8 ms·

Covid-19 vaccination-related myocarditis: A Korean nationwide study

73 points by VagueMag 3y ago

ex3ndr 3y ago
20% of myocarditis ended up in deaths and heart transplantation. Young males 12-17 seems to be more affected.
- rashkov 3y ago
  Yes, with 5.29 cases of myocarditis for males aged 12-17 per 100,000 people. I think that number is good to include for context
  - iinnPP 3y ago
    Ah the nuthingbargar that inevitably follows the evidence of being wrong. Does the entire population have BPD?
  - 542458 3y ago
    The study seems to say 1.08 cases of myocarditis per 100,000
    - rashkov 3y ago
      That’s for all age groups
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Given the 20% incidence rate at 5.29/100k, the population of the US in that age bracket, and the last update cdc vaccination rate (71%) for that age bracket, that means you could expect roughly 200 males 12-17 died from a covid vaccine in the US, assuming no confounding factors in the study (such as other cause myocarditis). The known death count for this age range, males, for covid in the US is roughly 1000, or 5:1. There’s not good estimates on severe long term impact of covid (long covid) in these ages, but the studies I found estimate 4-10%. Further, when considering the value of vaccination at any age, you need to consider the “firewall” effect in not further transmitting to more vulnerable people. Young children in multi generational homes can pose a non trivial risk to the elderly in their home. A child killing their grandparents isn’t an outcome to be discounted. Overall even with these results it seems like good public health advice to vaccinate everyone, while not downplaying the tragedy of any premature death for any reason.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  I think you misread the numbers: > 21 deaths (4.4%), and 1 heart transplantation (0.2%).
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
I skimmed through the study, but didn't read the whole thing. It appears that they called it vaccine related if it happened within 42 days of being vaccinated. What would the normal incidence be for unvaccinated people in a typical 42 day period? And what is the incidence for people who get infected with covid? Without those to compare with its hard to know what to think about these numbers.
- tpoacher 3y ago
  I don't have numbers at hand at the moment, but the expectation is that its background rate is effectively zero in the absence of viral illness (COVID or otherwise), and presumably VRM is still lower compared to COVID-induced cardiac events. However, the latter point doesn't make this finding trivial; there was considerable debate during the pandemic, whether people who had recently contracted COVID (and thus had natural immunity already) should have the vaccine as scheduled anyway, on account of it "being harmless", with early evidence of VRM dismissed as conspiracy theories and fearmongering. I recall many people who declined the vaccine on that premise and were still labelled "antivaxxers" on that basis (which I thought was rather sad at the time). Furthermore, in many countries this policy was further enforced via "vaccine passports", meaning people with natural immunity still had to vaccinate regardless, in order to be able to go outside and conduct their business as normal, effectively putting people at unnecessary risk purely for the sake of administrative convenience. Therefore this is a clinically significant finding in my view. Not sure why the article got flagged so quickly on HN...
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Where did you draw the conclusion that vaccination after contacting the virus and getting some natural immunity would still incur a risk of heightened myocarditis?
    - tpoacher 3y ago
      That's what the linked paper is about. Risk of myocarditis post mRNA-specific vaccination.
zug_zug 3y ago
[flagged]
- generalizations 3y ago
  > neutral non-human mediator There's actually been a lot of discussion on hn around whether or not the safety controls constitute a fairly strong bias. “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Frank Herbert
  - zug_zug 3y ago
    Eh, if you seriously believe this you can ask it the same question but change "vaccine" to something else and see if that changes the math.
  - thebooktocome 3y ago
    What’s wild to me is: 1) It’s not neutral. It’s trained on a corpus including works by radicals of every bent weighted by the prevalence of their work in the corpus. 2) It’s not non-human. Separated from its human-derived training data, it does not function. 3) It doesn’t mediate between positions or propositions, it doesn’t have logic or intention. It merely regurgitates what it’s seen written before in similar contexts.
18744916 3y ago
It looks like this is part of a growing body of evidence that suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits of vaccination for young people. It's also worth noting that the incidence of post-vaccination myocarditis (from this study; 1.08 per 100k people) is significantly lower than the 2014 rate of myocarditis: 8.6 per 100k people [1]. Additionally, the risk of myocarditis from a covid infection is signfiicantly higher than the risk of myocarditis from the covid vaccine. That being said, especially since the danger of covid is much less for young people, and the risk of the covid vaccine causing myocarditis is much higher for them, there's a growing push to stop vaccinating young people against covid. I think the CDC continues to quash its credibility by trying to sweep this under the rug, rather than presenting the facts--that there is risk, and there's a cost-benefit analysis. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05951-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05951-z [2]: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.059970 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.... [3]: https://openheart.bmj.com/content/9/1/e001957 https://openheart.bmj.com/content/9/1/e001957
