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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories are shaking things up again, this time regarding the blood supply. An alternate blood donation infrastructure is growing. (If you don’t want to read the vaccine-skeptical take from TGP, here’s the Vice article on SafeBlood Donation they were reporting on.)

This comes after the release of the Suddenly Died documentary blaming the vaccine for the surge in heart attacks, including really odd blood clots.

I have given blood for twenty years and do not plan to stop. I don’t give through the Red Cross but rather through Vitalent, formerly United Blood Services. I am not vaccinated for COVID-19, and will continue to vehemently, vociferously, and assiduously avoid those injections, on both medical and religious grounds (though my reasoning is different than one might expect). I don’t plan to switch my donations to SafeBlood unless they can assure me it won’t be wasted, by my definitions of wasted.

All of this may seem to be a fascinating new front in the Culture War, but it’s actually an attempt to recapture territory: the denial of organ transplants to COVID-vaccine refusers.

surge in heart attacks

Heart attacks have indeed gone up in recent years, but there are at least two major potential factors besides the vaccine:

  • COVID itself

  • deferral of care due to the burdening of health system (which in itself might have many overlapping explanations, including COVID, secondary effects of COVID like the economic dip, undue fear of COVID, the related measures like lockdowns etc.)

These would seem particularly relevant considering that apparently the rise of excess heart disease began already in 2020, ie. before mass vaccinations began.

It's hard for me to take the vaccine/heart attack theorists completely seriously if they just wave these explanations away ("It can't be COVID because COVID was actually harmless!"), particularly considering that many of them did speak a lot about the problems of deferral of care such as heart attacks caused by lack of check-ups before the vaccines became the main topic of discussion and then immediately pivoted to blaming heart attacks on vaccines alone.

burdening of the healthcare system

I think you mean forced closure of the healthcare system. At least in the US, hospital bed occupancy was consistently lower throughout Covid than before it. Let’s not conflate the deliberate policy choice to deprive people with non-Covid health problems of necessary healthcare with mere bad luck or supply not meeting demand.

At least in the US, hospital bed occupancy was consistently lower throughout Covid than before it.

The things that will count as "burden" here mean health care decisions usually taken to avoid the sort of hospital bed occupancy people might see, ie. reorganizing care to move resources from other things to COVID stuff, tightening triage criteria etc. The fact that they successfully do that to avoid obvious, immediate occupancy overflow doesn't mean that COVID hasn't affected the general health care system sustainability in other ways.

I believe that the health care system was burdened by overtly tight measures, yes, but also by COVID itself. Both played a role.

Avoiding obvious, immediate occupancy overflow is one thing, consistently holding occupancy below normal levels is quite another.

Here's a possible steelman of the Vaccine heart attack theorists, using the most compelling case I have managed to come across.

Covid uses the ACE2 receptor to get into cells. Oxford-Astrazeneca is a viral vector vaccine. This works by inserting the chosen DNA into the cell via a virus that has been engineered to not be able to replicate itself, but instead only deliver this payload. The chosen virus for this is ChAdOx1, a simian adenovirus, chosen because adenoviruses are common, mostly harmless, and while humans often have neutralizing antibodies from prior adenovirus infections, they are unlikely to have them for simian adenoviruses. This means it interacts with the Coxsackie and adenovirus receptor (CAR) instead of the ACE2 receptor.

Many critics of vaccine side-effect hypotheses claim that, as the vaccines merely make your cells produce the spike protein, any side effects of the vaccines must necessarily be a subset of the consequences of getting covid. However, the vector used to deliver this payload is changed, and the vector itself can have it's own properties. Pfizer has lipids, but more importantly, and with a clearer link to potential side effects, Astrazeneca has Adenovirus and it interacts with CAR.

Adenoviruses are already known to have myocarditis as a rare complication.

First, adenovirus is an established cause of acute myocarditis (14). Adenovirus can enter cardiomyocytes by binding to a common transmembrane receptor [coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor (CAR)], induce direct myocardial injury, and trigger an uncontrolled immune response even after viral clearance (15).

Astrazeneca has been the frequent target of criticism over blood clotting issues, leading to withdrawals or recommendations to only use it on people above a certain age.

However, I'm not sure if this is a real steelman. More like an unobtainium-man, because the whole Astrazeneca episode has largely been invisible from the most prominent vaccine critics online, which are all American. It was never approved for use in the US. So even though this is the strongest case for the argument that covid vaccines (or at least, this specific one) lead to heart issues, it gets overlooked.

