology can be incredibly complicated times. So, provided the results are statically significant since it seems to be the standard, what possible hypotheses can be made ?
- zackees 4y ago
- cas14655 4y ago
  yes, spike protein is the culprit I think. When the vaccine came out it was believed that the spike is harmless but later it was shown that the spike protein is enough to cause symptoms similar to the disease COVID. [1] For a long time people thought that the mRNA, and therefore the spike from the vax, would stay in the muscle tissue and be broken down in a matter of days. This study [2] in Cell found that, actually, the mRNA can get to the lymph nodes and cause spike production for as long as 60 days. Spike protein is also found in the blood of 96% of vaccinees and the concentration is comparable to that of an acute infection. [1] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/spike-protein-of-sars-cov-2-virus-alone-can-cause-damage-to-lungs https://www.contagionlive.com/view/spike-protein-of-sars-cov... [2] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9
- lamontcg 4y ago
  We actually do know that the adenovirus-vectored vaccines (ChAdOx1, etc) do cause blood clotting disorders. > The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination. But this is bad logic. The mechanism behind the adenovirus clotting adverse reactions is that Platlet Factor 4 sticks to the adenovirus capsid. It shares nothing with SARS-CoV-2 at all. Since the virus sticks to the capsid it is endocytosed as the virus particle enters cells. That results in PF4 inside of cells, which is not supposed to happen. Some people have the 'right' HLA subtype and bits of the PF4 molecule is displayed on the surface of their cells. Then further some breakdown happens in the bodies identification of "self" proteins in some people and the immune system starts to produce autoantibodies against PF4. This autoantibody attack results in vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia. Both SARS-CoV-2 viral infection and adenovirus-based vaccines can cause clotting issues. Biologically they only really share the spike protein in common. But the clotting issues observed after ChAdOx vaccination are due to a mechanism unique to adenoviruses (and naturally occurring human adenoviruses may cause the same issues, but it has never been detected before). [The other comment here is also full of nonsense. The spike protein is contained within the cell producing it. There is detectable spike protein in the blood of some people post-vaccine but at femtogram per mL concentrations that require special assays to detect, likely due to lysing of the cells in lymph nodes and tiny bit escaping. This is very unlikely to have any direct biological effect] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEyaRZeF_hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEyaRZeF_hI
tempestn 5y ago
This is good data, and as the paper states, it is important that vaccine recipients are aware of possible side effects so that they know to seek medical attention if such arise. That said, it's important to note the scale of the effect observed. Looking at the cardiac arrest calls for instance, we're looking at an increase from roughly 7 to 10 per week, while hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses were being administered per week. Likewise ACS calls went from 30-35 per week up to a peak of around 45. These are obviously very significant increases, but still remained unlikely events. That said, unvaccinated case fatality rate from covid in that age range is also very low: > Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0·0023%, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·0015–0·0039) and increasing exponentially through ages 30 years (0·0573%, 0·0418–0·0870), 60 years (1·0035%, 0·7002–1·5727), and 90 years (20·3292%, 14·6888–28·9754). https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... But of course we can't directly compare the two, as we'd need to know the fatality rate from these CA and ACS calls, not to mention looking at other negative outcomes short of death. Regardless, it certainly appears to me that vaccination still makes sense for all ages, but if you assume the risk of these side effects is the same for each booster, whereas the impacts on serious covid outcomes are diminishing, I guess there would be a point at which the risk of the side effects would outweigh the marginal benefit of additional / more frequent boosters for young people.