- dgeiser13 3y ago
  Ah, yes. Account created 43 minutes ago.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > I think the CDC continues to quash its credibility by trying to sweep this under the rug, rather than presenting the facts--that there is risk, and there's a cost-benefit analysis. If true, I don’t blame them. One thing they have learned this pandemic is the modern public doesn’t process nuance - see the usage of masks. If they broadcast this, a huge chunk of the population will think they should not vaccinate, COVID deaths will surge and more people died from COVID than vaccines induced myocarditis. Best to keep their mouths shut until more studies are completed and they have enough data.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    > see the usage of masks The modern public doesn't have patience for lies. The messaging around the masks was explicitly untruthful, as we now know. Once the public picked up on that, the CDC etc. lost the benefit of the doubt, and that got us to where we are now. What you're referencing is the effect, not the cause.
gfodor 3y ago
[flagged]
- timmytokyo 3y ago
  Worldwide, there have been over 7m reported deaths from COVID.
  - superooled 3y ago
    Assuming that's over 2 years, then it represents 6% of expected annual global deaths.
  - gfodor 3y ago
    Yes, thanks for demonstrating what I meant by "not reckoning" with it.
- drewcon 3y ago
  Some people are dead because of anything. Alone that is an entirely unuseful realization. We need adjusted hazard ratios to make rational comparisons.
  - gfodor 3y ago
    It's absolutely a useful realization since there were many things we could have and should have done, that would have been cost-free, if only people were a little more willing to admit that the vaccines did confer meaningful rates of harm.
- zug_zug 3y ago
  "Some people are dead" sounds bad, but if you think about it some "people are dead" from lack of vaccine mandates too. So you really have to do the math, and the math is actually pretty clear on the whole. Then you can get more sophisticated and break it down by age group.
  - VagueMag 3y ago
hayst4ck 3y ago
1.08 in 100,000 cases of vaccine related myocarditis (VRM), 2.16 deaths per 1,000,000. Hard to take much meaning away from that without understanding the risk posed by not vaccinating. If vaccines can prevent long COVID or "post viral syndrome," that's another potential cost benefit analysis. (which would make sense from a laymen perspective, killing k random cells seems bad, but killing N random cells seems strictly worse).
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  > Hard to take much meaning away from that without understanding the risk posed by not vaccinating. What's the benefit from vaccinating otherwise healthy young men against Covid? Not people in risk groups, but healthy young men. It should be obvious that if your clinical trials cannot rule out major adverse events in 1 in N, you shouldn't vaccinate populations in which the benefit occurs in less than 1 in N. > If vaccines can prevent long COVID or "post viral syndrome, that's another potential cost benefit analysis. That's a big "If".
- tpoacher 3y ago
  This is true, but misses an important exception: people who received vaccines despite demonstrating natural immunity at the time of vaccination. Indeed I'd be interested to know of those episodes of VRM, how many of them had recent COVID, and whether these individuals had worse outcomes. I suspect you'd find these individuals were put at increased risk, for no clear increase in benefit.
dmart 3y ago
Look at this user's submission history - nothing but inflammatory political posts, almost nothing related to technology. This is one of the only aggregation websites yet to turn into the typical Twitter/Reddit screaming chamber, disappointing to see users actively try to push it in that direction.
- musicale 3y ago
  > nothing but inflammatory political posts, almost nothing related to technology Ironically HN almost seems like one of the better discussion venues for all of these incendiary (and possibly off-topic) posts, because: > This is one of the only aggregation websites [that has] yet to turn into the typical Twitter/Reddit screaming chamber HN occasionally has downvote wars, but overall it seems to have done pretty well, even while comment sections on other sites (Ars Technica...) devolved into screaming chambers.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  Apart from whether this messenger specialises in "inflammatory political posts" the fact remains that this specific message potentially "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", especially given the way potential side effects of SARS2 vaccination have been made close to impossible to discuss without being labelled and pushed to the sideline. Assuming that the "European Heart Journal" is immune to being labelled as "anti-vaxx" and other similar epithets their decision to publish this article should give pause to those who attempt to silence any discussion on this subject.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- kaba0 3y ago
  I for one would really prefer more tech content. On certain days I barely see any interesting one, and while the discussion on non-tech topics can at times still be interesting, it is often prone to the typical ego-disease of IT people (I’m also guilty of that), who overestimate their knowledge on foreign topics. I still think that a tagging system would greatly benefit the site.

