I am vaccinated but I am upvoting this post because I believe that it is important to investigate these cases to determine how to improve future vaccines. I really don't like how this topic seems to be treated like some fringe conspiracy theory. Maybe it is just a conspiracy, but we won't ever know until sufficient research has been done. Currently, I still believe that people should vaccinate, even if vaccines cause…
Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
571–580 of 662 posts
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#572A question for vaccine skeptics: For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid? There seems to be a lot of "aha I knew it" whenever any side-effect of the vaccine is found, but aren't the side-effects of covid well established,…
According to my governments stats, the COVID-19 hospitalization rate for my age + health cohort, when modestly adjusted for their known undercount of cases, is less than 1 in 3000. Also by their stats, more than 1 in 2000 4-dose mRNA vaccine series have resulted in a serious adverse event reported by a health professional. Then, factoring in the additional risk of acquiescing bodily autonomy to an opaque bureaucracy…
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is a weird way of demonstrating a link. They picked them specifically for that, it can't be evidence of something. If they selected 25 people who died of myocarditis regardless of vaccination status or recency, and all 25 turned out to have been recently vaccinated, that would be scary data. It's perfectly valid as an idea, although a lot of statistical work would need to be done to show that it wasn't just hap…
> Consider a depoliticized example: you do 30 autopsies on people who had recently been to a particular location, let's say a certain grocery store in town. Enough people go to this grocery store that it's not uncommon for way more than 30 recent visitors to be dead unexpectedly by random chance. Further, let's say in the general population, a tiny fraction of people die of a certain food-borne illness. You have a pr…
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common? You forgot to account for the risk of getting the virus. If you choose to get the vaccine, the probability is 1. But what's the probability of getting Covid? Definitely less than 1. For certain age groups (young men), the risk of complications * probability of getting the vaccine (1) was more than the risk of compli…
> Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people... Having seen the impact of covid on young family members and others in my extended social circles, I believe that there's a long tail of effects that we won't be able to see the full picture of for years to come. There's a lot more that should be considered in the decision than just risk of death.
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://time.com/6170735/how-many-people-have-had-covid-19/ It's 60%. Probably. Meanwhile most vaccinated people have had 2-4 shots. Also keep in mind immunity doesn't last forever, so you need to balance the risk of the shot within a certain timeframe versus the risk of Covid times the risk of complications within the same timeframe. You also can't compare the lifetime risk of Covid versus only 1 shot, both occur wi…
60% of the population over a 5 month period had detectable levels of antibodies in their blood, so it's at least 60%. IIRC they are only detectable for a few months (but that maybe also depend on the way of testing I don't know) which would means it's closer to 100% than to 60%. The risk comparison is indeed not trivial, but I think it's a safe bet that you're going to get covid.
There's ~3 possibilities after an infection happens:
* A person's innate immune system quickly fights off the virus. This is a generic set of defenses in our bodies that are always active, and if they succeed then you don't create antibodies in the first place.
* Detectable antibodies, meaning your innate immune system wasn't enough and your adaptive immune system took care of it.
* Antibodies have faded and are no longer detectable. You can still do a T-Cell test (more costly, may take longer?) to find out if you can rapidly create new antibodies, which would mean you're still good despite no longer having antibodies.
There's also the issue of the type of antibodies. The mRNA vaccines are only coding for the spike protein, so your body only learns to fight that - but the virus has mutated away from what's currently in the vaccines. Natural/recovered immunity creates a variety of antibodies that work against different parts of the virus, so that's still effective even against "vaccine escape" variants.
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “I drove my car off a cliff to really stick it to society” Strawman. > What’s warmed my heart is most Covid deaths being from the unvaccinated. Clearing out the weak and stupid even sooner than natural causes. And the wailing and gnashing of teeth continues. You sound like a nasty, sick person xcrunner529. They don't make a jab for that. EDIT: I will give you the benefit of the doubt though, in the spirit of this w…
The vaccine has stayed just as effective for serious disease as it always was said. I am undeniably safer with the vaccine than without as I have actual family members who like you bought into the “vaccine bad” propaganda and died an early death from…COVID. There really should be real life DARWIN awards. The great thing, it’s mostly right wing voters dying. :)
It wasn't, this is just how you're coping with your cognitive dissonance.
