[trimethylpurine]

In [1] "those who are not vaccinated" is a tiny subset of society that is actually composed of those who are infected, and also symptomatic, and also not vaccinated.

A large portion of society can't be counted because they are asymptomatic. How do you find them to count them? In fact that's nearly everyone. And for those people the vaccine increases their risk by 4/100,000. (More harm than good.)

Let me know if I've misunderstood.

[croon]

If we accept your (extremely unrealistic) premise, then sure, but the numbers get worse at just a 5% chance of contracting the virus itself, and downhill from there.

[trimethylpurine]

Can you show me that math?

Your premise is that COVID infection at just 5% is incredibly dangerous. But you can't actually say that without first knowing how many people were actually infected and asymptomatic. And you don't know that.

For all we know, everyone was infected, and infection is nearly harmless. Or it could be that it's way less contagious than that, and extremely deadly. You simply don't know. You'd need to make wild guesses without evidence.

We're supposed to be doing science, right? Seems to me your premise is the one that's unrealistic. Mine is firmly grounded in evidence that we DO have. Not guesses and doomsday religion.

[croon]

70/100k is baseline. 5/100k is vaccination. 200/100k is unvaccinated with covid.

With vaccination you're at 75/100k.

Without vaccination at 0% chance of covid you're at 70/100k.

Without vaccination at 5% chance you're at 77/100k (worse than 75 here), at 10% 83, etc, etc.

> We're supposed to be doing science, right? Seems to me your premise is the one that's unrealistic. Mine is firmly grounded in evidence that we DO have. Not guesses and doomsday religion.

There are plenty of studies linked in this thread, that you're simply ignoring.

[trimethylpurine]

See section 2.4. The "unvaccinated" group includes people with a history of myocarditis and pericarditis who had an episode during the study, and coupled with the fact that cases "without an episode" were excluded, we should expect that the numbers are very much inflated.

There indeed are plenty of studies linked. I'm not ignoring them, I'm using them to point out that they don't carry the implications necessary to recommend vaccination for everyone.

To make the claim that the vaccine LOWERED incidence of myocarditis even for those without covid, counter to so much other research (e.g. [0]), we would like to see that the study excludes people with a history of myocarditis.

Including them is cheating, quite simply.

Regardless, even if we did go with this Spanish study, you still can't say that a 5% chance of infection is worse. You can say that a 5% of symptomatic infection is worse. There isn't any study in the thread that includes asymptomatic infection, which we know is MOST infection.

So at least so far, I don't see that you have the math to back what appears to be an unscientific claim.

And when faced with the counter research below [0], defining the mechanism of action, we should assume that the risks are a valid concern. You can't just sweep them under the rug.

Most people who tested positive had no symptoms. Most people who didn't get tested also had no symptoms but were likely infected. All of those people shouldn't take on additional risk in their own self interest. At best you can claim that they should take on the risk to try to achieve herd immunity so as to protect others. And actually I'm not sure that we have the data to determine that either.

[0] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-v...

[croon]

In retrospective cohort studies, researchers track newly occurring incidents during the study window.

If someone has a history, but suffers a new episode from covid, that is a medical event that should be counted.

> Regardless, even if we did go with this Spanish study, you still can't say that a 5% chance of infection is worse. You can say that a 5% of symptomatic infection is worse.

Yes you can. The mechanism for the side effect (as per your own source) is the same in both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. Recipients of the vaccine do not get respiratory symptoms, and yet can contract the (very rare) side effects.

And as for your source, the author, Dr. Joseph Wu:

> “But COVID’s worse,” he added. A case of COVID-19 is about 10 times as likely to induce myocarditis as an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination, Wu said. That’s in addition to all the other trouble it causes.

[trimethylpurine]

You're not addressing the issue. 5% of what?

5% of symptomatic COVID cases. So now you have to compare that to only people with injuries from the vaccine.

Otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges.

If you want to compare people who got the vaccine to people who didn't, then you need to include ALL people who didn't. Not just the ones who were symptomatic.

And no, you can't include those people who had previous symptoms in the "everyone" group. Obviously those people are way more likely to return for treatment than the average Joe. They are skewing the sample because they are immediately nearly 100% likely to return for treatment. That is not representative of a random sample of people in the general population.