73 points by VagueMag 3y ago

ex3ndr 3y ago

20% of myocarditis ended up in deaths and heart transplantation. Young males 12-17 seems to be more affected.

rashkov 3y ago
Yes, with 5.29 cases of myocarditis for males aged 12-17 per 100,000 people. I think that number is good to include for context
- iinnPP 3y ago
  Ah the nuthingbargar that inevitably follows the evidence of being wrong. Does the entire population have BPD?
- 542458 3y ago
  The study seems to say 1.08 cases of myocarditis per 100,000
  - rashkov 3y ago
    That’s for all age groups
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Given the 20% incidence rate at 5.29/100k, the population of the US in that age bracket, and the last update cdc vaccination rate (71%) for that age bracket, that means you could expect roughly 200 males 12-17 died from a covid vaccine in the US, assuming no confounding factors in the study (such as other cause myocarditis). The known death count for this age range, males, for covid in the US is roughly 1000, or 5:1. There’s not good estimates on severe long term impact of covid (long covid) in these ages, but the studies I found estimate 4-10%. Further, when considering the value of vaccination at any age, you need to consider the “firewall” effect in not further transmitting to more vulnerable people. Young children in multi generational homes can pose a non trivial risk to the elderly in their home. A child killing their grandparents isn’t an outcome to be discounted. Overall even with these results it seems like good public health advice to vaccinate everyone, while not downplaying the tragedy of any premature death for any reason.
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
I think you misread the numbers: > 21 deaths (4.4%), and 1 heart transplantation (0.2%).

amanaplanacanal 3y ago

I skimmed through the study, but didn't read the whole thing. It appears that they called it vaccine related if it happened within 42 days of being vaccinated. What would the normal incidence be for unvaccinated people in a typical 42 day period? And what is the incidence for people who get infected with covid? Without those to compare with its hard to know what to think about these numbers.

tpoacher 3y ago
I don't have numbers at hand at the moment, but the expectation is that its background rate is effectively zero in the absence of viral illness (COVID or otherwise), and presumably VRM is still lower compared to COVID-induced cardiac events. However, the latter point doesn't make this finding trivial; there was considerable debate during the pandemic, whether people who had recently contracted COVID (and thus had natural immunity already) should have the vaccine as scheduled anyway, on account of it "being harmless", with early evidence of VRM dismissed as conspiracy theories and fearmongering. I recall many people who declined the vaccine on that premise and were still labelled "antivaxxers" on that basis (which I thought was rather sad at the time). Furthermore, in many countries this policy was further enforced via "vaccine passports", meaning people with natural immunity still had to vaccinate regardless, in order to be able to go outside and conduct their business as normal, effectively putting people at unnecessary risk purely for the sake of administrative convenience. Therefore this is a clinically significant finding in my view. Not sure why the article got flagged so quickly on HN...
- kaba0 3y ago
  Where did you draw the conclusion that vaccination after contacting the virus and getting some natural immunity would still incur a risk of heightened myocarditis?
  - tpoacher 3y ago
    That's what the linked paper is about. Risk of myocarditis post mRNA-specific vaccination.

zug_zug 3y ago

[flagged]

generalizations 3y ago
> neutral non-human mediator There's actually been a lot of discussion on hn around whether or not the safety controls constitute a fairly strong bias. “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Frank Herbert
- zug_zug 3y ago
  Eh, if you seriously believe this you can ask it the same question but change "vaccine" to something else and see if that changes the math.
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  What’s wild to me is: 1) It’s not neutral. It’s trained on a corpus including works by radicals of every bent weighted by the prevalence of their work in the corpus. 2) It’s not non-human. Separated from its human-derived training data, it does not function. 3) It doesn’t mediate between positions or propositions, it doesn’t have logic or intention. It merely regurgitates what it’s seen written before in similar contexts.

18744916 3y ago

It looks like this is part of a growing body of evidence that suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits of vaccination for young people. It's also worth noting that the incidence of post-vaccination myocarditis (from this study; 1.08 per 100k people) is significantly lower than the 2014 rate of myocarditis: 8.6 per 100k people [1]. Additionally, the risk of myocarditis from a covid infection is signfiicantly higher than the risk of myocarditis from the covid vaccine. That being said, especially since the danger of covid is much less for young people, and the risk of the covid vaccine causing myocarditis is much higher for them, there's a growing push to stop vaccinating young people against covid. I think the CDC continues to quash its credibility by trying to sweep this under the rug, rather than presenting the facts--that there is risk, and there's a cost-benefit analysis. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05951-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05951-z [2]: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.059970 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.... [3]: https://openheart.bmj.com/content/9/1/e001957 https://openheart.bmj.com/content/9/1/e001957