> There really should be real life DARWIN awards.
There are. They are called the Darwin Awards. They have a website and everything.
> The great thing, it’s mostly right wing voters dying. :)
No I know you don't really mean it, you're just angry and lashing out because you've been wrong and humiliated so many times. You're a good person deep down I think.
And surprise surprise, you're wrong about this too. Vaccination rates correlate highly with age, and so do right wing political beliefs.
Because the vaccine is more beneficial for older people. And people can in fact make reasonable decisions about their health. Incredible isn't it?
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#577Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which inconvenient fact am I ignoring? I took screen shots almost daily of all-cause mortality stats through the lockdown. The entire time it tracked pretty close to the expected linear increase that we see year over year with an aging population, with the exception of a bump in April that was almost exclusively New York City. Given the reported quality of care issues that drove a lot of that, there are still a lot o…
The data is easy to find. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-... I wonder what happened in 2020 and beyond that so many more died? It must just be the weather
But here, I'll save you some time. Those pretty graphs you're linking to use the HMD database as the primary source through Feb 2021.
Take a look at how the HMD database derives it's numbers [1].
Now we can discuss the issue in rational, educated terms.
[1]https://www.mortality.org/File/GetDocument/Public/Docs/Metho...
Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#579Re: Autopsy-based characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
That first part is a mistaken belief. There's also a useful metric for the "chance of dying" - it's known as a micromort. Each micromort is a one in a million chance of dying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort A fair bit of statistical work has been done on COVID-19 and it is summarized in the wikipedia article. AstraZeneca vaccination against COVID-19 – 2.9 micromorts[31] COVID-19 infection at age 10 – 20 micro…
We have to be extremely cautious when considering any of the death-related statistics for this particular situation. For example, we know that a dubious methodology was used for counting deaths in Toronto (Canada's most populous city, and the fourth most populous city in North America). This was publicly admitted to by Toronto Public Health itself, as early as June 2020: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but…
> "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
I don't know the particulars of Toronto Public Health, but this wasn't uncommon for immediate reporting vs death record reporting. Since, in many places, comprehensive death records can take a few weeks (or longer!) to go through the pipeline before ending up on finalized reports, it's useful to have more immediate death reporting during a pandemic. Such immediate reporting is necessarily going to be a little rougher around the edges, but it generally gets you pretty close to the real numbers.
But, it's absolutely true that this immediate reporting isn't perfect. Still, it's very useful, and usually close enough for near term needs. Taking the Toronto example, the main tradeoffs are that a) you include some deaths where Covid wasn't actually a contributing factor and b) you miss deaths where the person was never tested for Covid (especially applicable to deaths that occurred at home). Often, these two somewhat balanced themselves out, but only in places with fairly high levels of testing.
Then, in the medium to longer term, you can switch over to relying on more comprehensive death records. This helps to filter out non-causal scenarios (e.g. the "hit by bus, tested positive for covid, died" scenarios). It also helps add in cases that were initially missed (had symptoms of covid, never went to hospital, died at home, etc).
Finally, to validate numbers, we can also look at excess deaths. This helps ensure that we're not wildly off base with reported numbers. Excess deaths isn't a perfect metric to compare to, but it's still a great benchmark.
To wrap up this comment, let me respond to this:
> We have to be extremely cautious when considering any of the death-related statistics for this particular situation.
I fully agree, but.. I would suggest that your comment missed a lot of the accuracy refinement that happens in practice over the medium to longer term. Additionally, it's very much worth pointing out that, with additional analysis (from death records, from excess death analysis, etc), we've found that very few places were likely over-reporting Covid deaths, but that a significant number of places were under-reporting Covid deaths. So, yes, take shorter term Covid death stats with a grain of salt, but know that we've generally ended up reporting too low, not too high.