This is comparing myocarditis to hospitalizations.

Where is the comparison between myocarditis induced by vaccination vs natural infection?

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

“Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.”

This is out of date and incorrect. The latest data shows that the risk of myocarditis in children after two doses vastly exceeds the risk of myocarditis posed by the virus:

https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1437876328640876544

Better breakdowns by age and gender show a risk of myocarditis after two doses as high as 1 in 3000:

https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1437067899089219589

This number has been steadily increasing, as time passes. Current consensus seems to be that one dose is the optimal tradeoff between risk and reward for young children.

Within that Twitter thread, there’s an interesting article on science based medicine that goes into this topic in detail.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-ant...

That report doesn’t appear to talk about case rates of myocarditis due to COVID at all. It compares COVID hospitalization rates to vaccine-related myocarditis case rates. Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?

Covid hospitalizations are a superset of myocarditis cases. If you broke out Covid-induced myocarditis, the comparison would be even more lop-sided against the vaccines.

> Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?

Yes. It is not an assumption. Myocarditis is not a mild condition, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Hmm. https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccin...

> With or without treatment, the "clinical course appears mild"

> Patients commonly received NSAIDs, steroids, and colchicine for treatment of vaccine-associated myocarditis.

These are.. not comparable to typical COVID hospitalization outcomes, are they?

In children? Yes.

The (very) few kids who end up hospitalized for Covid have serious co-morbidities that are easy to pre-screen (e.g. severe obesity). For these children, a full vaccination is recommended. Nobody is arguing about that. For healthy kids, it's very different.

It's great that most kids with myocarditis don't end up in the ICU, but being put in the hospital to get hooked up to an IV and an MRI scan is not a good outcome for an otherwise healthy kid who would would have -- at most -- a head cold from SARS-CoV2.

Even if we accept this reasoning (It’s not clear to me that the myocarditis cases are more than ‘call your doc, rest up and take ibuprofen’, and I believe that applies to cases among non-hospitalized COVID patients too), but the last I saw the effective reproduction rate for COVID was >1, so every otherwise healthy kid who gets a ‘head cold’ is also going to pass it on to someone else, right?

> Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid.

How many avoided death because they had good health care?

One of my pet peeves about this pandemic is how death metrics keep being pushed around, as if it was not a big deal.

If this pandemic had hit before we had modern health care facilities, it would have been comparable to the great pandemics in history.

Besides, what happened to the children that didn't die? What sort of issues this could cause that may affect their development? We don't know, so we should play it safe.

> from the vaccine

There isn't just one vaccine. There are several. If one is potentially causing issues, use another.

Also, what about heart problems from Covid-19, even among those not hospitalized?

I can't read your paywalled article, but I've found another link. The 'heart problems' are myocarditis, which in most cases is mild and _resolves_ by itself.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

> How many avoided death because they had good health care?

If you are going play that game, you also need to ask how many died between March - June 2020 because of panicked doctors intubating everyone left and right with no one around to advocate for the patients.

> you also need to ask how many died between March - June 2020 because of panicked doctors intubating everyone left and right with no one around to advocate for the patients.

Not sure what this is implying, or what kind of advocacy would have made a better call. Doctors intubated people (despite a shortage of ventilators and the difficulty of triage) because the patients were struggling to breathe, and given available data the medical profession though it would help those patients recover. They've since learned more about the outcomes from this particular disease and when a ventilator is appropriate. Your comment makes it sound as though any idiot off the street could tell who should be on a ventilator and who should not.

I'm not sure why death is the only thing we're trying to avoid. Currently, children's ICUs in Oklahoma are full in part due to the number of Covid patients. I'd rather my child not end up in the hospital, much less be turned away from one in a time of need.

What is the baseline utilization of ICU space? I’m also curious what happened to those heroic efforts of retrofitting parking garages into field-expedient hospitals. Oh, and the notorious “gunshot victims are being left to die because of all the covid, bros!” misinformation that respectable journalists printed without any effort to check the facts.

>that respectable journalists printed without any effort to check the facts.

Journalists from the same publication (Rolling Stone) were responsible for the whole fabricated "A Rape On Campus" article as well. I would not give them the respectable journalist moniker anymore except in jest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus

Then you should be concerned about the considerable risk they will end up there due to heart inflammation (in the case of male children).

Edit: I'm not going to respond to every comment below that points out that it's extremely rare, other than to ask that you compare that chance to the chance of hospitalization due to covid, which according to the link above is less likely.

Source for “considerable risk” needed.

It’s still considered extremely rare post vaccination.

The sources are literally three comments up! And the point is that the risk is higher than the risk from COVID!

“ Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19.”

This is comparing rates of myocarditis vs rates of hospitalization, which is two different things.