bad_alloc 5y ago
It could be the vaccine. It could be the novel virus and degradation of healthcare services due to overloading. It could be an interaction of both and unknown external factors.
- cas14655 4y ago
  slowly we are progressing from "it can't be the vaccine". I can already see this is going to be a long couple of decades.
baisq 5y ago
jmcgough 5y ago
While this paper looks scary, keep in mind that the journal isn't particularly reputable and that the vast majority of studies find that mRNA vaccines are safe. It's certainly worth studying this (and many more researchers will continue to do so) but not really anything to merit not getting vaccinated. If you want to confirm any pre-existing belief you may have, you can find fringe papers to support essentially anything.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  It's a nature journal so it's been reviewed.
  - jimmont 5y ago
    Yes I’m wondering why these various comments directly challenge this publisher and publication’s credibility? Especially without a substantive explanation since the content is available for this type of dialog. Strange.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    This is not Nature, it's Scientific Reports, which publishes all sorts of things. Don't let the domain name fool you. See "controversies": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports
    - tomohawk 4y ago
      Yes, because we all know wikipedia is a very reliable, non-partisan source.
- sgent 4y ago
  That statistics are also weird. Not necessarily wrong, but the article doesn't control for the rate of COVID infection in Israel, which is a major cofounder, and of the three authors one is an ER doc and two are Management professors -- no epidemiologists, public health, or other expertise. They also pick seemingly random periods of time to analyze against each other. My guess is that a more correctly written paper would have been published in a better journal (maybe even Nature) if it got the same results, but it didn't.
raverbashing 4y ago
It's overall interesting, but with the caveat > It is important to note the main limitation of this study, which is that it relies on aggregated data that do not include specific information regarding the affected patients... underlying comorbidities as well as vaccination and COVID-19 positive status Also from the graphs, while the number of events do seem correlated, there are some peaks that are hard to explain
KarlKemp 4y ago
Note that we are talking about an increase from 150 to 190 here. And the 150 in 2020 was actually lower than 2019, so it may just be regression to the mean. And it's significant in exactly one age/gender combination, of about a dozen tested.
distrohopper 4y ago
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  - zackees 4y ago
  - distrohopper 4y ago
    the problem is forcing people into a medical treatment (injection of a vaccine) which obviously has risks. This is unethical and illegal.
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    You are not guaranteed to get COVID. None of my friends or family have gotten it. Not one.
    - nradov 4y ago
      How would you know that? You aren't guaranteed to get COVID-19 (the symptomatic disease) but you're almost guaranteed to get infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The majority of Americans already have been, and those that haven't yet will likely get it soon. Many infections are asymptomatic (particularly among the vaccinated) so patients don't necessarily even know whether they've been infected. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infections-us-most-americans https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infection... https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
  - cas14655 4y ago
    The vax doesn't prevent infection.
    - beej71 4y ago
Trouble_007 4y ago
search: >scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 infection cardiovascular event'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 infection cardiovascular event' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 CO...> search: >scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine cardiovascular event'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine cardiovascular event' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 CO...>

