My teenage athlete nephew mysteriously developed heart problems right around after he got vaccinated, and now he can barely walk up a flight of stairs. No one is going to say the vaccine caused it, but the timing seems pretty damning. Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in a car.

Personally I don't believe that we are living in a rational society right now. For the fun of it, maybe I'll figure out one of those browser plugins to replace the word "science" with "propaganda".

> Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in a car

You have to look at the CDC stats and the vehicle fatalities to make this claim. "Risk from riding in a car" is extremely low. 0.008% of teens die annually (2400 out of 30 million, age 13-19) in car accidents.

Case fatality rates from COVID are an order of magnitude higher for that age group -- 0.04-0.06%, depending on your source -- so you'd have to believe case underreporting by 100x (impossible, since cases are > 1% of population everywhere) in order for risk from "riding in a car" to be "at least an order of magnitude" higher.

Okay. I already did that in recent memory, which is why I felt confident stating what I did.

Since you gave a statistic for car accidents, I'll do the same for the covid side: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Since the start of 2020, there have been 576 "All Deaths involving COVID-19" among people under 18 in the US. Compared to 60,811 deaths from all causes, that's slightly less than 1% of all child deaths.

The 576 covers almost two years, so let's call it 300 deaths/year. Not accounting for the slight difference in age ranges, that's 1/8 your number of 2400 deaths/year from car accidents. I'd call that roughly one order of magnitude lower. If you clump in children under 13 in your car accident statistic, I suspect it would fall below 1/10.

Is my math wrong or is your math wrong? If my math is wrong I would love to understand why.

I think your math doesn't distinguish between rates and amounts: indeed, if every kid in the US got COVID and only 600 died, then sure, you could make the claim that it's less risky than driving. (Also, the pandemic would be over, rendering this whole conversation moot.)

The truth is we don't know how many kids in the US have had COVID, but I'm pretty sure it's not 100% of them -- which is why the number I cite is the estimated case fatality rate and not just the total number of cases.

If you throw in an unknown scaler and fudge it, then yes you can make the statistic do whatever you want. I'd argue it's not a relevant or useful statistic, though. It's analogous to you telling me my risk of dying from a bullet to the head is near 100%. It's technically true, but I'm not going to super glue a kevlar helmet to my head.

What’s the unknown scalar? We know the case fatality rate.

Oh, my apologies, I originally misinterpreted one of your earlier messages when you brought up underreporting.

I understand where the 0.05% case rate number comes from (reported deaths divided by reported cases). I do personally think the reported deaths number is probably slightly over-reported and the reported cases is significantly underreported.

Even if the case fatality rate is accurate, I just don't think it's useful when assessing personal risk unless you routinely go out of your way to catch covid. If you start getting into that level of detail, you at least need to correct for comorbidities as well.

Specifically, when I say that it's an order of magnitude less likely for a teenager to die from covid than a car accident, I don't mean a teenager that caught covid or a teenager that was in a car accident. I mean a randomly sampled teenager out of the 60 million or so in the US.

I was thinking about it a bit more. Apparently the fatality rate of car accidents is 0.7%, so comparing that to a covid case rate of 0.06%, it seems like it's still an order of magnitude less fatal for a teenager to get into a car accident than to catch covid. It's been an interesting discussion, and I've enjoyed diving into the numbers more. Thanks!

Perhaps he got the vaccine in the bloodstream as opposed to muscle tissue as intended.

There are reports now of injections done without pulling back to see whether the injection site is a blood vessel. How the drug performs is seriously different in blood stream vs muscle tissue.

The primary impact of blood stream doses appears to be heart related problems.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/

TL;DR: The vaccine probably did not cause it. How it was administered could be the cause.

I mean come on, if the administration of the vaccine caused it, the vaccine caused it. If he hadn't gotten the vaccine, it would not have been (as conjectured) injected into his bloodstream.

Fact is, how it gets injected appears to have a very significant influence on it's impact to the patient.

There is a clear distinction here; namely, whether the vaccine was improperly used.

Taking too much Tylonol can cause liver failure. Too much Ibuprofen can cause renal failure...

In those cases, the drug was improperly used, but the cause analysis centers on improper use, because doing that multiplies the risk and symptom severity.

See how that all works?

Saying the "vaccine caused it" simply is not enough information, which is why I linked what I did.

It is important that we get these discussions right.

Edit:

In the interest of accuracy, note I did not say the vaccine did not cause the trouble. I said it probably did not cause it, and I said improper injection probably did.

Neither is an absolute. I did not intend, nor mean to imply otherwise. What I did intend was to improve on the clarity, scope and accuracy of the discussion.

Why bother?

Better discussion means more informed people taking fewer risks and or making more good choices, all of which will improve law, costs, outcomes.

Getting back to the matter at hand, when we factor the elements down, we see one thing we can do right away, and that is we make damn sure we are administering vaccines properly.

There are risks with the vaccine. They are small by percentage, but they are there. No argument from me.

Those risks go up dramatically with improper injection; namely, it being delivered directly to the blood stream, which is entirely avoidable.

That's a fair point. It seems to me like the government is pressuring people into taking a vaccine that isn't being properly administered en masse, and all the parties involved are both protected from liability and aren't being transparent about it, all to mitigate a trivial amount of risk.

I just saw an article yesterday talking about Pfizer making $36 billion on vaccines this year.

I see it that way too.

We do not have absolutes to work with here.

The damn Covid is novel, meaning we get our education together, the hard way and that sucks.

And that means being smart about probabilities and potential cost and risk outcomes matters a lot! Doing that is harder than necessary too.

A small investment in proper injection can seriously reduce vaccine risks, for example. That is real news as far as I am concerned and that should be acted on STAT. And you just gotta know the optics on all that complicate and likely bias action away from optimal too.

My own first injection was not done properly. (By that I mean the person doing it did not do a blood vessel check.)

I made sure the second one was done properly.

I very seriously oppose the blanket immunity myself for similar reasons.

The profit drive on this is pretty ugly too, and it is a complicated discussion. Very generally, I must say the problem is global and allowing profit to drive policy is not doing humanity any favors.

There is a whole lot to be said... but, maybe another day.

Frankly, our current body politic is very seriously ill.

Trust is low.

Because of all that, I personally am paying close attention to how I handle my part in it and am reluctant to judge anyone else.

I am usually reluctant anyway, because what I feel should be obvious reasons! But yeah, extra care is indicated right now.

Best move, in my view as a normie out there wanting to be a good human, is to try and understand one another better, avoid judgement and the usual fear, blame and shame, talk more and hopefully more of us make smarter choices and see lower risks and better outcomes more of the time as this all plays out.

Pretty sure that is as good as it all gets right now.

Really sorry about what happened too.

Sucks :(

Sure hope he improves and can get past it.

That's actually the theory I developed the first time myocarditis in skinny teenagers was reported many months ago. It just makes sense that spike protein mRNA is getting shotgunned into their heart muscle cells. So, I was rather disillusioned when I saw that theory finally pop up in the news in the last month.

Saying the vaccine didn't cause the myocarditis because it was "injected wrong" isn't a compelling argument to me, or likely to anyone that's thinking rationally.

I hear that. You are not wrong, in my view.

The discussion is complex and difficult enough as it is.

People struggling with it should be expected and handled with tact and candor far more than it is right now.