In the Covid vaccine-skeptical community, the lay hypothesis of the mechanism was much more plain: the spike protein itself somehow acts like transfats, and it’s the one thing shared by both the mRNA vaccines and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And guess what? “One Google search” (as per the recent Pfizer meme) turned up this paper from the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, Volume 602, 15 November 2021, received in March 2021:

… SARS-CoV-2 spike protein removes lipids from model membranes and interferes with the capacity of high density lipoprotein to exchange lipids …

Here's an illustration of the abstract of that paper.

And cardiac science has recently shown how absolutely vital saturated fats are for heart health:

Dietary lipids are important regulators of cardiac function through their role in membrane phospholipids, as signaling molecules and ligands for nuclear receptors, and as the predominant oxidative substrate for cardiac mitochondria.

This second paper is absolutely fascinating, even for a Star Trek technobabbler like me with no biology courses since high school. I found this section particularly interesting:

It has become increasing clear that packaging of triglyceride into intracardiomyocyte lipid droplets plays an important role in cardiac fatty acid metabolism, and very likely prevents the toxic effects of lipid accumulation in the heart.

So, if the spike protein removes good fats from heart membranes, we indeed have a candidate mechanism for heart failure by both the virus and the vax.

And cardiac science has recently shown how absolutely vital saturated fats are for heart health

Has it? Their conclusion says:

In summary, manipulation of dietary fat intake shows promise in the prevention and treatment of [heart failure]. Clinical studies generally support high intake of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids from marine sources to prevent and treat HF. Additional clinical and animals studies are needed to determine the optimal diet in terms of the relative and absolute intake of saturated, monounsaturated, and n-3 and n-6 PUFA for this vulnerable patient population.

In other words: omega-3 fats are good (which everyone knows already) and further research is needed for the others. Nothing of substance.

Where did you find them saying that saturated fats are "absolutely vital" for heart health? The only claim I could find that comes even close is:

We recently used a similar hamster model to compare the effects of two high fat diets (45% of energy from fat): one high n-3 PUFA and n-6 PUFA, and the other high in saturated and monounsaturated fat. There was only a modest ~10% increase in body mass with the two high fat diets, but surprisingly consumption of the high saturated and monounsaturated fat diet prolonged life compared to either the standard low fat diet or the high n-3PUFA + n-6PUFA diet (Figure 2). We found improved survival in cardiomyopathic hamsters fed the high saturated and monounsaturated fat diet compared to either a standard low fat diet (12% fat), or a high fat diet enriched with n-3PUFA and n-6PUFA7. Again, as with the SHHF rat, the relevance of this model to most cases of human HF is limited and one should use caution in extrapolating to patients.

Admittedly, I've only skimmed the article.

Edit: I want to point out that the paper itself is about high-fat, low-carb diets, not about specific types of fat.

Disrupting the exercise habits and diets of millions of people likely would cause an increase in heart disease, as well.

I literally joined a gym a month before Covid, and planned to use their pool regularly. I guess that plan was foiled pretty handily.

My understanding is the surge in heart attacks occurred after the vaccine but was not present in 2020.

If that’s true there are still some questions:

  1. Did covid mutate in a way to make heart attacks more likely?

  2. Did a year of lockdowns (stress and sedentary lifestyle) cause a surge?

  3. How frequently were the victims vaccinated?

Nevertheless if my timing is right it does increase the likelihood that vaxs are playing some role (could be multivariate).

At least this would seem to suggest a spike already in 2020.

Like I already said in my posts, one reason might be lockdowns and general sedentary life. However, one thing that a least couldnt explain a spike in 2020 would be the vaxx.

It’s possible that Covid does damage that takes 6 months to a year to see manifest. It’s also possible that there’s an interaction between vaccination and Covid, whereby having both damages you in a similar way.

Let's also add more sedentary behavior while locked down, and depression and stress from social isolation and job loss.

Yes, that would be among the secondary effects (ie. lockdowns might cause some of it, but some increase of sedentary behavior, or a fair amount of it, might have also occurred due to avoidance of COVID without any lockdowns at all).

Despite being steeped in this group since the beginning of 2020, I've never seen any person of any significance who makes the claim the rise in heart attacks is because of the covid injections alone. Can you link a single person of any significance who claims the rise in heart attacks are vaccines alone?

Which person or persons would you label "vaccine/heart attack theorists" which you're "not taking seriously" because of your characterization here?

No, because I'm talking about the general form of popular antivaccine discourse that I'm encountering randomly online, ie. chiefly on Twitter.

Ok, so if you’ve encountered it on Twitter then can you link a tweet that you think is an instance of it?

no one holds the opinion you're claiming, you've built a strawman

Isn’t there an entire documentary under discussion that explicitly does hold that opinion?

no, have you seen it?

I'm not particularly a fan because I think it's washing good information with montages of Bigfoot which poisons the well and has basic failures in vetting some footage, but at no point does the documentary claim the covid injections are the sole reason for the huge increase in heart attacks.

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