Myo-Card Me a River
Medical indifference to the possibility of myocarditis among young Covid vaccine recipients predictably escalates after a new, but flawed study.
The mass experiment on humanity of the Covid vaccines has revealed that there’s more than the two, obvious benefits to running novel medicines through series of limited testing - narrow scope of potential harm, and better ability to observe harms. It turns out that once the scale of a trial reaches the entire population, the people administering the trial - the medical community, at large - become unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of harms to begin with.
It is in this context that we may discuss the medical community’s reaction to the recently-released paper suggesting that the rate of myocarditis among young Covid vaccine recipients exceeds the current CDC estimate,1 which has ranged from foaming indignation, apocalyptic fear-mongering (directed only in the direction of the virus), and personal attack. The scandal is overviewed in the article appearing in MedPage Today, headlined “Myocarditis VAERS Analysis Sparks Social Media Uproar — Doctors worry misinterpretation will fuel misinformation campaigns.”2
The report by Tracy Høeg, MD, PhD, of the University of California Davis, and colleagues found that rates of "cardiac adverse events" after the second dose were higher than previous CDC estimates […]
The authors also concluded that the risk of hospitalization for cardiac adverse events following vaccination is higher than the risk of being hospitalized with COVID for healthy boys in both age groups.
The findings led to an uproar by physicians on social media, who pointed out that they're unreliable due to the nature of VAERS and its known limitations -- and that the authors are running the risk of serious misinterpretation of their findings by groups with bad intentions.
Perhaps interpreting “groups with bad intentions” to mean “anyone who advocates against allowing non-adults to take an experimental, failing vaccine” is ungenerous. But it seems implausible that the physicians on social media were referring to would-be home invaders, or voicing their well-known foreign policy anxieties over the possible weaponization of misinterpreted studies into vaccine harms by our foes in the Iranian government. The sole example supplied by author Kristina Fiore to elaborate the phrase is a tweet posted by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Thus, Fiore is presumably referring either to Greene’s Covid vaccine skepticism, brand-damaging promotion of CrossFit, or violation of progressive cultural dogmas as the “bad intentions” empowered by the study’s findings.
Fiore, after citing “physician-blogger” David Gorski’s characterization of the study as a “dumpster dive,”3 at least goes on to provide the lead author ample space to reply to her emailed questions. Here, Høeg comes off as even-headed and sensible. However, I share some of the more salient reservations voiced by the study’s apoplectic critics: The decision to use a 120-day window for severe outcomes is strange (even if presuming a hellish booster regime, a 182.625-day window makes more sense), and the basic premise of trying to quantify an imperfect signal is, in my eyes, not a very productive endeavor to begin with. One quantification is necessarily as questionable as another, as long as the portion of actual harm being represented by the signal is unknowable. The signal thus acts as a binary between unlikelihood and likelihood of a given “possible long-term outcome among some number of recipients,” and the possible long-term outcome and number of recipients who will experience it both implicitly have no limiting factor.
Attempting to quantify the signal does nothing to establish that the actual harms are not limited to the current signal size (not best case outcome), or that they are not universal (not worst case outcome).
It could turn out to be the best case outcome, but the only way to take the worst case outcome off the table is to stop dosing kids.
Here we wade into the question of how to compare this risk - the risk that nearly every young recipient of this experimental injection will not live to their 30th birthday, if even their 20th - with the risk of infection itself, and what to make of the epistemic double-standard applied by professional advocates for the Covid vaccines. To do so, however, would consist of retreading the exact same ground covered in the discussion of the Quillette hit-piece against ivermectin.4
But what is novel about the reaction to the study and to Greene’s heretical, “antiscience” sharing of it to the citizens she represents,5 is not just that medical professionals continue to downplay the possibility of the risk using whatever epistemic standard suits their ends, but that they are now outwardly manifesting a deliberate indifference to the possibility.
What makes Gorski’s essay remarkable, for example, is the underlying presumption that to establish that VAERS serves only to make a signal for harms visible, not epidemiologically quantify those harms, is to win the argument: As if the existence of a signal that young recipients of an experimental drug are having years of their life chopped off, and no one is doing anything to look into it, is not cause for moral outrage! In the framework constructed by Gorski’s essay, the most troubling thing about the possibility of post-vaccine childhood onset of myocarditis, in the end, is the potential that looking into the subject might violate epidemiological norms and taboos (emphasis added):
No, I don’t think that Dr. Tracy Høeg (or any of the other authors) is antivaccine. However, it is very clear that she and her co-authors are completely out of their depth here and do not understand how VAERS works, even though Dr. Høeg, a sports and spine medicine specialist, does also have a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from University of Copenhagen. She really should know better, but this study demonstrates that she does not, as I will show. As for the rest of the authors, Allison Krug is also an epidemiologist who, again, really should know better […]
This absolute and un-self-aware indifference to the children whose cardiovascular health might be permanently destroyed while physicians quibble over technique, is echoed by one of the forty thousand or so twitter-warrioring medical professionals Gorski quotes approvingly in the essay, who concludes a three-tweet thread acknowledging the signal for elevated post-vaccine myocarditis with:6
[Comparing Covid vaccine risks for normal weight and obese children, which allows doctors and parents a better evaluation of potential harms] plays into the idea that some kids’ illness is not as important. A coldly American idea.
VAERS is only a signal, but it’s not the only signal. I would argue that the most important signal at present is the one that’s the most obscure: The anecdotes of widespread malfeasance on the part of American healthcare providers, including willful miscategorization of patient events as “Covid 19” cases as incentivized by the immunity granted by the PREP Act.7 The notion that healthcare providers are either voluntarily declining to, or being discouraged from reporting temporally associated medical issues to VAERS is disturbing enough. The possibility that the wave of “unvaccinated childhood hospitalizations” for infection with SARS-CoV-2 over the summer includes, to some large share, teens who were less than 14 days after their second dose, and what such an absurd technical contortion might imply about why they are actually in the hospital to begin with, is whip the cowboy-hat while the bomb falls out the hanger material.
