I sort of thought that too; we've known it can cause myocarditis for years, it was the basis for people avoiding the mRNA vaccine (i.e. "clot shot"). Still though I'm happy to see people continuing to research this instead of just avoiding politically tense fields all-together
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Slowly the skeptics and the conspiracy theorists are getting proven correct in this case.
It’s unfortunate it’s taken so long for the hidden truth to come out. It’s also unfortunate they swept this under the rug which just increases people’s suspicion around vaccine safety. I hope they, the establishment, learn from this boondoggle.
This is an extremely rare event that was nonetheless detected by scientists who then nonetheless updated dosing guidelines to mitigate it as early as February 2022.
This has been an active area of focus since before the drugs were even released which is why such events were in fact tracked closely during the 30,000+ participant clinical trials.
Those gigantic clinical trials (some of the largest RCTs ever conducted) didn't detect this issue because of its extreme rarity.
This is exactly the drug development and post-market surveillance process working correctly. At every point (and even still) the risk calculus is heavily weighted toward vaccination for nearly everyone, and slightly weighted toward vaccination for the most SAE-prone group (young men).
And that's all assuming COVID doesn't have latent systemic effects like many viruses do (chickenpox, ebola, or measles come to mind).
The skeptics have been wrong at every turn. It's even too generous to say a broken clock is right twice a day.
>Those gigantic clinical trials (some of the largest RCTs ever conducted) didn't detect this issue because of its extreme rarity.
You assume good faith on their part. These studies are run by the same companies that stand to make billions based off the study outcomes. For example we know now when a toddler died in the Moderna covid RTC of cardiac arrest after vaccination they reportedly covered it up and didn't report it.
This all is starting to sound a lot like what happened with vioxx. Where an increase in heart problems was detected in RTC but covered up. Vioxx would go on to cause an estimated 50000 deaths from heart attack.
> These studies are run by the same companies that stand to make billions based off the study outcomes
No they're not. Studies are run by a distributed network of large, medium, and small businesses who are independently following the "recipe" designed by the pharma company.
Then this data is submitted back to the pharma company and collated into a report that is given to the FDA.
It is effectively impossible to systematically get a couple hundred or couple thousand independent trial sites to misreport safety data.
It is possible that the pharma company could manipulate data during collation, but unsurprisingly there is a vast infrastructure to detect this and gargantuan penalties for when they're discovered.
> For example we know now when a toddler died in the Moderna covid RTC of cardiac arrest after vaccination they reportedly covered it up and didn't report it.
This is literally not true. You can find the death reported in the exact regulatory filing exactly when and where it should have been reported. What happened is that a Substack author found it and has made it seem like it was not reported.
Re Vioxx comparison:
Sure we should always be vigilant for another Vioxx. The way we do that is through fair and levelheaded analysis of the data we have available. Right now, that analysis lands very clearly on the side of vaccines. At the scale of vaccine rollout, we would not need to squint to see signal of a major problem.
It is not rare at all. Fact is, as more and more data comes out we are becoming more and more aware that the Covid vaccines have caused severe damage.
Here is the data collated from 125 countries: there were about 31 million excess deaths across the 2020-23 period.
Spatiotemporal variation of excess all-cause mortality in the world (125 countries) during the Covid period 2020-2023 regarding socio-economic factors and public-health and medical interventions
https://hal.science/hal-05110349
If only there were some method by which we could disaggregate effects like these...
Perhaps we could get a huge number of people and then randomly assign some of them to a "treatment" group and then some to a "control" group. We don't tell people which group they're in. Then we measure whether they got wet.
The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.
> The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.
Major claim: COVID is not the correct explanation for the 31 million excess deaths during... COVID.
Reasons provided:
* Excess deaths didn't rise until after public healthy emergencies were declared (yeah, duh, emergencies were declared as testing showed extreme growth which occurs at least weeks prior to most deaths)
* Vast differences in mortality rate between political jurisdictions, even among those who shared borders (yeah, duh, sharing a border doesn't mean you have the same public health or data reporting systems as the county, state, or nation nearby)
* Erratic mortality patterns (yeah, duh, there's a seasonality to many viruses and one can quite obviously see that in excess mortality and also by uhh... living through winter...)
