Here’s an article from Hot Air that got a lot of links yesterday. An excerpt [emphasis mine]:
We keep being told that injury to the heart from the COVID vaccine is very rare, but a study done in Basel Switzerland indicates that the rate of subclinical myocarditis after the COVID vaccine is hardly rare at all.
In fact, in a study with only 777 participants with a median age of 37–all medical professionals getting the COVID vaccine–the incidence of elevated cardiac enzymes 3 days after injection was pretty substantial, at almost 3%.
The CDC did a study and from that, they claimed the rate was 0.001%, or one out of 100,000.
2.8% is a lot higher than 0.001%. Another 0.3% had “probable myocarditis,” putting the total at over 3%. That is 3000 times higher than the US government claimed.
Sounds terrible, right? But it’s actually a very misleading analysis of the data by the author of the Hot Air critique. If you don’t read carefully, you might not catch the problems, but they’re quite blatant and become more so if you follow the links and read the studies involved.
The key is that the “injury to the heart” in the Swiss study was subclinical. That means it had no clinical consequences but was a function of measurement alone. And it was temporary and resolved on its own.
And let’s look a bit closer [emphasis mine]:
In this small study, nobody had serious complications, but with a myocarditis complication rate of 3%, you would have to expect that giving out hundreds of millions of doses is a pretty risky proposition.
Yes, like maybe a risk of actual clinically noticeable complications in one out of 100,000, just like the government claimed. Oh, and what did the government actually claim? (And was it actually the government claiming it? When I look at the authors, I don’t see that it was the US government doing the research, anyway.) Let’s follow that link:
In this study, the incidence of vaccine-related myocarditis was 0.95 per 100,000 individuals and was highest in men aged 18–24 years, who had received two doses of the vaccine.
This sounds as though they are talking about actual myocarditis that is measured by actually having symptoms that bring a person to the doctor. And indeed, it seems that’s what’s being measured in this study; I read the bulk of it and that is apparent.
So the Hot Air author is comparing apples and oranges. In the study that found 3% elevated enzymes, no one was ill – and ordinarily these people would not even have had their enzymes checked. The elevations subsided on their own. In the other study being compared – the one that had found a much lower level of problems – they were talking about the level of symptomatic myocarditis itself, not just elevated enzymes. No one checks the enzymes of everyone who got a vaccine, nor does that study purport to have done so.
The smaller Swiss study did something quite different; researchers took a small group and checked the enzymes of everyone in it after getting the vaccine. But only after getting the vaccine. It would have been better to have also checked those levels in those people before getting the vaccine so they could compare the actual changes in those levels post-vaccine. But they did not. Instead, the way they determined there were elevated enzymes was to compare the people’s levels to norms in the population for the age groups involved. In addition, no patient in the Swiss study “had ECG-changes, and none developed major adverse cardiac events within 30 days.”
Researchers prior to this have been quite upfront about there being a very small elevated risk of symptomatic myocarditis in certain populations after getting the vaccine, almost all cases very mild and temporary. And in that linked government study, the authors also say this:
We hypothesized that COVID-19 mRNA-vaccine-associated myocardial injury following booster vaccination may be much more common, as symptoms may be unspecific, mild or even absent, escaping passive surveillance.
What that means is that the authors are saying there may be a higher incidence of asymptomatic changes post-vaccine that were not measured in the study, because the study only looked at symptomatic cases. And that’s exactly what the Swiss study did measure: asymptomatic changes that were temporary. So of course the number of people with such changes was higher.
So there is no contradiction here at all between the two studies. And, as with nearly every single one of the articles I’ve read purporting to say how awful the COVID vaccines are in terms of side effects – and I’ve probably checked at least fifty such articles – I have never found a single one of the claims about such articles that isn’t quite flawed, sometimes very flawed. As is this one.
Unfortunately, most of my lengthy discussion of such things has been in the comments rather than in posts, so it’s very hard for me to go back now and find them and link them. But I’ve written about such things many times.
Look, the government lied about plenty of things connected with COVID, particularly the lab leak origin that was always likely and yet was strongly denied. They lied and/or were mistaken about the efficacy of lockdowns and of masking. Initially they claimed that vaccines would make the vaccinated person unable to transmit COVID and would have a very low chance of getting it in the first place, but with the newer strains that turned out to be false. There were lies about how many people were dying of COVID versus with COVID.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of these articles about how the government lied about so many other things connected with post-vaccine side effect, articles that purport to crunch numbers and understand research, are simply mistaken or lying themselves. And yet so many people seem to believe them.
Just because one side lies and/or is mistaken doesn’t mean the other side doesn’t lie and/or is mistaken. However, I consider government lies more serious, because they are the supposed experts and they influence policy and many more people. But I still don’t like to see research misrepresented by anyone, whether on the left or right, and I see it almost constantly.
[NOTE: By the way, there’s also symptomatic myocarditis as a complication of getting COVID itself. See this, for example; the indication is that the incidence is higher post-COVID than it is post-vaccination.]
