This is a 2 years old belief that's convenient to politicians but has been utterly, comprehensively destroyed by science by now. It needs to die, yesterday.
For one thing, Covid-caused myocarditis is an order of magnitude or two more frequent than vaccine-caused myocarditis, at all ages. The latter also overwhelmingly resolves in a few days without treatment.
For another, there appears to be no such thing as durable "natural immunity" with Omicron. Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart !
Finally, not a single week goes by these days without a new study being released that describes "yet another creative way SARS-CoV-2 f*cks up the human body, yay!".
This week I suppose the most interesting development is a new meta-analysis reporting that HALF of people infected with Covid still have symptoms at least four months later (aka Long Covid) https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
In the UK, an estimated 1.3 million people had long Covid as of early 2022, growing by 200K each month.
It was estimated that nearly a quarter million people had dropped out of the job market completely as a result :
https://www.ft.com/content/33444f29-bab1-4655-85b5-c0b1f68d9...
https://www.ft.com/content/8b9166af-2e85-4429-ab1f-362c189e4...
Covid isn't going to immediately kill us all, but it's pretty obvious by now that it's already a mass disabling event, the main unknown being how reversible the neurological + cardio vascular damage is going to be in the long term.
If only the vaccines would prevent infection, so these risks would be mutually exclusive, instead of cumulative.
> Reinfections are now documented to have happened as closely as 20 days apart !
How soon has an infection been documented after becoming "fully vaccinated"?
It would shed more light to know the delta between unvaccinated and vaccinated for those dead from heart problems vs dead from Covid.
Yes. The risk of myocarditis from covid is higher than this, even if there were zero other effects to consider.
That would certainly seem unlikely. Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior. Which is somewhat likely, but then you're not really comparing the effects of the vaccine anymore.
Everything I've seen has shown the obvious, fewer and less serious cases.
It's actually a proven matter of fact, so it's not really up for debate about whether it's likely or not. It happened already.
The few countries that publish infection rates by vaccine status all show the same thing: the vaccinated get infected with COVID at much higher rates than the unvaccinated and this has been getting worse with time. England, Denmark, New Zealand all show this. There may be other countries by now.
Most countries simply don't publish this basic statistic at all, which is all you need to know about the integrity of public health.
Really the only way that's possible is by vaccinated groups having different behavior
No, negative effectiveness has happened before with vaccines and there are biological pathways via which it can happen. In particular the COVID mRNA vaccines are immunosuppressant. This was known by Pfizer before approval but not mentioned anywhere - it came out during their document dumps. OAS/imprinting is another very likely candidate.
No, other possibilities which have been observed with other pathogens are Original Antigenic Sin (i.e. perhaps targeting the spike protein from the now-extinct Wuhan strain gets the immune system "stuck in a rut" with a less optimal response) or Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Not to say that these definitely are occurring in the case of SARS-CoV-2, but even Fauci acknowledged the possibility of disease enhancement before the vaccines were rolled out.
A good article on the UK vaccinated/unvaccinated data, which was pulled when it no longer flattered the vaccines: https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/uk-will-hide-vaccinated-ca...
Of course, any scientist name i'll give as a reference will be immediately categorized as "anti-vax" or "fringe and non representative"... Which curiously is still a grave thing, eventhough a lot of the consensus around covid vaccines has been proved incorrect times and times again (with the only remaining truth being that it does protect people at risk from lethal outcome, which is clearly the bare minimum and not the original expected outcome).
That's because they probably are fringe and non representative. And for every Galileo there are 100.000 Dr Wakefield's
> a lot of the consensus around covid vaccines has been proved incorrect times and times again
If that were true it wouldn't be the consensus, by definition.
In your construction, actually observing published government statistics and acting rationally on it automatically makes someone a "notorious antivaxxer". It's ideology, not rationality.
What I'm saying is that this guy is a run-of-the-mill antivaxxer, even outside Covid. Check his tweets and blog : he writes fallacious pieces against childhood vaccinations like : https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/florida-vaccine-hesitancy-...
And no, he's not acting rationally. It may have the flavor of it at first glance, but the implications of what he says being true would invalidate large swathes of science. So is he a genius or a crank ? I don't have time to comb through and debunk every single claim (Brandolini's law !) but good old Occam's razor says he's a conspiracist crank who fallaciously massages data until it fits what he set out to prove. That is to say, an ideologue.
You haven't read his article or engaged with his argument at all, but he must be a crank because you can't stomach the implications if he was right. A cursory inspection of the first few paragraphs shows that (a) it's about 2021 so definitely not "outside COVID" and (b) it's another example of what I was pointing out: he is looking at government data that looks pretty concerning and reacting to it in a rational way.
Your only argument he's not rational is that "vast swathes" of science would be invalidated if he's right, therefore he must be a crank.
That's not even an argument, is it?
1. Some of the biggest leaps forward in science have come from invalidation and correction of deeply fundamental science. That's why Einstein is famous. The potential to invalidate pre-existing scientific beliefs is pretty much a pre-condition for a study to be interesting.
2. Vaccine efficacy is a tiny sub-area of the overall scientific enterprise. If everything people believed about vaccines was disproven conclusively tomorrow that'd certainly be far less than 0.1% of all scientific knowledge.
