Another obvious cause for the increase in heart disease related deaths which you ignored is that level of treatment and detection of heart disease was reduced due to people less regularly seeking medical care during the pandemic.

How did it look in US during height of covid? I would definitely agree in say most of Europe where people including doctors got properly shit scared, and medical care was... lacking to be polite. Very bad time to be in situation to require medical help.

But I had the impression that US (maybe apart from NY) was trying to keep business as usual as much as possible.

>But I had the impression that US (maybe apart from NY) was trying to keep business as usual as much as possible.

More or less a lot of companies took some handouts from the government while half the country insisted it was a demonrat hoax and the others stayed home to try and stop having out hospitals blown the fuck out.

There was a strong effect on medical services and the willingness or ability to use them for non-covid illnesses during the height of the pandemic. Many people who took Covid seriously locked down and may have put off getting routine examinations or even going to the doctor when they should have because of fear of exposure (my parents for example, who while in a Republican area where most people were not very concerned about covid were this way and many other people especially in major blue cities would do the same) and on the other side, people in areas that may have been skeptical of covid may have been turned off because of reduced or near zero service while local hospitals dealt with the effects of covid on the local community.

Routine checkups and other non-urgent care was frequently postponed or canceled, especially during the bigger waves when hospitals and ICUs were at risk of being overwhelmed.

It wasnt exactly lacking but immediately after COVID really started all non-critical office visits were cancelled. Lots of elective and non-critical outpatient procedures were canceled and impossible to reschedule for months. Even now it can take months to schedule a regular checkup. Staffing issues and long waits at the emergency room are still common. If you’re about to die there’s not going to be a wait.

A lot of people, including myself, waited a long time for our yearly (or bi yearly if you’re older) visit. I’m sure a lot of older people could have done some preventative stuff to prevent a heart attack. Like getting a stint put in if they had an irregular heart beat, had this happened to a family member in their late 80s.

Short of having some acute emergency, it was for all intents and purposes IMPOSSIBLE to get a doctor's appointment of any sort through the height of the pandemic. At least that was my family's experience in Los Angeles.

A lot of people went really sedentary during the pandemic. This is reflected in other data as well and could likely explain the uptick in heart disease: it isn’t the development of the disease that needed to go from 0 to 1, but the transition to symptomatic expression across a population that essentially moved a big clump of already-diseased but asymptomatic people forward at once.

Two additional factors:

- Much higher stress from making ends meet, world events, national decline, etc.

- Supply chain issues leading to lower quality chemical byproducts in your food and household items. Though we don’t know how much of a problem this is and we may not for a long time, if ever.

Good points.

I wonder about your sedentary comment. You said during the pandemic, when we were encouraged to stay home, but what about after? At first it feels true because a lot of people WFH now. But before Covid, most people drove to work, which isn't really any better than WFH and it's arguably worse due to the stress of driving.

Covid also strongly encouraged outdoor activities over indoor ones. In my area, many indoor events were converted to outdoor events and we found that even with the relaxation of precautions, people prefer we keep them outdoors as it was more enjoyable.

I suppose my experience doesn't match up with people who live in more disagreeable climates, like the South or Southwest.

Yeah it’s a complex shift but all the indicators I’ve seen at a population level show upticks in markers associated with increased sedentary behaviors.

Some people definitely went the other way and took up more healthful activities but the dominant shift seems to have been toward less physical activity.

I personally wonder if the “long covid cognitive effects” aren’t down to things like less exercise, more social isolation and too much screen time, especially as people keep looking for explanations for effects on children.

It’s not like it all went away when the pandemic officially ended either. People can be slow to change.

I remember reading years ago that the average American adult puts on 3 lbs during the holiday season and then never recovers by dropping that excess weight, so it just accumulates every year. For the people whose fitness routines and health were negatively impacted by COVID (e.g. people who had young children at home, in my experience, and people who got really sick), I think we might be seeing a similar effect. You can't get back lost time even after life "returns to normal."

