These 444 cases of blood clots are after an estimated 24.9 million first [Astrazeneca] doses, and 24.2 million second doses of the vaccine in the UK. Of the 444 people who developed blood clots, 80 died. Six of these deaths occurred after the second dose.
Up to 23 November 2022, there were 554 suspected cases of myocarditis or pericarditis reported in the 18 to 29 age group following the vaccine. This is an average rate of 31 reports per million doses.
In the 30 to 39 age group, there were 470 cases suspected cases of myocarditis or pericarditis reported in the same time period. This is an average rate of 27 reports per million doses.
Studies looking at myocarditis and pericarditis after the vaccine have not found any increased risk of death or cardiac arrest, compared with being unvaccinated. A large study of 4 million vaccinated people in Denmark, published in the BMJ found there were no deaths or diagnoses of heart failure in people who were diagnosed with myocarditis or pericarditis after being vaccinated.
A higher rate of myocarditis in the highest risk groups compared to blood clotting, but there is a more than an order of magnitude difference in the severity of blood clotting vs Myocarditis. In addition, blood clotting from the Astrazeneca Vaccine is thought to be incidental to immune response development, while Myocarditis with all covid vaccines is related to the strength of the immune response and is also a symptom of COVID-19.
you should really re-evaluate your ability to determine what is reliable and factual information if you are sharing that link. Blows my mind that so many people who point to VAERS as evidence still have no understanding whatsoever of what VAERS is.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is jointly-run by the US FDA and CDC established by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (the same legislation that transferred liability for vaccine injuries from drug manufacturers to US taxpayers through federal funding of vaccine injury compensation) and is one of a handful of tools for monitoring vaccine safety.
The greatest concern with regards to VAERS has been underreporting. A HHS-commissioned study (PDF available here: https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-sup...) found, about a decade ago, that "Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of 'problem' drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed."
So, no, VAERS is not some conspiracy theory website and was created at the same time that vaccine manufacturers were relieved of legal liability for injuries and deaths caused by their products. It's a government-run system for identifying vaccine safety signals that, if anything, suffers from underreporting. Any entity or any individual seeking to discredit VAERS with nebulous handwavery in the absence of a workable, running alternative is engaging in extremely dubious, vaccine-safety denialism.
Of course it isn't. However, it is raw data, and it takes careful analysis to separate the signal from the noise.
Most of the reported events are not caused by vaccines. VAERS is meant to be used as a tool for identifying possible rare vaccine side-effects. If a pattern emerges in VAERS reports, then there is further study.
As the FDA explains,[0]
> VAERS reports generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. Some events may occur coincidentally after the administration of a vaccine while others may in fact be caused by a vaccine. As a result, if a safety signal is found in VAERS, further studies can be conducted in safety systems such as the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), or the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project. These systems do not have the same limitations as VAERS and can better assess health risks and possible connections between adverse events and a vaccine.
Everything I've read suggests that the myocarditis associated with the vaccines is rarely more than a passing nuisance, and that the rate of myocarditis associated with catching the virus without being vaccinated is higher in the same age groups.
Do you have any evidence to base your statement on?
Looking at the "Controversial articles" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports does not give me much confidence in the rigorousness of "Scientific Reports"'s review process.
What do you think it would be reasonable to expect me to have, if in fact the article is wrong or dishonest in some way?
I am not a virologist or cardiologist or any other sort of medic. I have not gone to Israel and interviewed the people they worked with. I am guessing the same is true of you.
So what can I do? I can look at whether the authors seem reputable (answer: probably? -- the corresponding author for this paper seems to be somewhat conspiracy-theory-ish on this particular topic, but since the question at issue is roughly speaking whether he's found an actual conspiracy that doesn't seem like a good reason to dismiss what he says). I can look at whether the journal seems reputable (answer: not incredibly so, it seems to be publishing quite a lot of junk). I also note that there's a note attached to the paper saying that something about it is disputed and they're still discussing with the relevant parties; that could indicate a real problem or it could just indicate that anything to do with COVID-19 vaccines is likely to provoke controversy.
I could also read the paper. But, again, I am not an expert in this field; if it looks good, I could easily be missing subtle errors (accidental or deliberate); if it looks bad, I could easily be missing subtle reasons why the things that look wrong to me are actually right.
My reaction to a quick look at the paper, as a mathematician who doesn't know much about vaccines or viruses or cardiac arrests: I'm not going to try to redo their analysis, but the graphs suggest that if there's anything here it probably isn't much; the matchup they say they see between vaccination and emergency-service calls for cardiac arrests is not obviously any bigger than the random noise in the latter. Maybe sufficiently clever analysis can make it clear whether it's signal or noise, but figuring out whether their analysis is sufficiently clever (and sufficiently robust, and done correctly) seems like way more work than I am interested in doing on this.
(Also: even if the most alarming conclusions anyone could draw from the data are correct, the number of adverse events here is still really small compared with, say, the number of deaths from COVID-19. The paper chooses to describe it as "a 25% increase" but that's from a baseline of "hardly any". The fatality rate of COVID-19 would need to be a lot lower than it is (even for the age group they're looking at, where it's relatively low) for this effect, even if real, to make the vaccinations a bad idea. Of course it's still an interesting question whether getting vaccinated against COVID-19 can cause heart trouble, and if so how, and if so whether there are ways to make it happen less. And it might (though it's not altogether obvious[1]) be worth warning people getting vaccinated to be on the lookout for signs of myocarditis. Reminder: you posted this link in response to something asking for evidence that myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination is "a much, much bigger problem" than blood clotting after adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccination. It doesn't look to me as if the numbers bear that out even if the effect claimed in this paper is entirely real.)
[1] Because giving this sort of warning may increase stress, which is also not great for your heart.
Before covid vaccines came around, if a doctor said to you "don't worry, that myocarditis is just a passing nuisance," what would your response have been?
Or put another way, if you had this from covid itself and someone said to you "oh myocarditis is just a passing nuisance side effect of covid," how would you respond?
I would say "Thank you for reassuring me that even though this is a problem affecting my heart, which on the face of it sounds super-scary, it actually isn't all that threatening". (Well, probably I wouldn't be so explicit, and probably I would first ask some questions about what they meant by "passing nuisance". And I might be annoyed that a medical professional treating me was using dismissive-sounding language about something I found distressing, but obviously that particular annoyance isn't relevant when it's Some Guy On The Internet talking about it in the abstract.)
What if you knew myocarditis could have a risk of complications and your doctor said that? Wouldn't you prefer the doctor said 'generally it's temporary and will go away, but there are some potential complications and you should monitor for the following...' You shouldn't have to ask questions for that.
The way people are now happily accepting hand-waving away heart damage because someone said 'hey it's fine' is astonishing. I do truly hope it is a mostly transient issue, because we haven't done the long term studies yet.
Of course I would prefer my doctor to give me an accurate account of what's wrong with me and what its likely consequences are.
We are talking here about some guy in a brief Hacker News comment, talking to some other guy on Hacker News. The level of detail it's reasonable to demand is not the same in these two cases.
