I have read some critiques of the paper, including comments on PubPeer, and I now think it’s pretty flawed, and very misleadingly written. They take a lot of logic leaps based on flimsy assumptions. There is a good “takedown” here: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines, part 3: Antivax rhetoric and incompetence at ACIP | Science-Based Medicine The short version is that the assay is flawed. The long version is that they obfuscated data, the “10ng” rule is not applicable in this type of assay, they analysed expired vials (thus degradation) etc etc.
The truth is it is not a no-brainer, at least at a population level, which is why the vast majority of countries are not universally recommending it to their citizens at the population level.
If you are older (age depends on the country) or have specific health issues that leads your doctor to specifically recommend it to you, then it is a no-brainer. But say you are a seemingly healthy 45 year old: few countries recommend it.
The reality is that we lack relevant and recent high-quality data on the risk and rewards. The virus changed over time, and most of us are no longer naive, so our response changed, and even the booster changed over time. It would be nice to have high quality health outcome data (not surrogate markers like antibodies), but we don’t have it.
Hence we are left with educated guesses at this time. Your guess may be right; I don’t claim to know. I do know the claim of “no-brainer” is inaccurate though.
What governments ask you to do can be different from what you should do, in fact, if you listened to the government you could have a 94th percentile LDL-C your entire life as the cut off is 95th percentile, and they would never screen you for it when it mattered the most.
I don’t think I really ever paid much attention to any government recommendations. I do read the studies the scientists write to try and move the Rube Goldberg government machine in a slightly better direction. There’s also second order effects from any recommendation.
They must have spoken poorly, I doubt this is what they mean. A simple look at current hospitalizations and deaths per week relative to the peak of the pandemic will demonstrate the inaccuracy of this statement.
It is undeniable that prior exposure to the virus (or to the vaccine) has an impact on the probability of poor outcomes. It is unquestionable that the most at-risk people, on average, are older, in poor health, and virus & vaccine naive when infected.
Obviously individual circumstances vary, and it is possible to get a worse outcome on infection (N+1) than one got on N. But this is not the typical scenario at all, which is why the pandemic has ended and we’ve moved into the endemic stage.
No, actually. A few hours after my first shot I developed rapid heartbeat. It was so rapid it felt like my heart would explode. A few weeks went by. I followed the standard medical advice to get a second shot. A couple of hours after my second shot, it happened again. My body was literally shaking from the violence of my heart beating in my chest. I also began stuttering violently I was unable to type or do other work for 36 hours thereafter. After that the shuddering and shaking went away. But the rapid heartbeat episodes did not.
Since then the rapid heartbeat episodes have happened numerous times for no reason out of the blue… most recently two days ago when I was sitting reading a book. It’s a problem I never had before the shot; my doctor concedes that the mRNA vaccines were the most likely cause. Like many other adult males, my heart was damaged by the vaccines.
A good friend of mine also got both shots, and was bedridden for over 15 months following her second injection.
I’m sure there are some people who have benefited from getting them, but it’s not something I would do to myself again. I have no plans to subject my body of that kind of damage again.
Even for those of us who are older, it’s not necessarily in no brainer. I am 72 years old. My heart was damaged by the mRNA vaccine. I would not have gotten it if I had known that myocarditis was a possible side-effect. It affected mostly young men but also some in my age group. You’re correct that we lack relevant and high-quality data on the risk and rewards. mRNA vaccines are still experimental technologies; other vaccines are tested for years before being approved. This one was not.
Let me ask you this. Were these adverse effects ever reported?
Of the maybe a hundred or so people I’ve heard suffer side effects (some fatal), whether it was themselves or someone they knew, none of them were actually reported as covid vaccine side effects. This makes the data look like it’s safer than it is.
I’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice but that sounds like atrial fibrillation was triggered by the vaccine, you should definitely see a doctor – and buy an apple watch, it has a EKG function you can use at times and can detect afib and some falls.
It comes with a risk of stroke because of clots forming in the heart during episodes, blood thinners can be good for this, even for subclinical afib blood thinners reduce stroke by up to 40%: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2310234
Side effects can definitely happen, even if we are not completely clear on the exact incidence. You should get checked out by a cardiologist, get some comprehensive EKG readings and a full workup.
I reported them to my doctor; I did not report them elsewhere. My friend who is bedridden for over a year after the MR vaccine tried to do so several times; she found the online interface for making reports very difficult to use, and gave up. She was not looking for compensation, just looking to let others know what had happened to her.
The virus has also changed. Newer strains seems less dangerous.
But you’re right - obviously none of us are naive any more, either from vaccinations or previous infections (most likely both). I think the point was that just because you had a mild case of Covid before, doesn’t mean it’s impossible for you to have a bad time or developed long-lasting symptoms in the future.
Welcome to the forum, and I’m sorry to hear that. But as far as we know, the data says that getting Covid is around 10x more likely to cause cardiac damage than any of the vaccines. That’s because the virus replicates and spreads around your body, and the vaccines do not.