* Unstable economic correlations (yeah, duh, there were different interventions protecting or exposing different people disproportionately at different times)
So all of these things they say disprove the virus hypothesis.
It was the scientific community who first found an association between the vaccine and myocarditis and who then established a more causative effect, who determined its probability, its target demographic, and now who is figuring out the underlying mechanisms.
And even the risk assessment hasn't changed, the scientific community was still right in that the risk from the vaccine of this side effect is much lower to that of Covid itself.
So I'm really not following your logic, your statement seems plain false to me.
> However, Wu noted, if the inflammation is severe the resulting heart injury can be quite debilitating, leading to hospitalizations; ICU admissions for critically ill patients; and deaths, albeit rarely.
> “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.
I recall hearing about this as a low-probability potential side effect during the pandemic. What do you mean by "swept this under the rug"?
Who, specifically, urged them and what was the exact request? There was plenty of open scientific discussion on this point so it’s not like it was a secret but, as this article also notes, the risk is significantly higher from COVID.
I mean your being a bit obtuse if you don't think there was a stigma around criticizing the vaccine in 2021/22.
Writing a LinkedIn/Facebook post about how the vaccine causes heart problems might result in you losing your job and would definitely cause you to lose a few friends. There was a massive stigma around pointing out flaws in vaccines at that time, it was not a nuanced issue, either you were all in or you were a psycho anti-vax nut.
The problem is that if you're criticizing the vaccine for this, you're at best uninformed, and quite often, doing so in bad faith.
As has been pointed out in the thread you're responding to, it causes these effects at lower rates and lower severities than just getting covid while unvaccinated. It's also just something we've known some flu vaccines to do for decades now. (And just the regular old flu can cause it, too)
Vaccines can cause myocarditis. This isn't new information, it's not specific to Covid vaccines or mRNA vaccines. It's a well known potential side effect of vaccines. We've known that flu vaccines can cause myocarditis and pericarditis for a long, long, time.
But importantly, just like other flu vaccines, the Covid vaccines cause them at lower rates than getting infected while unvaccinated, and the actual severity is also lower.
The article says "Stanford Medicine investigators have unearthed the biological process by which mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 can cause heart damage in some young men and adolescents — and they’ve shown a possible route to reducing its likelihood." That's very different from the headline.
It's pretty well-established by this point that mRNA Covid vaccines caused myocarditis in younger males. They also protected against the significantly higher risk of myocarditis from Covid itself. This second point is conveniently omitted by the "skeptics and conspiracy theorists" when they cry vindication.
Yeah, the skeptics and conspiracy theorists want to roll back time and prevent any vaccination at all (or have the smugness of saying "See, we were right, there shouldn't have been any vaccination at all!"), because of a 1 in 16750 peak incidence rate among a group, and "Fortunately, most of these cases end well, Wu said, with full heart function retained or restored. Recovery is typically swift.".
“See, we were right, there shouldn't have been any vaccination at all!”
Nobody sane says that. Such rhetoric is a divisive wedge.
Same people would have liked to see an open honest discussion about the vaccine. Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion. All medicine has side effects… but these fuckers were on a mission. Anything remotely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, not everybody should get a vaccine… oh boy can’t have that.
But if you want to mis-characterize things, by all means do so.
> Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion. All medicine has side effects… but these fuckers were on a mission. Anything remotely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, not everybody should get a vaccine… oh boy can’t have that.
Heh, who's mis-characterizing things? As I recall there was a lot of "the risks are within limits", rather than the authorianism you're characterizing...
I mean I heard about it and I don't seek out fringe websites and sources. I'm pretty middle-of-the-road in my news sources. So how "suppressed" was it, really?
> Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion.
What's ironic here is the other responses - vehemently defending this authoritarian thought control; while for the last two weeks, we get daily posts reaching the HN front page criticizing EU chat control/age verification/VPN ban/etc.
It's true what they say - "you don't oppose the boot, you just want to be the one wearing it".
> But if you want to mis-characterize things, by all means do so.
People were allowed to have open and honest discussion about things. I saw plenty of discussion about myocarditis at the time from reputable sources and in reasonable manners.
But they were all pointing out that this is just an aspect of flu vaccines, that we had known it could happen even with regular flu vaccines for a long time, that the incident rate is lower than just getting covid (or the flu) in general, and that the severity was also less than that of if you had gotten it as a result of covid.