It's easy to go from non-sedentary to sedentary. It's harder to go back. So some didn't go back - they remained sedentary after Covid concern faded.

I don't know what fraction of the population went sedentary, and what fraction of those remained sedentary. It could be enough to matter statistically.

As far as I know, while a sedentary lifestyle leads to or exacerbates the physical deterioration which leads to death by heart disease, I do not think slowing down brings it on, at least within a couple of years. For people at high risk, unaccustomed exercise is recognized as a trigger of acute disease (with snow-shoveling being a well-known example.)

I find that study unconvincing, it is based on very limited data. They essentially looked only at the initial RCTs for the vaccines, and the total number of deaths is very low there. This ignores all the information gathered after the vaccines were approved, which of course doesn't have randomly assigned placebo groups, but does have far greater numbers. If the mRNA vaccines were indeed killing as many people as they saved we would have seen that in other sources of data as well.

Hasn’t heart disease been the top cause of death for years?

Yes, heart disease and stroke have been way up there for decades. Type 2 diabetes, also diet-driven, is a close follower. Cancer may have been behind these two but it as well has many diet-driven types, but I’m not sure how much those comprise overall rates of cancer.

Since the 1920's it's been way up there on the list.

But just ignore that. This is about Covid, it must be. /s

It's almost like there can't be only one factor in anything to do with a list containing as many variables as one full of people who died from heart disease.

Yes, but the study is exploring the sudden change.

Is there a proposed mechanism for the increased mortality? I would be more curious if there were. Why would receiving a segment of a genome in a vaccine be more dangerous than receiving all of it by getting COVID?

He didn't suggest that it was more dangerous than covid (there are studies that tackle this question though, with answers that vary by age cohort, leading to health authorities like Denmark and Sweden prohibiting the jab for young people)

The proposed mechanism is clear, it's not the genome it's the spike protein. The jabs were suggested to keep this protein in the local muscle tissue, and clinical evidence suggests that this does not happen. It makes its way to the heart where it causes issues

Wasn't this suggested in the original comment's italicized phrase, "even after accounting for the protective effects of COVID"? It argues that we have the relative risk backwards.

This might have been suggested by some, but systemic effects have been acknowledged since the beginning. Both of the original papers on the safety of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines report systemic effects being more common in the jab group than the placebo.

I wonder if the mechanism is the same for both covid and the vaccines - perhaps the immune response/inflammation by the body to the common proteins in the vaccine/virus are the cause in both?

On a side note I wonder if Low Dose Naltrexone would help, as LDN is generally considered helpful for "correcting" an overactive immune response.

If its an inflammatory response you're worried about, maybe just eat more fish?

Certainly - I'm not very concerned about covid/vaccine inflammation for myself as I (unfortunately) have other health conditions that already cause a lot of inflammation. Though, aren't there mercury risks from consuming fish in large quantities?

> Though, aren't there mercury risks from consuming fish in large quantities?

The mercury exposure can vary by a factor of 100 depending on what species you're eating, and sourced from where

In general, to decrease mercury exposure, stick with small fish that are short-lived and lower on the food chain, as well as shellfish.

Mercury reference for a high level idea (some of this is out of date or not specific enough by species/fishery and also doesn't cover many local fish): https://www.fda.gov/food/metals-and-your-food/mercury-levels...

edit: a good reference site is https://seafood.edf.org/ which breaks down by fishery and multiple contaminants for general recommendations on safety (as well as ecofriendliness)

Yes, in early 2020 it was reported pretty often that the unique-for-a-coronavirus spike protein was the part of the virus causing most of the damage. Seems like no one thought twice about injecting us with mass amounts of it for the vaccines...

Well, less mass amounts of it then catching actual covid...

Maybe its also the exposure to any form of covid dna. There is no end to variance of long covid symptoms, and most of them are simply not reported. Ie my wife is a doctor, and after 3rd covid (which should have been some variant of omicron) she noticed her hair falls out more.