We would need to see rates of myocarditis due to vaccination vs rates of myocarditis due to natural infection.

Plus that's comparing one risk of the vaccine to one risk of the virus. You need a holistic comparison. COVID messes you up in lots of other ways too, ways in which the vaccine does not.

I'm curious how, in your mind, myocarditis is being diagnosed and reported in children if not at the hospital?

Heart inflammation is not typical in children or adolescents. This is not based on self-reporting.

Are you aware that UK regulators have not approved the vaccine for 12-15 year-olds (or any children younger), based on this risk, specifically?

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669

> myocarditis is being diagnosed and reported in children if not at the hospital?

The vast majority of people who visit a doctor are diagnosed with no hospitalization and the recommended course for most myocarditis cases is not hospitalization. If the recommendation were hospitalization then many more infected young males would be hospitalized based on myocarditis diagnosis.

“Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.” [0]

So there’s a preprint stating that COVID-19 causes myocarditis at a higher rate than via vaccination. So it’s not quite clear to me whether or not, if looking at it from a risk of myocarditis, that not getting vaccinated is the better choice.

And according to the JCVI, it still is marginally beneficial to get vaccinated over not getting vaccinated. So it’s not like they are advising that natural infection is safer than vaccination.

“For otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year old children, their risk of severe COVID-19 disease is small and therefore the potential for benefit from COVID-19 vaccination is also small. The JCVI’s view is that overall, the health benefits from COVID-19 vaccination to healthy children aged 12 to 15 years are marginally greater than the potential harms.” [1]

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...

The part of the JCVI decision you omitted is:

"The medium- to long-term effects are unknown and long-term follow-up is being conducted.

Given the very low risk of serious COVID-19 disease in otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced and a precautionary approach was agreed." [1]

As a concerned parent, this is how I will be approaching vaccination for my sons.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...

The term hospitalization implies an inpatient (or at least observation) stay, as opposed to an outpatient encounter like the emergency department or a clinic. Most diagnoses made in the outpatient setting do not require hospitalization, which could include both COVID and myo/pericarditis.

EDIT: speling

Did you miss the data point that boys are 6x more likely to be affected from the therapy than the illness?

That "data point" is that that group is 6x more likely to be affected by myocarditis after receiving a vaccine than to be hospitalized due to COVID. I would like to see an actually useful comparison, like, say, the likelihood of being affected by myocarditis after receiving a vaccine versus the likelihood of being affected by myocarditis after a COVID infection.

Myocarditis, in this circumstance, were cases reported in VAERS, which isn't a mild or asymptomatic condition -- it usually means hospitalization. Furthermore, the researchers who have been analyzing the rates are going back to the VAERS records and actually looking at the case data.

These are severe enough cases to require medical attention.

This is a blatant misrepresentation.

Many of us view that claim with skepticism and prefer that the analysis of this data be left to experts who understand how misleading data can be.

you're deferring thinking to an unnamed mystery expert and then arguing on behalf of that unnamed mystery expert as if you know what they'd say. lol, just lol.

The cdc link provided raw numbers. The telegraph link is a journalist deducing a conclusion. I don’t think any experts provided any conclusive evidence in this thread (which I gather was the point of the comment you replied to)

Anyone can claim to be an expert. Once one comes forward we can evaluate to see if their claims hold up.

In this case experts have pointed out that the analysis is wrong because it doesn't compare mycardius in the control group even through we know covid also causes that. Nor do they consider harm, despite vaccine caused mycardious being mild.

Did you miss the point where any death is likely preventable and 400+ in the US is still too many ?

Kids can also be carriers, and more spread among a partially resistant population means more mutation and more variants. Vaccines are in the process of being approved for all ages.

Vaccinated individuals can also carry it. It does not stop spread or contraction. These Vaccines are just supposed to reduce the extreme Symptoms

No they are not. They are supposed to allow the immune system to react more quickly after infection (essentially immediately if you have antibodies).

Kill pathogens more quickly, you'll be infectious for less time, and whoever do you infect will have a lower viral load.

That's incorrect. Vaccinated people are contracting Covid at a bit less than 1/5 the rate of the unvaccinated. See for example

https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...

I think it is very likely that vaccinated people are contracting COVID-19 less than unvaccinated people, but because most testing is done on symptomatic people, and the vaccine is known to reduce symptoms, the sampling bias is likely overstating the effect.

Vaccination greatly reduces transmission.

Vaccinations reduce your chance of getting infected and reduce the average duration of the infection. The combination of these two factors thus reduce the R value of covid in vaccinated populations when compared to unvaccinated populations with identical network topologies and behaviors.

Stop? No. Reduce? Yes.

