Unfortunately we still do not understand the mechanism of action nor the underlying cellular consequences. (Subclinical cases obviously are not measurable, and clinical resolutions may not mean no permanent damage.) Here is a study where autopsies were done on teenagers who appear to have died from the vaccine induced myocarditis.
It could go either way imo: we may find only a small number of people were harmed, or we may find that thousands of young men now have subclinical heart damage that they need to monitor and make lifestyle choices to address. I suspect we will know more in the next year, but in any case this radically alters the bioethics of mandates.
I can't edit my parent comment, just want to say thanks for your later comments, and citing sources.
I was of the impression (and, tbh, am still under the suspicion..) that any myocarditis risk was "noise" -- not noticeably higher than that in the larger population, or that reported cases have confounding factors that would suggest the vaccine is not the cause.
That being said, I think the more interesting question is what constitutes non-trivial medical risk. 1 in 10k is really small, especially for a medical treatment.
It doesn’t constitute noise if you control for males under 40, especially Moderna. Early on this would have potentially just been data mining, but it’s been replicated and has also led to pulling Moderna for those age groups in some countries. 1 in 10k isn’t a massive risk, but when taken in conjunction with the mandates making the population this is administered in to be “all living humans” then the absolute numbers get very concerning imo, esp if you think there may be more subclinical cases than we think.
> if you control for males under 40, especially Moderna
Fascinating! Thanks. (to be pedantic, my emphasis on the word "was", meant to convey that my opinion was changing)
I was gonna ask "do you have a source on that?" but was able to find this in JAMA w/o much effort: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346
which states in no uncertain terms that "The rates of myocarditis cases were... in adolescent males aged 16 to 17 years .. 105.9 per million doses of the BNT162b2 vaccine", sure enough, 1 in ~10k.
I think it's also important to note, just for larger context -- not attacking or negating anything you've said -- that that cohort (16-17yo males) is the most extreme, it's down to 1 in ~20k once you include up to age 24. Across the whole population it becomes closer to 1 in 200k.
Myocarditis is by no means "no impact" and certainly if you get it, complications are the least of your worries. Here's a blog post about the relative risks by a doctor:
"And myocarditis is a serious disease, make no mistake. Lately, I’ve been hearing this sentence alot: “but the myocarditis caused by the covid vaccines is mild!”. I’d never heard of “mild” myocarditis pre-covid. Pre-covid, myocarditis was always considered a serious disease. What the people saying this mean is that the patients admitted to hospital with myocarditis after vaccination are usually able to go home after a few days, and don’t generally end up in an ICU. Which is true.
But we don’t say that most heart attacks are “mild” just because they don’t result in a stay in an ICU, and just because the patient is usually able to leave the hospital within a week. A heart attack is a heart attack, and is by definition serious. The same goes for myocarditis. Our heart muscles are not very good at repairing themselves, and it is impossible to know today the extent to which an episode of vaccine induced myocarditis increases the person’s future risk of serious long-term complications, such as chronic heart failure or atrial fibrillation.
So, myocarditis is always serious, regardless of whether it puts you in an ICU or not, and we need to know whether the risk of myocarditis caused by the vaccines is greater than the risk caused by infection."
That’s a counterpoint to some arguments like “if it’s March 2021 and you’re 40 you should not get shot one” but not ones like “we should be concerned about vaccine side effects from Moderna” and “if you’ve caught COVID and you’re a 20 year old male it is unethical to mandate the vaccine and perhaps unwise to take it to prevent BA.2”
If we're talking about relative personal risk assessment, you need to incorporate natural immunity, omicron, the waning effect of the vaccines, demographic skew on both sides of this, uncertainty about the mechanism and scope of side effects, and a bunch of other things beyond dividing two numbers together.
1/10,000 men develop a medical problem from taking a vaccine.
Around 2/10,000 men die from not having access to the vaccine (I don't have the data, but I imagine most of those under 40 men died unvaccinated based on this [0])
You can mental gymnastics all you want about 'personal risk,' and 'natural immunity,' but at least agree that's not a data-driven approach.
- Vaccine induced heart damage is more likely in younger men
- The vaccine induced immunity drops off after 5 months due to waning + evolutionary pressure
- Natural immunity of a prior infection confers protection towards BA.X
I'm not doing any mental gymnastics. I stated specifically: your counterargument is one for some arguments, not others. I am illustrating clearly when what you wrote is not a meaningful counterargument if it is being used to persuade someone to get vaccinated or to justify a mandate when, for example, that person is a young, healthy man who has already had COVID.
Now go ahead and reply again with another thinly veiled insult, citing broad, long term statistics and dividing two numbers. It reflects poorly on you.
And soldiers are heavily trained to try and avoid getting killed, especially by friendly fire. People seem to think there's some contradiction here, but there isn't. Nobody wants to unnecessarily run the risk of being injured, perhaps permanently, by their own side.
And it is unnecessary. COVID was already almost always mild for people outside of risk groups like the elderly (who aren't serving in the military anyway), and Omicron just took that mildness to another level. It just isn't necessary for this CO to get vaccinated against Omicron, especially as the vaccine effectiveness has gone negative i.e. not only can they get it anyway after vaccination but they're actually more likely to.
The myocarditis from COVID and vaccines plausibly have separate prognoses (we don’t even know much about either) but in any case for this population some studies have shown the risk is higher of this specific symptom for both mRNA vaccines.
