5 ms·

Having lived through this, observed it first-hand, read the studies, having dozens of anecdotal evidence on top from near friends and family, and still not able

Having lived through this, observed it first-hand, read the studies, having dozens of anecdotal evidence on top from near friends and family, and still not able to even question the new mRNA platform publicly without knee-jerk backlash and demonisation, has done more damage to my faith in institutions and the medical community than anything else I’ve witnessed in my near forty years on this planet. Covid made crystal clear to me that we still live under tyrannical dogmatic rule devoid of scientific nuance because it’s “for the greater good”.

apical_dendrite 1y ago
The claim that it is not possible to "question the new mRNA platform publicly without knee-jerk backlash and demonization" is just not accurate. There is a very well-known counterexample. Researchers identified that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of myocarditis, particularly among younger males. This is rare - something like 3 excess cases per 100,000 doses. This has been studied extensively. Regulators required additional surveillance and it's included in all the guidance from regulators and physicians associations. The consensus has been that this is an acceptable risk, particularly since COVID itself is associated with an increased risk of myocarditis. Clearly you have a different view, but the consensus view is based on analyzing data from millions of patients across many countries, not on a "knee-jerk backlash".
- logicchains 1y ago
  >something like 3 excess cases per 100,000 doses That was for clinical myocarditis in the overall population, but the rate of subclinical cardiac damage among young males was significantly higher, around 1% with abnormal ECGs post vaccination: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-022-04786-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-022-04786-0 .
  - dingdingdang 1y ago
    Exactly this - vaccinate even a small town and cardiovascular issues will start popping amongst the neighbors, there is very good reason why there has been, and is, a public backlash on the MRNA vaccine usage among those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
    - uecker 1y ago
      Please do not spread misinformation. Nobody expects "cardiovascular issues" "popping amongst the neighbors" and there is no evidence supporting this.
  - uecker 1y ago
    In the paper it says 0.1%. " Cardiac symptoms are common after the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine, but the incidences of significant arrhythmias and myocarditis are only 0.1%." Also note: "subclinical".
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      "Only"? COVID posed a negligible risk for young males without major preexisting conditions. By contrast, common cardiac symptoms paired alongside significant arrhythmia and myocarditis in 1 in 1000, disproportionately affecting young males, is huge. And I expect we will eventually come to find out that the overall (particularly longer term) side effects of these drugs have been greatly underestimated. For instance excess mortality continues to remain extremely high [1], even though it would be expected to be negative following a pandemic simply because those most affected by COVID were those already near death. Put more bluntly, disproportionately get rid of the elderly and future death rates should be lower than they would be otherwise. So why are disproportionately large numbers of people continuing to die? [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
      - uecker 1y ago
        You may want to look at this paper to get a better idea of risk and benefits, e.g. Fig 2 and Fig 3: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.056135 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.... One also needs to understand that myocarditis is not uncommon, and especially common after viral including COVID itself. Also "subclinical" means that this includes mild cases and here the 0.1% also included arrhythmia. Looking at the other paper above, they found 1 (!) person with subclinical myocarditis while screening for it in a population of 4928. Also interesting to put this in perspective: "Underlying disease was present in 109 (2.2%) of the patients, with simple congenital heart disease in 33, mitral valve prolapses in 36, arrhythmia in 36, Kawasaki disease in 11, and previous myocarditis in 2" Your idea that excess mortality is caused by the vaccine rather than COVID itself seems far fetched to me.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    The most frustrating and brain damaged part about this take is that everyone pushing it ignores that not getting vaccinated has 20x higher chance of cardiac damage from covid. It's literally people arguing not to wear seatbelts and pointing at cases were people lived because they were ejected from the car. Ignoring all the people who lived because they were wearing seatbelts. The correct framing is "How many young people didn't get myocarditis because they got the vaccine?"
    - ifyoubuildit 1y ago
      It's contrived and breaks down pretty easily, but why isnt it more like this: - both wearing seatbelts and getting in an accident have a significant chance of causing x - you are almost definitely going to get in an accident - are your chances of x greater or lesser given car accident while wearing seatbelt? I think your framing is correct (though it'd be better to just say were better off in general), but I haven't seen anyone give a convincing answer to that question in favor of the shots.