Could be coincidence, but her sister who lives 1000km away got similar (or same due to visits) covid at roughly same time, and has same symptoms. Nobody reports stuff like this unless some researchers go out and actually start asking for this specifically en masse or do some hard statistics like this on whole populations.

But then again, I realize I know next to nothing about this virus in detail, and people like to speculate.

Is there reason to believe "long covid" is even a thing? Is covid so significantly different from many diseases that it has about 50 various "long" symptoms that run the gamut from brain fog to change in taste to a rash and now to hair loss?

I do notice that there's significant baggage associated with covid, and a large number of people terrified of it, along with most of these symptoms being neurological (and the rest self-diagnosed). It's also politically convenient to push "sure the disease itself is like a bad cold, but you'll be permanently damaged in various unforeseeable ways!".

I'm 3x vaxxed myself, I've also had covid to be clear. All the evidence I've seen about long covid is anecdotes. Is there any hard data to substantiate?

I think your skepticism here is good and smart. I had the same. Anyone who relies only on self-reported issues has the ability to have general axienty increases cause 'covid associated' behaviors.

That said, neurological covers more than just self-reported concerns like this. Take a look at this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02001-z

You can ignore a lot of these (and I do) as they are self reported, but some are not. Consider Cerebrovascular disorders or some of the others.

There appears to be an association that is non-subjected non-self-reported between people who got covid and people who did not. The study makes NO statement that can be attributed to people who got covid with/without the vax because the study was started/concluded prior to the vax being in general circulation amongst a high number of the population.

So yes, I think "long covid" has a large amount of general anxiety - but not this much. I think its likely we will find this is 1/2 our brains just making up symptoms and 1/2 actual legit f'ing scary problems. I hope I'm wrong. This study implies I'm not.

Cheers.

I've suspected the whole time that a bunch of viruses trigger "long [whatever]" symptoms of some kind for some people who get them, and Covid's just where all the attention is. People get a normal cold or the flu and are still a little foggy a year later, maybe they don't connect it to the virus, you know?

> Danish research currently indicates that those who have taken the mRNA vaccines are at greater risk of all-cause mortality.

Is the same true for people who take the flu shot? Maybe people who get vaccinated are just less healthy in general.

No and no I think. Flu shots are not based on mRNA. Being vaccinated is also directly correlated with being healthy.

Being vaccinated COULD be correlated with being less healthy just in that old people might be more likely to be vaccinated and young people more likely to "take their chances", and there are few things less healthy than being old.

My perception was that most infants all over the world now receive shots like MMR, TDaP and IPV. The herd immunity gained through this exercise automatically makes us less susceptible to certain diseases which were widespread even 50-60 years ago, and in turn, more healthy, even at old age.

> Being vaccinated is also directly correlated with being healthy.

Source?

I've shared my perspective in response to the other comment.

> Danish research currently indicates that those who have taken the mRNA vaccines are at greater risk of all-cause mortality

My first suspicion is that those who have more contact with medicine tend to have greater all-cause mortality because they probably have a reason to have contact with medicine - there's tons of correlation and it's hard to tease out causation.

Vaccines certainly have tradeoffs and in the US at least there are mechanisms in place to try and offset those https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...

What's new is the politicization of vaccines, and particularly in one American political party, but I suspect the math (including the new mRNA vaccines) is as it ever was; vaccines are a huge net win for public health.

Generally one thing I've noticed about medicine could probably be summed up as - it's really complicated, there are trade-offs to nearly every decision, and you eventually die anyway.

This is misinformation. COVID-19 vaccines aren't covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program [0], but the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) [1]

But wait, there's more!

> Will the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program provide compensation to individuals injured by COVID-19 vaccines? [2]

> ...For a category of vaccines to be covered by the VICP, the category of vaccines must be recommended for routine administration to children or pregnant women by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, subject to an excise tax by federal law, and added to the VICP by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. No COVID-19 vaccines currently meet this criteria.