110 points by johntfella 5y ago

Can anyone offer insights to how reliable this article is? I don’t know the field and am reduced to looking at superficial signals, like: I see business school bylines and the “see additional publications by this author” links don’t turn up anything… but the Nature imprint seems impressive? Can anyone weigh in on the methodology or data? (Interesting to note that the linked page puts this article in something like the 99th percentile for how much it’s tweeted, which I would put squarely in the “reduces my confidence” category…)

netsharc 5y ago
I guess many anti-vax people confirmation-biased this article and are tweeting about it, and if I can guess, you're pro-vax and your confirmation bias is skeptical about it (if it was an article that touted how good the vaccines are, you'de be less skeptical about it, and less critical pro-vax minds would be on Twitter saying "See, I was right!").
- johanneswu 5y ago
  I don't know ryandamm, so I can't judge whether he is pro- or anti-vax, but you should be fact checking every article before sharing it. Doing basic checks like "what else did the authors publish" seem fairly sensible.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Actually it isn't really since the scientific community regularly has the problem of ostracising those that offer much progress. It is a decent method in practice but ultimately fallacious. The corpus of published works is far too massive so it is a compromise. A bad one, because the pressure to publish has a negative effect on scientific rigour.
buildbot 5y ago
I am leaning to towards not reliable, as they claim the trend started in Jan 2021, which is a little early for when Israel was vaccinating that population: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/israel-covid-vaccination-data-offers-hope-exit-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/israel-covid-v... It seems like the authors probably went into this with a conclusion in mind…
- cft 5y ago
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Please follow HN guidelines when responding, you could have simply stated, "Looking at figure 1b, it seems like there was time delay between the first dose and the increase in rates".
    - cft 4y ago
      This is a wrong venue to condescendingly teach other people how to write comments. The goal of this forum is to contribute information or insights. If you you think I violated HN guidelines, please downvote and report to dang.
      - buildbot 4y ago
        Respectfully, it is exactly the right venue? I sorta thought that was the point here. And sure, done.
  - alimov 5y ago
    I’m not very knowledgeable about this, but I was wondering if MIT (professor?) co-authorship precludes papers from coming to the wrong conclusions? Or is it we’ll know that when a co-author is from MIT that the paper is as rigorous and objective as possible?
    - 5y ago
raxxorraxor 5y ago
Don't know in general but there is another study with the same statement for young people with increased heart problems. Cannot find it, but it is just a few weeks old and I think the country of study was Denmark. Not sure though.
mpfundstein 5y ago
on the page, there is a link to his google scholar page He is a serious scientist: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RBSyaTIAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RBSyaTIAAAAJ&hl=en
folli 5y ago
> but the Nature imprint seems impressive It's Scientific Reports from the same publisher, but not Nature, the journal itself. Scientific Reports has a very high acceptance rate, i.e. they publish pretty much anything that passes peer review.
- jrapdx3 4y ago
  Traditional paper-bound journals are intrinsically limited re: number of articles that can be published. OTOH online publications aren't so restricted, so why not publish all that are worthy? I think the real question is the quality of peer review. A "high rate of acceptance" isn't bad if accepting an article happens only after good quality peer review. But a high rate of acceptance without adequate peer review would be a big source of concern. Not sure which of these publishing considerations applies to this article. I'll have to go over it again in detail when I'm more rested, anyway on quick overview I didn't spot any glaring problems in it.
scantis 5y ago
Looks like a straight forward article. Instead of a conclusion you are left with a discussion, which sadly is quite weak, but this seems to be the point. (As I understand it after skimming through it) Basically you have a data set and some statistical evaluation. The gabs are filled with some medical and statistical "Mumbo Jambo" I didn't read. Seems professional, the graphs are pretty clear cut, which is nice. The discussion basically states that the data is flawed for the purpose of making clear connections and urges the necessity to provide better data in the future. They aren't even able to make their derived call data public, due to privacy laws in this case. They are absolute right and have a valid point here. No reason not to publish this and it conveys some important messages. We should gather better data and find a way to share it, without touching on the privacy of individuals. A very difficult topic I personally wouldn't touch with a stick.
- logifail 5y ago
  > A very difficult topic I personally wouldn't touch with a stick Agree completely. This topic has got so ideological that if (when) it comes up in conversation I tend to demur and politely change the subject. Perhaps at some point there will be a genuine attempt to gather more data on just who genuinely benefits from vaccination (obese/elderly/other comorbidities?), and who doesn't (young/healthy). One thing we can be sure of is that no such study will ever be funded by Big Pharma.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  Of all the parts of the paper to gloss over, the medical and statistical "Mumbo Jambo" is the most important one to evaluate!
  - scantis 4y ago
    Would you like to discuss why they use Spearman instead of Kendall and if this negative binomial distrubition asumption is valid in this case? It won't have any effect on the final result, which basically states that the data set is insufficient.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tylermauthe 5y ago

mrfinn 5y ago

linkgoron 5y ago

The result looks relatively weak IMO. The numbers are less impressive then what they seem, and IMO the numbers look like they were computed in a way that resulted in what the authors wanted. For example, weekly counts of cardiac arrest calls are computed using a five-week centered moving-average, and COVID-19 and vaccination doses are computed using a three-week centered moving-average. I'd assume that using three weeks for cardiac arrest calls, the numbers would look less correlated.

jimmont 5y ago
Consider submitting this feedback to Nature. It’s generally a reliable source. I’d be curious to see how they respond to your review.
- fock 4y ago
  You know this is published in Nature ... Scientific Reports. And there goes the reliability!
- schiffern 4y ago
  Note that this journal is Scientific Reports (a Nature Portfolio journal), not Nature. Confusing I know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports > Scientific Reports is an online peer-reviewed open access scientific mega journal published by Nature Portfolio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_journal > A mega journal (also mega-journal and megajournal) is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE. This "very lucrative publishing model" was soon emulated by other publishers. Basically it's bunk-for-hire.
- someotherperson 4y ago
  The domain is a bit misleading. It's not Nature, it's Scientific Reports, and it's not exactly a great journal[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports#Controversi...