      - uecker 1y ago
        Maybe this helps? https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.056135 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - apical_dendrite 1y ago
    Comparing these two numbers is completely wrong. The study that you cite performed an ECG on 5000 high school students after a COVID-19 vaccine and found 50 had abnormal ECG. But having an abnormal finding on an ECG doesn't actually mean that there's any underlying heart condition. I just went through this myself - I had a bunch of ECGs for a clinical trial (unrelated to any cardiac issue). One came back abnormal. Repeating the ECG in my PCP's office showed nothing. A cardiac stress test showed nothing. About 10 other ECGs for the clinical trial showed nothing. It was just an incidental finding. Saying that 1% have "cardiac damage" because there's an abnormal ECG is just completely wrong. The test has a false positive rate that's greater than 0. And 50 abnormal findings does not mean 50 cases of "cardiac damage". In fact there were 5 - 1 myocarditis and 4 arrhythmias. All of these cleared up on their own. And finally, you can't compare the two studies because they are looking at fundamentally different things. The 3 excess cases per 100,000 doses comes from looking at millions and millions of health records, so it will only show cases that were actually diagnosed in the real world. The paper you cite performed an ECG on everyone in the study - so of course they are going to find vastly more cases, because they are doing vastly more testing. But that study is not performing ECGs on anyone who gets COVID but has not been vaccinated. If you did that, you would also see myocarditis, because viral infection is the leading cause of myocarditis. You cannot conclude anything from the study that you cite about the relative cardiac risks of the vaccine - it's just not a study that's designed to do that.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
  > The claim that it is not possible to "question the new mRNA platform publicly without knee-jerk backlash and demonization" is just not accurate I’m not a Covid truther, anti-vaxxer, or anything of the sort, but let’s be honest here. Mainstream urban society will absolutely attack anyone who doesn’t adhere to the consensus view on covid (among many other topics). It’s an overreaction stemming from years of dealing with bad-faith trolls. But the net result is an enforcement of a specific political orthodoxy.
  - api 1y ago
    > It’s an overreaction stemming from years of dealing with bad-faith trolls. A billion billion billion times this. It makes me wonder about the inquisition. There’s a subset of Catholic inquisition apologists who argue it was an overreaction to social breakdown and an explosion of cults, some of which were very harmful. Having seen the rise of mass social media I am no longer able to dismiss this argument as easily. Still don’t quite buy it but there is, as you’d say in criminal law, reasonable doubt.
- ifyoubuildit 1y ago
  > The consensus has been that this is an acceptable risk, particularly since COVID itself is associated with an increased risk of myocarditis. This made more sense to me when people still believed that the shots meant getting covid was very unlikely. It's easy to find people who got lots of shots, it's hard to find people who didn't get covid. It always seemed implied that p(shot cardio issues) < p(covid cardio issues), and nobody ever talks about p(shot cardio issues) + p(covid cardio issues). Did anybody rigorously demonstrate that a vaccinated covid case doesn't have these risks?
  - api 1y ago
    The vaccine didn’t work as well as we thought it would. It did work to some extent. It’s there in the numbers. But it was not the resounding success that, say, the smallpox or polio vaccines were. It attenuated the disease a little. That might change some of the calculus. Or it might not. It’s hard to tell the difference between myocarditis caused by the vaccine or from COVID or from other factors. Imagine it’s you who gets to make the call. Whatever call you make will be roundly criticized and you might be wrong. If you’re wrong more people will die.
    - apical_dendrite 1y ago
      The polio vaccine has been around for 70 years and smallpox vaccination has been around for over 200 years. If you were to assess the polio vaccine a few years after its introduction and compare it to mRNA vaccines a few years after their introduction, then the COVID-19 vaccine might actually come out better. There was a major safety problem with one company's process for manufacturing the initial polio vaccine. 11 children died. If you read contemporary reporting from 1957 - two years after the vaccine was released - you see quotes like this: "The failure of this vaccine to prevent disease and at times death in certain vaccinated individuals and its apparent inability to reduce the number of carriers clearly indicate that polio will not be "wiped out" by this vaccine." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-good-is-the-polio-vaccine/303946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-goo...
- analog8374 1y ago
  Every time I question it on social media I get downvoted to oblivion, flagged and/or reported. Ten times out of ten.
  - api 1y ago
    That’s because most people who question it are bad faith trolls or crazy ideologues who think you can treat cancer with a juice cleanse. We have a very flawed class of experts who do know things but sometimes fuck up or are sometimes corrupt. We have a few good faith critics of said experts. We have a vast number of cranks and con men and trolls. Category three vastly outnumbers and out-volumes category two, to the point that to most people it looks like there’s only two categories. A ton of other topics are like this: climate change, anything anywhere near gender or sexuality, etc. The more politically charged something is the more the middle is excluded and the more people circle the wagons against bad faith actors.
- blub 1y ago
  This is particularly funny because: a) the risk is not acceptable and several countries switched young males to Biontech from Moderna b) every time I pointed this out on HN I got downvoted or some vaccinesplainer downplayed it. But yes, if the “trust the science” stuff one used to suppress criticism would turn out to be wrong, then rewriting history to edit out the massive censorship of perfectly logical ideas starts making sense. Covid was the West’s critical moment when it decided that propaganda and top-down messaging are more important than critical thinking and democracy. The poisonous fruit of this approach can be seem in the authoritarian handling of other controversial topics like migration, gender, the Ukraine war, etc.
  - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
    [flagged]

apical_dendrite 1y ago

The claim that it is not possible to "question the new mRNA platform publicly without knee-jerk backlash and demonization" is just not accurate. There is a very well-known counterexample. Researchers identified that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of myocarditis, particularly among younger males. This is rare - something like 3 excess cases per 100,000 doses. This has been studied extensively. Regulators required additional surveillance and it's included in all the guidance from regulators and physicians associations. The consensus has been that this is an acceptable risk, particularly since COVID itself is associated with an increased risk of myocarditis. Clearly you have a different view, but the consensus view is based on analyzing data from millions of patients across many countries, not on a "knee-jerk backlash".

logicchains 1y ago
>something like 3 excess cases per 100,000 doses That was for clinical myocarditis in the overall population, but the rate of subclinical cardiac damage among young males was significantly higher, around 1% with abnormal ECGs post vaccination: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-022-04786-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-022-04786-0 .
- dingdingdang 1y ago
  Exactly this - vaccinate even a small town and cardiovascular issues will start popping amongst the neighbors, there is very good reason why there has been, and is, a public backlash on the MRNA vaccine usage among those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
  - uecker 1y ago
    Please do not spread misinformation. Nobody expects "cardiovascular issues" "popping amongst the neighbors" and there is no evidence supporting this.
- uecker 1y ago
  In the paper it says 0.1%. " Cardiac symptoms are common after the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine, but the incidences of significant arrhythmias and myocarditis are only 0.1%." Also note: "subclinical".
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    "Only"? COVID posed a negligible risk for young males without major preexisting conditions. By contrast, common cardiac symptoms paired alongside significant arrhythmia and myocarditis in 1 in 1000, disproportionately affecting young males, is huge. And I expect we will eventually come to find out that the overall (particularly longer term) side effects of these drugs have been greatly underestimated. For instance excess mortality continues to remain extremely high [1], even though it would be expected to be negative following a pandemic simply because those most affected by COVID were those already near death. Put more bluntly, disproportionately get rid of the elderly and future death rates should be lower than they would be otherwise. So why are disproportionately large numbers of people continuing to die? [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
    - uecker 1y ago
      You may want to look at this paper to get a better idea of risk and benefits, e.g. Fig 2 and Fig 3: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.056135 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.... One also needs to understand that myocarditis is not uncommon, and especially common after viral including COVID itself. Also "subclinical" means that this includes mild cases and here the 0.1% also included arrhythmia. Looking at the other paper above, they found 1 (!) person with subclinical myocarditis while screening for it in a population of 4928. Also interesting to put this in perspective: "Underlying disease was present in 109 (2.2%) of the patients, with simple congenital heart disease in 33, mitral valve prolapses in 36, arrhythmia in 36, Kawasaki disease in 11, and previous myocarditis in 2" Your idea that excess mortality is caused by the vaccine rather than COVID itself seems far fetched to me.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  The most frustrating and brain damaged part about this take is that everyone pushing it ignores that not getting vaccinated has 20x higher chance of cardiac damage from covid. It's literally people arguing not to wear seatbelts and pointing at cases were people lived because they were ejected from the car. Ignoring all the people who lived because they were wearing seatbelts. The correct framing is "How many young people didn't get myocarditis because they got the vaccine?"
  - ifyoubuildit 1y ago
    It's contrived and breaks down pretty easily, but why isnt it more like this: - both wearing seatbelts and getting in an accident have a significant chance of causing x - you are almost definitely going to get in an accident - are your chances of x greater or lesser given car accident while wearing seatbelt? I think your framing is correct (though it'd be better to just say were better off in general), but I haven't seen anyone give a convincing answer to that question in favor of the shots.
    - uecker 1y ago
      Maybe this helps? https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.056135 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- apical_dendrite 1y ago
  Comparing these two numbers is completely wrong. The study that you cite performed an ECG on 5000 high school students after a COVID-19 vaccine and found 50 had abnormal ECG. But having an abnormal finding on an ECG doesn't actually mean that there's any underlying heart condition. I just went through this myself - I had a bunch of ECGs for a clinical trial (unrelated to any cardiac issue). One came back abnormal. Repeating the ECG in my PCP's office showed nothing. A cardiac stress test showed nothing. About 10 other ECGs for the clinical trial showed nothing. It was just an incidental finding. Saying that 1% have "cardiac damage" because there's an abnormal ECG is just completely wrong. The test has a false positive rate that's greater than 0. And 50 abnormal findings does not mean 50 cases of "cardiac damage". In fact there were 5 - 1 myocarditis and 4 arrhythmias. All of these cleared up on their own. And finally, you can't compare the two studies because they are looking at fundamentally different things. The 3 excess cases per 100,000 doses comes from looking at millions and millions of health records, so it will only show cases that were actually diagnosed in the real world. The paper you cite performed an ECG on everyone in the study - so of course they are going to find vastly more cases, because they are doing vastly more testing. But that study is not performing ECGs on anyone who gets COVID but has not been vaccinated. If you did that, you would also see myocarditis, because viral infection is the leading cause of myocarditis. You cannot conclude anything from the study that you cite about the relative cardiac risks of the vaccine - it's just not a study that's designed to do that.
GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
> The claim that it is not possible to "question the new mRNA platform publicly without knee-jerk backlash and demonization" is just not accurate I’m not a Covid truther, anti-vaxxer, or anything of the sort, but let’s be honest here. Mainstream urban society will absolutely attack anyone who doesn’t adhere to the consensus view on covid (among many other topics). It’s an overreaction stemming from years of dealing with bad-faith trolls. But the net result is an enforcement of a specific political orthodoxy.
- api 1y ago
  > It’s an overreaction stemming from years of dealing with bad-faith trolls. A billion billion billion times this. It makes me wonder about the inquisition. There’s a subset of Catholic inquisition apologists who argue it was an overreaction to social breakdown and an explosion of cults, some of which were very harmful. Having seen the rise of mass social media I am no longer able to dismiss this argument as easily. Still don’t quite buy it but there is, as you’d say in criminal law, reasonable doubt.
ifyoubuildit 1y ago
> The consensus has been that this is an acceptable risk, particularly since COVID itself is associated with an increased risk of myocarditis. This made more sense to me when people still believed that the shots meant getting covid was very unlikely. It's easy to find people who got lots of shots, it's hard to find people who didn't get covid. It always seemed implied that p(shot cardio issues) < p(covid cardio issues), and nobody ever talks about p(shot cardio issues) + p(covid cardio issues). Did anybody rigorously demonstrate that a vaccinated covid case doesn't have these risks?
- api 1y ago
  The vaccine didn’t work as well as we thought it would. It did work to some extent. It’s there in the numbers. But it was not the resounding success that, say, the smallpox or polio vaccines were. It attenuated the disease a little. That might change some of the calculus. Or it might not. It’s hard to tell the difference between myocarditis caused by the vaccine or from COVID or from other factors. Imagine it’s you who gets to make the call. Whatever call you make will be roundly criticized and you might be wrong. If you’re wrong more people will die.
  - apical_dendrite 1y ago
    The polio vaccine has been around for 70 years and smallpox vaccination has been around for over 200 years. If you were to assess the polio vaccine a few years after its introduction and compare it to mRNA vaccines a few years after their introduction, then the COVID-19 vaccine might actually come out better. There was a major safety problem with one company's process for manufacturing the initial polio vaccine. 11 children died. If you read contemporary reporting from 1957 - two years after the vaccine was released - you see quotes like this: "The failure of this vaccine to prevent disease and at times death in certain vaccinated individuals and its apparent inability to reduce the number of carriers clearly indicate that polio will not be "wiped out" by this vaccine." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-good-is-the-polio-vaccine/303946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-goo...
analog8374 1y ago
Every time I question it on social media I get downvoted to oblivion, flagged and/or reported. Ten times out of ten.
- api 1y ago
  That’s because most people who question it are bad faith trolls or crazy ideologues who think you can treat cancer with a juice cleanse. We have a very flawed class of experts who do know things but sometimes fuck up or are sometimes corrupt. We have a few good faith critics of said experts. We have a vast number of cranks and con men and trolls. Category three vastly outnumbers and out-volumes category two, to the point that to most people it looks like there’s only two categories. A ton of other topics are like this: climate change, anything anywhere near gender or sexuality, etc. The more politically charged something is the more the middle is excluded and the more people circle the wagons against bad faith actors.
blub 1y ago
This is particularly funny because: a) the risk is not acceptable and several countries switched young males to Biontech from Moderna b) every time I pointed this out on HN I got downvoted or some vaccinesplainer downplayed it. But yes, if the “trust the science” stuff one used to suppress criticism would turn out to be wrong, then rewriting history to edit out the massive censorship of perfectly logical ideas starts making sense. Covid was the West’s critical moment when it decided that propaganda and top-down messaging are more important than critical thinking and democracy. The poisonous fruit of this approach can be seem in the authoritarian handling of other controversial topics like migration, gender, the Ukraine war, etc.
- AlexeyBelov 1y ago
  [flagged]