dgeiser13 3y ago
Ah, yes. Account created 43 minutes ago.
worrycue 3y ago
> I think the CDC continues to quash its credibility by trying to sweep this under the rug, rather than presenting the facts--that there is risk, and there's a cost-benefit analysis. If true, I don’t blame them. One thing they have learned this pandemic is the modern public doesn’t process nuance - see the usage of masks. If they broadcast this, a huge chunk of the population will think they should not vaccinate, COVID deaths will surge and more people died from COVID than vaccines induced myocarditis. Best to keep their mouths shut until more studies are completed and they have enough data.
- generalizations 3y ago
  > see the usage of masks The modern public doesn't have patience for lies. The messaging around the masks was explicitly untruthful, as we now know. Once the public picked up on that, the CDC etc. lost the benefit of the doubt, and that got us to where we are now. What you're referencing is the effect, not the cause.

gfodor 3y ago

[flagged]

timmytokyo 3y ago
Worldwide, there have been over 7m reported deaths from COVID.
- superooled 3y ago
  Assuming that's over 2 years, then it represents 6% of expected annual global deaths.
- gfodor 3y ago
  Yes, thanks for demonstrating what I meant by "not reckoning" with it.
drewcon 3y ago
Some people are dead because of anything. Alone that is an entirely unuseful realization. We need adjusted hazard ratios to make rational comparisons.
- gfodor 3y ago
  It's absolutely a useful realization since there were many things we could have and should have done, that would have been cost-free, if only people were a little more willing to admit that the vaccines did confer meaningful rates of harm.
zug_zug 3y ago
"Some people are dead" sounds bad, but if you think about it some "people are dead" from lack of vaccine mandates too. So you really have to do the math, and the math is actually pretty clear on the whole. Then you can get more sophisticated and break it down by age group.
- VagueMag 3y ago

hayst4ck 3y ago

1.08 in 100,000 cases of vaccine related myocarditis (VRM), 2.16 deaths per 1,000,000. Hard to take much meaning away from that without understanding the risk posed by not vaccinating. If vaccines can prevent long COVID or "post viral syndrome," that's another potential cost benefit analysis. (which would make sense from a laymen perspective, killing k random cells seems bad, but killing N random cells seems strictly worse).

oldgradstudent 3y ago
> Hard to take much meaning away from that without understanding the risk posed by not vaccinating. What's the benefit from vaccinating otherwise healthy young men against Covid? Not people in risk groups, but healthy young men. It should be obvious that if your clinical trials cannot rule out major adverse events in 1 in N, you shouldn't vaccinate populations in which the benefit occurs in less than 1 in N. > If vaccines can prevent long COVID or "post viral syndrome, that's another potential cost benefit analysis. That's a big "If".
tpoacher 3y ago
This is true, but misses an important exception: people who received vaccines despite demonstrating natural immunity at the time of vaccination. Indeed I'd be interested to know of those episodes of VRM, how many of them had recent COVID, and whether these individuals had worse outcomes. I suspect you'd find these individuals were put at increased risk, for no clear increase in benefit.

dmart 3y ago

Look at this user's submission history - nothing but inflammatory political posts, almost nothing related to technology. This is one of the only aggregation websites yet to turn into the typical Twitter/Reddit screaming chamber, disappointing to see users actively try to push it in that direction.

musicale 3y ago
> nothing but inflammatory political posts, almost nothing related to technology Ironically HN almost seems like one of the better discussion venues for all of these incendiary (and possibly off-topic) posts, because: > This is one of the only aggregation websites [that has] yet to turn into the typical Twitter/Reddit screaming chamber HN occasionally has downvote wars, but overall it seems to have done pretty well, even while comment sections on other sites (Ars Technica...) devolved into screaming chambers.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Apart from whether this messenger specialises in "inflammatory political posts" the fact remains that this specific message potentially "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", especially given the way potential side effects of SARS2 vaccination have been made close to impossible to discuss without being labelled and pushed to the sideline. Assuming that the "European Heart Journal" is immune to being labelled as "anti-vaxx" and other similar epithets their decision to publish this article should give pause to those who attempt to silence any discussion on this subject.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kaba0 3y ago
I for one would really prefer more tech content. On certain days I barely see any interesting one, and while the discussion on non-tech topics can at times still be interesting, it is often prone to the typical ego-disease of IT people (I’m also guilty of that), who overestimate their knowledge on foreign topics. I still think that a tagging system would greatly benefit the site.