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I am going to do my best to write a post to follow up on last week's mRNA vaccine hypothetical. Last week, the idea of 25% of the population "dying" from the vaccine would have social consequences, and people discussed. I noticed a lot of in-the-weeds back and forth on the vaccines, and luckily, a paper came out today to establish a non-hypothetical.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22014931
I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease, but noticed that clotting incidences during Flu were never really elucidated or investigated. Science is a man made, bumbling golem. Blood clots in the lungs, according to my traditional reading of Physiology, would generally mean you can have blood clotting disorder anywhere you have blood. The Heart, The Brain, and the Lungs just have the worst, smallest pipes for these clots to be detected in.
A note about Covid being a clotty disease - covid blood clots are "amyloids" that cause "long covid" - then what are blood clots that appear during a flu sequalae? These probably have never been investigated or characterized. Covid is more clotty than flu - but are we considering that Covid causes severe sleepiness and lethargy? Do activity levels while infected affect blood clotting patterns during respiratory illness? (admittedly speculation - but have you ever taken a 16 hour plane flight? Look at this article about flu vaccines preventing blood clots, from 2008. They probably do - because all respiratory viruses increase chance of clotting? Well, that's fine, but I bet vaccines aren't supposed to cause clotting.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081109193332.htm
That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?
There has been some debate about the "naturalistic fallacy" in arguing that a Covid-19 infection can be characterized as less risky than receiving a Covid-19 vaccination. I keep encountering ostensibly "pro-vax" individuals who are claiming that getting myocarditis from the vaccine is a no brainer, if you are protected against myocarditis from Coronavirus. However, we have no clear mechanisms here, except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia. This type of myocarditis is not proving to be common at all with Covid-19 reinfections - I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken. If we had more traditional vaccines, perhaps an increased rate of myocarditis or blood clots near the lungs will be decreased, for a similar benefit. Why can't this be broached? Covaxin exists but was rejected by the FDA. The public health monolith seemed to block the chance to be "anti-vax" and win by scoring protection from the virus without being subject to a genetic-based biotechnology
We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me). This becomes true when infection reaches a tipping point and moves further than your lungs, but Omicron, combined with the fact that so many people have Natural and Artificial (oh sorry 2019 term - vaccine induced) Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).
It seems "pro-vax" are using some type of time fallacy that hasn't updated. What human is encountering SARS-2 with a naïve immune system in 2023? Why would you take a vaccine that can be compared to the risk getting your first exposure to a new group of coronaviruses in 2023? Then arguments can hit "we didn't know at the time," but this is extremely unsatisfying to people who had these exact suspicions during the vaccine drive, and got sick very early during the "it's just a flu" media push of Feb. 2020 (I was of course, masking in Feb. 2020, sigh).
Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.
Please come debate. I noticed more "pro-vax" on this board than usual - I'm ready for you. Let's be clear.
mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.
J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!
Novavax - this one does not rely on stable lipid nanoparticles, but involves a novel nanoparticle that helps arrange spike protein to look more like a "virus." This is important.
Covaxin - the FDA rejected this vaccine because the one's we had were so safe. This was the exact moment I sunk permenantly into my rabbit hole. The FDA and other public health stakeholders created some type of technology embargo against a traditional Covid vaccination methods. The reasons could be many, and I think are becoming deeply cultural, and I'm excited for the conversation we're about to have. Based on centuries old concepts of presenting antigens 'as they are' (insert latin term) rather than conjuring them at the ribosome in the cell, which has been of interest for less than a median human lifetime in the USA.
So in essence, rather than ask you what you think a 54% increase in Pulmonary Embolism incidence after Pfizer vaccination, I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted. If I have seemed at all to sneer or to be uncharitable, I apologize, and would be happy to reword. I wanted to put forward a spirited defense of "anti-mRNA vaxxery", not denigrate anyone on the other side.
You cite the unadjusted PE RR of 1.54, but after they adjust for the fact that patients receiving the Pfizer vaccine were older and more likely to be in nursing homes than the controls, the RR fell to 1.15. Given the small RR, the fact that they made many comparisons, and the fact that no such increase was observed for the Moderna vaccine, with a similar mechanism of action and higher dose, this is very likely to be either spurious, or possibly related to a Pfizer-specific adjuvant rather than to the mRNA LNPs.
Also, that autopsy paper you're tricking out all over the thread is not the smoking gun you think it is. It's been known and widely acknowledged that the mRNA vaccines are associated with myocarditis and pericarditis mostly in young males at a rate of about 5 per 100k, compared to 150 per 100k in infected patients. If you live in a country with a high chance of infection, such as the US, vaccination greatly reduces risk even when ignoring all the other sequelae of COVID-19 infection and considering only myocarditis risk.
There's been a group of people who clearly have a deep ideological and emotional investment in mRNA vaccines being far more harmful than COVID-19, and who have demonstrated a tendency to grossly misinterpret various data, anecdotes, or urban legends in order to provide support for that claim. After chasing down numerous such claims and finding that they don't hold up, I usually just don't bother. When I do, it's more in the spirit of, "How specifically did was this nonsense rationalized?" rather than out of wanting to see whether it's true. Anti-vaxxers just have no credibility left.
Everyone in the myocarditis study was not a young male. It just proves, that sudden death after vaccination can be downstream from the very "well understood" and "mild" myocarditis that the vaccine is associated with.
You are tricking out old Covid morbidity statistics against your best possible analysis of mRNA. For the right age group, you could see a 1 in 2,000 risk of heart damage.
Anyone who's heart stops after vaccination, could have died from the vaccine. The vaccinators did not study the vaccine long enough to even know this until part-way through the campaign, when it became "a known issue that doesn't hold up."
A lot of people had investment in mRNA stopping transmission, and that was why this rare side effect of "some heart damage to young people" was being hand waved. During the "we are getting herd immunity phase," It seemed like you would accept any risk to young patients to stop community spread. That's concept has collapsed, and you're trying to say that the vaccine is only somewhat as deadly as the disease you are actually trying to vaccinate against!
5 per 100k, 150 in 100k. Think of ALL the unreported covid cases that were mild or asymptomatic. You are showing me the best possible rate of myocarditis, and it holds up next to a disease. That's not great vaccine, even if you think an 85 year old in 2020 should have obviously received it (and then it wore off by mid 2021).
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To me that seems the opposite of what's happening. It's not the anti-mRNA-vaxxers who were arguing for, and implementing various measures to discriminate the vaxxed, and using grossly misinterpreted data, anecdotes, or urban legends to do it.
At best, I guess, you could argue both sides are doing it, but the asymmetry in actually implemented policies seems to point to an asymmetry in who is more emotionally invested.
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