This also doesn’t seem to be a mRNA vaccine specific thing, and has nothing to do with whether they are ‘experimental’ or not. Novavax (traditional protein vaccine) also causes myocarditis and pericarditis in a similar proportion of people. It seems to be more a feature of the viral spike protein in general - all the more reason to avoid being infected by Covid IMO.
I have heard that claim, that Covid is more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccine, but the evidence I’ve seen appears to suggest that the opposite is true. Perhaps some more studies will clarify this question at some point.
If people want to get the boosters, I wish them well. But I won’t be doing so,
Rapamycin repairs left ventricle of old dogs consistently it is reported.
Might work on humans too.
That was my earliest memories on dosing rapamycin my heart felt it first… then throughout my entire body…I could feel my heart beat and pounding pulse… soon after dosing.
I have been getting Novavax twice a year since it’s been available because I am high risk. This is the article I generally share with people about why I wait for this vaccine: Americans should be able to get Novavax. - by Don Ford
Yes that’s what I heard too. I’m very convinced that a very low percentage of adverse effects were even reported to whatever database keeps track, skewing the data.
My grandmother died a month after her second Pfizer shot. She was 86 so I can’t say if it was related or not. (She never got Covid)
My friend’s step brother died of myocarditis two days after his first Moderna shot. It was not reported as a vaccine death. This is the most extreme anecdote I’ve observed on a personal level.
The anecdotes I used to see on Twitter when this was the #1 topic in the world were simply too numerous for me to feel secure walking into a Walgreens and rolling up my sleeve. Many complained that their doctors wouldn’t report them as vaccine injured or that it took too long to file a report. I know there’s a lot of crap on social media but these seemed like real people with real stories to me.
I couldn’t walk into a restaurant or a gym as a result (some people were even afraid to be around me) so I moved somewhere else. I got covid eventually in June of 2022 and it was basically one day of a fever & cold sweats, followed by lingering cold symptoms in subsequent days.
At the end of the day, it’s a personal choice and I’m not as old as some people here, so I am viewing it from a different lens. I don’t know too many people getting really sick with COVID anymore though.
The published evidence overwhelmingly says that virus is worse than vaccine. But I am definitely open to the possibility that the published research doesn’t reflect reality. I, like @LukeMV have seen plenty of anecdotes or people having bad reactions to the vaccines (and to Covid, to be fair). However, I would not be too swayed by posts on social media, since we know there were massive campaigns by foreign countries and others trying to stir up trouble. Plus there are a lot of liars and attention seekers!.
Based on the published numbers, if myocarditis is 2-3/100,000 and pericarditis is 12/100,000 (https://www.tga.gov.au/news/covid-19-vaccine-safety-reports/covid-19-vaccine-safety-report-12-01-23) then you’d have to know more than 5,000 people to statistically know a person who suffered a serious side effect. I personally don’t know anybody with diagnosed myo/pericarditis after a vaccine, but I do know two people who did say their heart felt funny or weird afterwards. Then again, that could be nocebo because it was a widely known possibility. If I was Luke and someone I knew personally died 2 days after the shot, that probably would have put me off too.
The biggest problem is that faith in our public health institutions has gone to shit. Can’t trust anything from the US FDA, CDC etc now. The UK had a totally bipolar approach to Covid, making people panic, then literally paying people to eat at restaurants, then locking everything down again. Lots of countries went into total denial, lying about cases and deaths. There’s a lot of under-reporting of everything too. I’ve looked at recommendations from the UK, Europe, Australia, Japan, and they’re all over the place.
It’s a total shitshow and it’s impossible to make any good decisions now. Urgh.
The issue with this line of thinking is that getting vaccinated certainly does not prevent one from getting covid.
Unbelievably, some studies have shown that getting vaccinated makes it MORE likely to get covid within the next 6 months. I say “unbelievably” because I find that result to be implausible and suspect it is a question of confounding (these are observational studies not RCTs). Probably the people who got vaccinated were also more likely to get tested, so more likely for covid to be detected but not more likely to catch it, is my guess.
Regardless, the vast majority of us have been infected post-vaccination. So claiming covid is more likely to cause damage than the vaccine is irrelevant as we might get harmed by the vaccine or from our subsequent infection. The questions are: which populations have better health outcomes overall if they get boosted, and how do we know this?
And the answer is, we have some informed guesses on this based on observational data but we really lack the RCT data we’d love to have to make this simple. So opinions among public health agencies around the world are mixed, with most recommending boosters for high risk but not for more than half of their populations.
Just to be clear, if we are parsing our words carefully, there is a world of difference between your two statements on the matter.
“they say you that your previous experiences with Covid don’t really predict much about your future experiences.”
This is wildly different from:
“just because you had a mild case of Covid before, doesn’t mean it’s impossible for you to have a bad time […] in the future.”
The first statement says there is no relationship between severity of infection N+1 and N. Which is incorrect; were that true the pandemic would not have ended. Statistically there is a strong relationship that say it is overwhelmingly likely that infection N+1 will be milder than infection N.
The second statement says that it is always possible (albeit perhaps not likely) that infection N+1 will be worse than infection N.