zentr1c 5y ago

A Berlin News paper reports of the public inquiry of firefighters and emergency personnel to investigate the root cause of a rise in different "heart issue calls" of 27-31% in 2021 (40k calls) compared to 2018/2019. In german: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-feuerwehr-herzprobleme-und-schlaganfaelle-zahl-der-rettungseinsaetze-steigt-stark-an-li.222431 https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-feuerwehr-herzpr... They argue to change from mandatory vaccination to optional vaccination for their profession. Evolution will tell what the right choice was. I am having popcorn while watching the extremists battle each others position.

linkgoron 5y ago
Maybe it has something to do with a new virus going around, there was also an increase in 2020... There's a reason why they're comparing 2021 to 2018/2019 and not to 2020.
- lbj 4y ago
  Correlation between rollouts and virus-infections respectively, show that the mRNA vaccine is almost twice as likely to cause a cardiovascular event. So Covid is indeed dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as the vaccine it seems.
  - WithinReason 4y ago
    The risk-benefit calculation is strongly age dependent. For old people there's no question about the benefit of the vaccines. For healthy children it's close.
    - lbj 4y ago
      It's very, very, very far from close. The most recent study from Christine Stabell out of Copenhagen showed that even if you're in the age group where the vaccine cuts covid mortality in half, you're overall 7% more likely to die by taking the vaccine. We need to get back to the drawing board on this one.

cassepipe 5y ago

Disclaimer : I have no competencies whatsoever on judging the matter but there are other studies that conclude to increased risk of some kind of cardiac failure, even for young people as a consequence of COVID (something the the first line of the article acknowledges). What possible mechanism could play in even more risk after vaccination ? The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination. But I know biology can be incredibly complicated times. So, provided the results are statically significant since it seems to be the standard, what possible hypotheses can be made ?

zackees 4y ago
cas14655 4y ago
yes, spike protein is the culprit I think. When the vaccine came out it was believed that the spike is harmless but later it was shown that the spike protein is enough to cause symptoms similar to the disease COVID. [1] For a long time people thought that the mRNA, and therefore the spike from the vax, would stay in the muscle tissue and be broken down in a matter of days. This study [2] in Cell found that, actually, the mRNA can get to the lymph nodes and cause spike production for as long as 60 days. Spike protein is also found in the blood of 96% of vaccinees and the concentration is comparable to that of an acute infection. [1] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/spike-protein-of-sars-cov-2-virus-alone-can-cause-damage-to-lungs https://www.contagionlive.com/view/spike-protein-of-sars-cov... [2] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9
lamontcg 4y ago
We actually do know that the adenovirus-vectored vaccines (ChAdOx1, etc) do cause blood clotting disorders. > The only mechanism I am able to imagine would be the COVID spike protein itself since it produced both during the infection and vaccination. But this is bad logic. The mechanism behind the adenovirus clotting adverse reactions is that Platlet Factor 4 sticks to the adenovirus capsid. It shares nothing with SARS-CoV-2 at all. Since the virus sticks to the capsid it is endocytosed as the virus particle enters cells. That results in PF4 inside of cells, which is not supposed to happen. Some people have the 'right' HLA subtype and bits of the PF4 molecule is displayed on the surface of their cells. Then further some breakdown happens in the bodies identification of "self" proteins in some people and the immune system starts to produce autoantibodies against PF4. This autoantibody attack results in vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia. Both SARS-CoV-2 viral infection and adenovirus-based vaccines can cause clotting issues. Biologically they only really share the spike protein in common. But the clotting issues observed after ChAdOx vaccination are due to a mechanism unique to adenoviruses (and naturally occurring human adenoviruses may cause the same issues, but it has never been detected before). [The other comment here is also full of nonsense. The spike protein is contained within the cell producing it. There is detectable spike protein in the blood of some people post-vaccine but at femtogram per mL concentrations that require special assays to detect, likely due to lysing of the cells in lymph nodes and tiny bit escaping. This is very unlikely to have any direct biological effect] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEyaRZeF_hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEyaRZeF_hI

