[tsimionescu]

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?

[briandon]

"Increased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine rollout and third COVID-19 wave" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z

[gjm11]

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.

[briandon]

All you've got in terms of a response is FUD.

[gjm11]

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.

[headsoup]

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?

[gjm11]

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.)

[headsoup]

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.

[gjm11]

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.

[jebronie]

Calling myocarditis "a passing nuisance" is absolutely insane.