The question was about the general population, and they didn't sample the general population. They sampled people who come to the hospital. That is, only people with symptoms of some sort or another that are bad enough to warrant a journey to get treatment.

So all you can conclude is that people who come to the hospital have a higher frequency of heart conditions. And even that claim is not firmly established by the data, it's just a sensible inference. We expect that people who need treatment are more likely to seek treatment than those that don't need it. But there are countless counter examples there too. Hypochondria, etc.

No doubt if we had the data we'd find more problems there.

Wu's statement is fine, because again, it's not ALL people with COVID. His statement holds for people seeking treatment with COVID which is what they sampled.

Wu has no clue how many people have COVID asymptomatically and how to separate them from people without COVID altogether, and makes no claim about that.

You're simply making a claim that isn't in the research. Vaccination for people without COVID or with asymptomatic COVID is not researched or compared here.

This research, if you want to use it for a comparison, is for vaccination of people already coming to a hospital with symptoms of some kind.

EDIT: forgot to mention this was during a pandemic, so you might see significantly lower numbers for heart conditions if the study was repeated today. And it might be the case that during the pandemic it would have been a good idea to vaccinate everyone coming to a hospital from a statistical standpoint. But an even better take would be to identify what was common amongst the group with bad outcomes and vaccinate them, more specifically.

Regardless, nothing here implies better outcomes for everyone. It's not claimed by and it's not inferable from the research. And certainly not when there is a bunch of research showing contrary results to this study an example of which I linked earlier.

[tuesdaynight]

Why increase? Are you saying that asymptomatic people don't have myocarditis risk?

[trimethylpurine]

Because it's causally linked to myocarditis[0].

[0] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-v...

>Are you saying that asymptomatic people don't have myocarditis risk?

No.

[tuesdaynight]

I'm probably misunderstanding something, but if the overall population risk for myocarditis is bigger than 4/100,000, wouldn't that indicate that mRNA vaccinated people have a lower risk? The number I found for the global population is 10~20/100,000. If taking the vaccine increases the risk, wouldn't the risk be bigger than 10~20/100k?

[trimethylpurine]

If the risk went down the term for that is "inverse correlation." In that case it would be preventative, rather than causative. Here we are seeing a correlation and we have a known mechanism of action that's driving that (described in the Stanford study).

Is that making more sense?

In part though, you are right to be noticing that the Pfizer study and the Stanford study disagree on the risk profile.

Why might that be?

Well, for one thing, if you look up the peer reviewers for the Pfizer study, it's the same list of names as the ones that performed the research, and each one of them is a Pfizer employee. Unsurprisingly, the lower risk profile was found in a study conducted by the same drug company that stands to profit from a lower risk profile. And it's not peer reviewed. Typically we rely on peer reviewed research in the world of science and medicine. Without it, it becomes very difficult to differentiate a science article from advertising, and pseudoscience.

Conversely the Stanford study was done by various researchers from various schools with no conflict of interest and no apparent profit from Pfizer, as best I can tell. And as we'd expect, they found not only a causal link, not only a higher incidence rate, but also the mechanism of action that drives it.

[croon]

Then you also accept that the asymptomatic (unvaccinated) covid risk of myocarditis is higher than the vaccine risk, because it is.

[trimethylpurine]

See my other comment answering this. It's only higher if you don't trust peer reviewed research, and instead use the numbers provided by the drug company in a study that was not peer reviewed. See the list of peer reviewers in Pfizer's study and notice that they are the same as the researchers, and that they've made claims without providing their results (those are still being released over an 80 year period by FOIA court order, you'll get the results when we're all dead).

If you can't find a link to the court case on this, let me know. I'll find it for you.

[croon]

> those are still being released over an 80 year period by FOIA court order, you'll get the results when we're all dead

Are you referring to this [0]? It was solved years ago.

The study I posted in this thread that you're posting in is a peer-reviewed retrospective cohort study out of Spain. What is wrong with it?

[0] https://www.denvergazette.com/2022/01/07/judge-scraps-75-yea...

[trimethylpurine]

I wasn't aware that it was expedited, but I also wasn't able to find the documents. I did find that they were sued again to release them in Dec. 2024.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fda-must-disclose-m...

So, at least until then they continued to hide them.

Do you have a link to the documents, or any subsequent meta study?

And then we still need to resolve the issue of peer review.