tempestn 5y ago

This is good data, and as the paper states, it is important that vaccine recipients are aware of possible side effects so that they know to seek medical attention if such arise. That said, it's important to note the scale of the effect observed. Looking at the cardiac arrest calls for instance, we're looking at an increase from roughly 7 to 10 per week, while hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses were being administered per week. Likewise ACS calls went from 30-35 per week up to a peak of around 45. These are obviously very significant increases, but still remained unlikely events. That said, unvaccinated case fatality rate from covid in that age range is also very low: > Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0·0023%, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·0015–0·0039) and increasing exponentially through ages 30 years (0·0573%, 0·0418–0·0870), 60 years (1·0035%, 0·7002–1·5727), and 90 years (20·3292%, 14·6888–28·9754). https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... But of course we can't directly compare the two, as we'd need to know the fatality rate from these CA and ACS calls, not to mention looking at other negative outcomes short of death. Regardless, it certainly appears to me that vaccination still makes sense for all ages, but if you assume the risk of these side effects is the same for each booster, whereas the impacts on serious covid outcomes are diminishing, I guess there would be a point at which the risk of the side effects would outweigh the marginal benefit of additional / more frequent boosters for young people.

bad_alloc 5y ago

It could be the vaccine. It could be the novel virus and degradation of healthcare services due to overloading. It could be an interaction of both and unknown external factors.

cas14655 4y ago
slowly we are progressing from "it can't be the vaccine". I can already see this is going to be a long couple of decades.

baisq 5y ago

jmcgough 5y ago

While this paper looks scary, keep in mind that the journal isn't particularly reputable and that the vast majority of studies find that mRNA vaccines are safe. It's certainly worth studying this (and many more researchers will continue to do so) but not really anything to merit not getting vaccinated. If you want to confirm any pre-existing belief you may have, you can find fringe papers to support essentially anything.

plutonorm 5y ago
It's a nature journal so it's been reviewed.
- jimmont 5y ago
  Yes I’m wondering why these various comments directly challenge this publisher and publication’s credibility? Especially without a substantive explanation since the content is available for this type of dialog. Strange.
- skybrian 5y ago
  This is not Nature, it's Scientific Reports, which publishes all sorts of things. Don't let the domain name fool you. See "controversies": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports
  - tomohawk 4y ago
    Yes, because we all know wikipedia is a very reliable, non-partisan source.
sgent 4y ago
That statistics are also weird. Not necessarily wrong, but the article doesn't control for the rate of COVID infection in Israel, which is a major cofounder, and of the three authors one is an ER doc and two are Management professors -- no epidemiologists, public health, or other expertise. They also pick seemingly random periods of time to analyze against each other. My guess is that a more correctly written paper would have been published in a better journal (maybe even Nature) if it got the same results, but it didn't.

raverbashing 4y ago

It's overall interesting, but with the caveat > It is important to note the main limitation of this study, which is that it relies on aggregated data that do not include specific information regarding the affected patients... underlying comorbidities as well as vaccination and COVID-19 positive status Also from the graphs, while the number of events do seem correlated, there are some peaks that are hard to explain

KarlKemp 4y ago

Note that we are talking about an increase from 150 to 190 here. And the 150 in 2020 was actually lower than 2019, so it may just be regression to the mean. And it's significant in exactly one age/gender combination, of about a dozen tested.

distrohopper 4y ago

411111111111111 4y ago
- zackees 4y ago
- distrohopper 4y ago
  the problem is forcing people into a medical treatment (injection of a vaccine) which obviously has risks. This is unethical and illegal.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  You are not guaranteed to get COVID. None of my friends or family have gotten it. Not one.
  - nradov 4y ago
    How would you know that? You aren't guaranteed to get COVID-19 (the symptomatic disease) but you're almost guaranteed to get infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The majority of Americans already have been, and those that haven't yet will likely get it soon. Many infections are asymptomatic (particularly among the vaccinated) so patients don't necessarily even know whether they've been infected. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infections-us-most-americans https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infection... https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
- cas14655 4y ago
  The vax doesn't prevent infection.
  - beej71 4y ago

Trouble_007 4y ago

search: >scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 infection cardiovascular event'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 infection cardiovascular event' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 CO...> search: >scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine cardiovascular event'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine cardiovascular event' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholarly:'SARS-CoV-2 CO...>