"A growing body of evidence indicates that people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna) are less likely than unvaccinated persons to acquire SARS-CoV-2 or to transmit it to others."

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

It's nothing to do with them catching it, it's about them spreading it.

The usually bandied figure is 80% immunity to stop the pandemic.

Without the teenagers vaccinated, that's never going to get hit.

Wait until winter hits and the cases spike, then it's suddenly going to become "necessary", but if they'd made that hard decision 3 months ago this would already be over.

How can they know that figure (80%) without knowing % of people with natural immunity? We can guess but there hasn't been much of an effort made to track this.

If you mean anti-bodies, then they've been sampling the population and know the percent of people who've got anti-bodies.

If you mean something else, you're a victim of fake news.

> The usually bandied figure is 80% immunity to stop the pandemic.

That was pre-Delta. The higher the R0, the more mitigation we need to do. The question is what gets RE below zero.

At this point, with Delta's R0 and the vaccine's effectiveness, it looks like mere vaccination without masks is going to be insufficient in large groups (e.g. at a giant concert, a big play). But, since all the precautions have a multiplier, that's fine. It means we can keep doing those things as long as we take precautions while we do it and not assume vaccine = ignore COVID.

Good thing the only thing that matters is death, not any other issue.

Good thing children never transmit viruses to adults.

Good thing reservoirs of disease never allow for novel mutations.

Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare projections in one case to actual results in the other.

Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare one rate in the general population to a rate in an already selected group.

Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare self-reported issues to actually verified cases.

Good thing your source[1] didn't make a big deal about the huge multiplier difference between two exceedingly small numbers (0.01622% vs 0.00261%)

Good thing your source[1] didn't falsely imply "hospitalization" and "myocarditis " as equivalently severe, ignoring that the myocarditis responded well and quickly to treatment[2] whereas COVID does not, leading to long hospital stays and/or ventilation and/or death.

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...

Please don't argue in the flamewar style on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It is exactly what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not arguing with you, but I'm not 100% sure what specifically was wrong. Can I trouble you to provide a little more context? Was it stylistic? I originally wrote up my issues with his source as a paragraph, but that seemed harder to read. Was it the repetitive beginning of each line? Or was I just being too snarky?

Oh, and sorry.

Yes, too snarky, and that sort of repetition is a rhetorical device that acts as a hammer. It is a device for political battle, not curious conversation. No one speaks that way in a conversation.

The thing about comments like that is that they polarize the discussion even further, because those who agree with you will become intensified in their agreement while those who disagree with you will react the way people react when someone hammers them repeatedly. This kind of polarization makes curious conversation impossible, because curious conversation has to do with maintaining connection across differences.

Good thing people under 18 are never in contact with people over 18.

Minor correction.

That 412 number is "covid involved", not "covid caused".

This could be that the death was not at all due to covid, but the cadaver tested positive. They were in a car accident, for example.

This could be actually caused by covid primarily.

This could be covid tipped someone over the edge who was already very ill.

EDIT: also hospitalizations for children are rare

https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html

If you are skeptical and think "COVID involved" according to CDC might mean they could have died of other things but also happened to have COVID, then here is an exercise you should do: First, go to CDC and download all the death data for 2015-2020. Second, import this into your spreadsheet of choice and plot all of these deaths as 6 individual time-series plots with Jan-Dec as the X axis. Third, observe that the curves are nearly identical for 2015-2019, with the exception of a very slightly elevated curve for one of the flu seasons (I think it was the tail end of 2017 / start of 2018). Now observe that the curve for 2020 has several giant bumps in it that precisely correlate with the COVID surges in both size and shape. Calculate the area between that curve and any of the previous years. Now observe that it very, very closely matches the number the CDC is reporting as "covid involved" deaths for 2020.

I did this. This is quite convincing to me that the "COVID involved" deaths are not mis-categorized and they actually are related to COVID unless CDC is straight up fabricating death numbers on a massive scale. The stories about the COVID death categorizations being overstated are pure FUD.

The OP asked about kids specifically. Counterpoint:

> Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid.

> Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities

> Six had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years - though researchers caution some illnesses may have been missed

Were the children with complex neuro-disabilities pushed over the edge by covid? Quite possibly. Is that a reason for parents of healthy children to worry? Unlikely.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717

> This could be that the death was not at all due to covid, but the cadaver tested positive. They were in a car accident, for example.

That's not how "covid involved" is defined, no.

Source?

EDIT: please post a url or something.

The CDC documentation for the data they publish.

> Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19.

What use is it to compare two different things? Those heart problems aren't all hospitalizations. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to have heart problems than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Many young men have died of COVID-19, and none have died of the vaccine.

> Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]

More than twice as many died in August as in July or as in August of last year. With Delta and school in session, expect this number to go up for September.