So, no, there is not a mechanism in place to offset those.

[0] https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation [1] https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp [2] https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/faq

Fair enough, I did not mean to imply that it would be covered; I don't know those details. All I'm saying is that it has been recognized for sometime that there are vaccine injuries, but the net benefits of them to public health have been large.

Agreed, it's a valuable program. Just not (currently) relevant to the discussion of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

The paper you linked is investigating whether the mRNA vaccine influenced 46 deaths among 122,164 recipients of the vaccine. That is not relevant to the change in life expectancy observed in the submitted article.

You know thats how study analysis in life science studies work don't you?

Check out hazard ratio - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_ratio - it covers the increase in likelyhood above base case. You seem to be implying it doesnt matter because the absolute number is low. Thats not how life science studies work. If this causes a 10k% increase in your hair turning orange, even if it affects a low number of people, its still a drastic increase in hazard ratio.

The things you said are correct. However, it is also true, to parent’s point, that the error bars grow relatively larger the smaller the absolute sample size, and the smaller the measured effect is, right? This is also how life sciences work; noise in the data is more problematic the smaller the sample, and certainty is only achieved when the signal is far greater than the noise. (These researchers aren’t claiming certainty, they’re using this data to say more study is needed.)

The abstract says “For overall mortality, with 74,193 participants and 61 deaths (mRNA:31; placebo:30), the relative risk (RR) for the two mRNA vaccines compared with placebo was 1.03 (95% CI=0.63-1.71).”

A single person change in the death rate for either group here can change the summary outcome that people use as their talking point. Meanwhile, out of any other sample of seventy thousand people, it’s pretty likely that both numbers will change, probably by a larger delta than 1.

The real problem here is drawing too hard of a conclusion like the GP did: “Danish researcher finds that one is more likely to die after taking the mRNA vaccines, even after accounting for the protective effects against covid.” Framing things this way is premature and misleading when you’re talking about 31 people out of 75k. The researchers did not come to that conclusion, they did not necessarily find that everyone is more likely to die with the vaccine than without, they found a small sample that perhaps suggests it might be possible, and they’re saying we should collect a larger sample to find out if it’s true.

It potentially is relevant. If the mortality rate is ~8/1000 and all 46 of those individuals die at half their expected duration it appears to move the life expectancy down by over a year when extrapolated to the general population.

> The second, much more contentious fact is that mRNA vaccines elevate the risk of heart attack.

The bulk of the covid excess deaths (unsurprisingly) happened before vaccination. This is going to be somewhat difficult to tease out of the numbers. Frankly it's probably not true.

> the Danish researcher finds that one is more likely to die after taking the mRNA vaccines, even after accounting for the protective effects against covid

That is absolutely not what that paper says! Go read it again.

I've been persuaded that we are plagued by hyperinsulinemia due to the sugar in the American diet. There's plenty of studies on this but as an additional point of anecdata, I reached for a can of Campbell's butternut squash soup yesterday, packaged with their new "healthy" brand "Well Yes!" https://www.campbellsoupcompany.com/newsroom/news/campbell-s...

NINETEEN GRAMS of sugar. In a small can of squash soup.

> Danish researcher finds that one is more likely to die after taking the mRNA vaccines, even after accounting for the protective effects against covid.

Please be careful talking about it like this, it has the potential to be misleading. This is too strong of a statement, and the researchers did not make a claim this strong. They have a small sample for which the number of people who died with placebo was 1 person less than the number of people who died (not necessarily of COVID) after taking an mRNA vaccine. With 31 people in the sample who died after taking the vaccine out of 74,000, the potential for noise is high, and they are simply suggesting that we should ask the question again with a larger sample, they are not claiming to have conclusively found that the odds of actually dying with the vaccine are higher than without.

another factor - lockdown decreasing social ties, which in turns increases mortality. Loneliness kills.