3. Your heuristic is totally unable to correct handle or react to groupthink or bad incentives. The entire field of virology claimed that there was no possible way SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab and anyone who claimed it could was spreading conspiracy theories. Those same scientists were simultaneously writing private emails saying a lab escape was definitely possible and even looked likely. You were the sort of person who was successfully fooled by their conspiracy, and maybe still are.
Fundamentally, your attitude here is poisonous to the search for truth that defines science to begin with. If you can't be bothered evaluating their arguments then don't express opinions on them.
You give yourself away by your obsession with Fauci whom you always refer to as if he was a mononym like an idiot celebrity. Rarely Dr. Fauci or yet Anthony Fauci. Just fauci. You know a few interesting highly specific terms of art like Original Antigenic Sin which is in stark contrast to your otherwise very shallow understanding of the topic. This is because you collect interesting nonsense like a bird picking up shiny things.
This site doesn't need people who have never created an account with Hacker News before to create one now to spread the same bullshit you folks spread on Facebook. I see folks like yourself all over hacker news in recent years and quite frankly like covid you are a pathogen. Its absolutely impossible to fix the dialogue with you folks because to you these are vital truths that are being ignored. You are for what its worth likely very much in good faith its just that you yourself have been infected. Fix your inputs and maybe you will fix your outputs.
Good Luck.
Sure, but that's something that trials test for before a vaccine gets to the general public.
The exact cause isn't known because anything that could be perceived as "anti-vaxx" doesn't get funded or honestly researched, even though it's important. But the best bet seems to be a form of imprinting. The immune system prefers to make antibodies that it's made before and does so even if it's exposed to a pathogen different enough to have evolved past those antibodies. For real epidemics this probably doesn't matter much, because they move in waves through the population, but if you repeatedly vaccinate the whole world then you're causing fixation on a long since extinct form of the spike protein. When a mutated virus turns up the body manufactures useless antibodies that don't work rather than trying to develop new ones.
It's actually not even clear that the trials showed positive effectiveness for COVID. They reported it but the way they defined "vaccinated" creates a denominator problem. Their methodology would create the appearance of initially high effectiveness that steadily decays to nothing for anything, including water. Regulators not only didn't notice this but public health agencies adopted the same methodology.
What becomes clear the moment you start learning about this stuff is, we never hear about these problems because any bad news about vaccines is immediately squashed and anyone who points it out gets banned and viciously attacked.
The vaccine is not effective against the less dangerous Omicron variant, and the hospitals are not overwhelmed.
They also give a ratio, which could also be interesting, and which you can't deduce from the excess events without knowing the number of events in the reference group.
So if that is virtually no risk, so is 20 cases of myocarditis (that aren't all lethal) per 100,000.
(I used 6100 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... divided by 53 million to get 10/100,00).
There's some fuzzy outlines of that data here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm).
In any case : vaccine-induced myocarditis is almost always benign and resolves without treatment, and while there's been a lot of focus on it in the press and in antivaxxer circles, it's really a footnote in the list of Covid-related health issues.
It's many orders of magnitude less frequent than Long Covid, for example.
There's really no solid data to back this up. The only randomized controlled trials that were ever conducted ended when the EUAs were granted and the placebo groups were immediately vaccinated, long before the Delta variant even existed, let alone Omicron. Everything else is observational studies subject to selection bias and other confounding variables. And even there, the proportion of vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths from Omicron (where good data is available) does not suggest high levels of protection from the vaccine.
It would be truly remarkable if vastly decreasing the prevalence of the pathogen early on somehow kept you from the hospital but led a far less extensive infection doing just as much damage. Posting solid data here when literally everyone on the forum has sought out such data at one time or another is a waste of everyone's time. If you have succeeded in ignoring it at this point no data is liable to change your mind.
Given the infectiousness of the recent variants, it's reasonable to assume very high probability of eventual infection.
(Myocarditis appears to be the more common severe side effect of vaccination, even though it is still quite rare. Hospitalization rates from infection (a reasonable proxy for a severe infection) in the similar age groups are probably higher.)
It does seem that a young male already immune due to having had Covid would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
Citation needed on the “already immune” bit. So far studies have shown that immunity to the corona wears off, and most people can be reinfected months to a year later.
The incremental benefit of a healthy young person getting vaccinated after already having had Covid may be quite small. Plus the incidence of myocarditis in this group (vaccinated after having had Covid) could well be higher than it is in people getting vaccinated who haven't had Covid. (This is plausible, since as seen in this study, the risk is higher for the second shot, when the immune system has already been stimulated before.)
There is no such thing as "already immune due to having had COVID".
Unvaccinated individuals were observed to have far higher reinfection rates than vaccinated individuals (over 5-fold higher chances).
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe...
> (...) would be best advised not to get an mRNA vaccine.
This assertion is not only entirely baseless but also completely ignores the fact that a) unvaccinated individuals are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to die from COVID, b) the myocarditis issue pinned to vaccines is benign and transitory, and estimated to be at most less than 5 cases per 100 000 vaccinnees.
However, as they say, "...persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated."
One thing to think about is that "every nations medical experts" are heavily committed to a narrative that vaccines are good, and hence may be disinclined to admit there are exceptions to this (such as healthy young males who have already had covid). They may think that the vaccine is good for most people, and that they should therefore pretend that it's good for everyone to avoid "confusion"...