Because that's a better picture of reality because it gives you the full context.
Instead of pointing out that whole context, a whole lot of people left it at "it's the clot shot! it gives you myocarditis!"
And despite this apparent widespread suppression that everyone claims was going on, this bad-faith misrepresentation of the reality of the situation was all over the place. I saw many times more people spouting misinformation than I did the actual full details of this stuff. Like .01% of the potentially fatal misinformation got cleaned up and people are acting like there was this brutal suppression of the truth.
> Same people would have liked to see an open honest discussion about the vaccine. Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion. All medicine has side effects… but these fuckers were on a mission. Anything remotely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, not everybody should get a vaccine… oh boy can’t have that.
This is absolutely untrue: what were suppressed by various sites were outright lies and misrepresentation. There was continuously a vigorous discussion about vaccine efficacy and safety, who should be prioritized, etc. and the people who engaged in it scientifically had nothing to fear. The people who were lying about vaccination now claim that’s what they were doing but anyone who watched it at the time could easily see the difference.
That’s a vague hypothetical so I can’t answer it but in this case I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers for ideological reasons, so it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
Don't take this the wrong way, but the run on sentences are quite hard to parse.
> That’s a vague hypothetical
Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.
> I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers
This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
> it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Yes, people are going to say wrong things, and mislead other people. But the cost to suppress this speech is far, far more detrimental than letting it be.
> Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.
Speech restriction being able to be abused doesn't mean that speech restriction is never appropriate. There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.
> This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.
> Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.
> The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property. This isn't a societal priest class.
Even an extremely slanted Supreme Court didn't find that the actions of the government had significant influence on social media companies and their tamping down of covid misinformation.
> There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.
Great. Waiting for your argument on why this is one of them.
> If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.
I'm curious, how did you come to know that everyone who is asking questions not in line with the consensus belief is a bad faith operator? And what makes you able to assess the framework behind their questions?
> Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.
This is exactly the problem. You're equating the small minority of folks who are using their speech to defraud with the remainder of the "dissent group" (for lack of a better term) who is trying to get to the truth. Then, by claiming the existence of the minority's speech is incredibly dangerous, attempt to ban anything not in line with the orthodoxy.
I'm not defending people using their speech to profit politically or financially. I'm saying the benefit of getting rid of that speech is not worth the collateral damage that would inflict.
How did the folks that questioned the early "masks aren't effective" claim stand to profit? Or the claim that the virus definitely 100% had zoonotic origin? Maybe you believe they were heavily invested in mask manufacturing companies and were imminently about to launch a political campaign on a Sinophobic platform?
> Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property.
There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not sure how much you've gone into the details of what you're saying, but:
- "free speech is not absolute" is not normative, but descriptive (not really relevant to our discussion)
- "private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property" Wrong. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R.... Whether this applies to social media is currently being tested in our court system.
- SCOTUS saying "not much came of this" doesn't mean nobody was wronged, or that much couldn't have come of it. Also, doesn't this (govt intervention in speech) directly contradict your claim that it was just private companies acting in their own domain?
> This isn't a societal priest class.
You're literally advocating for a priest class, who is blessed to discuss "science", because they are doing it in the way that you interpret as "good faithed" and have the right "framework" behind their discourse. Which is exactly what qualified the religious leaders of old times.
I'm incredibly grateful to not live in a time where only certain people could speak on particular topics. I wish more people were.
Hard to disagree here because the skeptics were saying everything at once. It was peak misinformation: It doesn't work. It doesn't help. It is worse than the infection. Ivermectin works better. It causes heart damage. It causes brain damage. I gave it to my dog and my dog died 3 months later. Etc.
1. "Putting seat-belts in cars and making us wear them!? That's nothing but a dangerous government conspiracy! For your own safety, never wear the annoying and evil devices!"
2. "OMG, look at this! Scientists had no choice but to admit the horrible seat-belts do cause injuries on people during a crash!"
Original (emphasis mine): >> Stanford Medicine study shows why mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis
Transcribed to an HN headline here: >> Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis
A significant difference, no?
Why?
----
After reading the article at Stanford, the word I'd choose is 'how' as in 'how vaccines can cause myocarditis'.
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