Within the inner realms of the American healthcare system - which for all intents and purposes has become a self-contained police state - the truth of what patients are experiencing could not be more obscure. To watch anonymous, faceless whistleblower accounts proliferate online or see TV news stories where official hospitalization figures are read out over the phone, is to realize that the entrance to an American healthcare facility in 2021 might as well be a portal into North Korea.
But the shroud of mystery draped over the healthcare system is only all the more reason to discontinue experimenting on our own children until better methods of establishing the truth are set in place. It is not American 13 year-olds who designed the monitoring system that has no capability of accurately measuring whether we are killing them; for physicians to excuse their wanton behavior by pointing out the limits of VAERS over and over, gleefully, is merely to hurl the blame for this disaster down at their own feet.
I don’t often comment here on what I actually think an mRNA spike protein script, injected into shoulder muscle, goes on to inflict inside the human body and mind; nor what I make of cardiovascular damage associated with infection with the virus itself.
For one thing there are other sources, much more knowledgeable than myself, to which the reader could refer.9 For another, I think the “negative circumstantial” evidence in favor of acting as though this is all a giant global depopulation campaign has been overwhelming before the Pandemic™ even arrived. We all live in a reality where getting the entire population of the earth to self-inject a bio-weapon would be, well, really quite nifty from the perspective of any person or country with enough money to fund a research lab; so, presume the grounds are being laid to market such a product at all times, or be prepared to hit the concrete. And lastly, I think fear of the Covid vaccines is not the way out of our mass medical psychosis, which itself is not a novel feature of reality, either. There is only one hope of freeing ourselves from the Public Health Theocracy which seeks to establish itself in plain sight, and that is to restore our faith in our own bodies - to trust them with our fate, knowing that to do so is to embrace death as the thing that gives meaning to life.
All of that said, if you don’t think the signal for a possible avalanche of pending early deaths among younger Covid vaccine recipients is already well-established, it’s possible that you’re delusional. And if, among the physicians who are promoting these products to parents, the reaction to any attempt to discuss or interpret the signal, however flawed, is not doubt or introspection but doubled-down delusion, then God help the under-twelve year-olds who will be targeted a mere 45 days from now.
Høeg, T. et al. “SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17: A Stratified National Database Analysis.” medrxiv.org
Fiore, Kristina. “Myocarditis VAERS Analysis Sparks Social Media Uproar.” (2021, September 15.) MedPage Today.
The physician-blogger, David Gorski, in a defamation lawsuit-ready post for the ages, also associates the study with the “anti-vaxxer” slur (a slur which merely becomes descriptive outside of the church of medicine, of course), and asserts that Høeg et al. “are completely out of their depth here and do not understand how VAERS works” and that Høeg “really should know better, but […] does not, as [Gorski] will show,” that co-author Allison Krug “again, really should know better,” that co-author John Mandrola has “a definite axe to grind,” and that co-author Josh Stevenson “didn’t want anyone to know [his affiliation with Rational Ground, an apparent outpost for medical heresy],” because he is possibly “embarrassed, or maybe he doesn’t want people citing his work to be aware of his bias.”
See Gorski, David. “Dumpster diving in the VAERS database to find more COVID-19 vaccine-associated myocarditis in children.” (2021, September 13.) Science-Based Medicine.
As tweeted by Peter Hotez and quoted by Gorski in his essay:
“This is absolutely not true and was shown to be false. Gross antiscience disinformation from an elected member of the US Congress. Antiscience aggression is contributing to the death of 1,500 Americans each day. Enabled by social media. 100,000 needless American deaths since May”
Kudos to Hotez for the abuse of math. Although worldometers shows the United States was at 100,000 fewer total deaths attributed to “Covid 19” as recently as April 20, it would only take two months and seven days to reach 100,000 deaths at a daily rate of 1,500. Of course, Hotez is using the current rate, mid-summer-wave, which has yet to reach 1,500 on a 7-day average basis, but is currently pretty close. However, as “antiscience disinformation” cannot limit its effect to ~28 days after being uttered, it is more appropriate to use an annualized death rate / 365 when measuring how many deaths “antiscience disinformation” is contributing to per day.
See the Department of Health and Human Service’s landing page, https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/legal/prepact/Pages/default.aspx
I recommend, for instance, Huber, Colleen. “Is it possible to avoid heart damage from the COVID vaccine? Or do all COVID-vaccinated people have some myocarditis?” (2021, July 21.) The Defeat of COVID.
Watching combat between competing PhD is always fun. But it takes careful analysis to find truth, since inflated egos that often go with academic credentials inhibits scientific discovery. When their minds are made up there's little room for facts.
It is unfortunate that the relevant data are unreliable and incomplete. One would hope for better competence from a science based operation like the medical establishment. But, of course, politics has certainly been the primary adjudicator of science during this episode, so the neglected records are at least partly purposeful. But data is never perfect, and we always make do with the best data available, accounting for the shortcomings of sparse data mathematically, and inaccuracies with probabilistic estimation. Careers will be made for generations of researchers trying to explain what happened in this episode.
The most important errors have been corrupted risk analyses. The risk decision for young people is only partly consideration of vaccine unjuries. Risk is not just whether the vaccine causes harm, but whether the risk of adverse infection warrants any vaccine risk at all. The covid risk for young people is very small. Moreover, we seem to have a pretty good handle on the conditions that predispose people of all ages to serious illness. The worst malpractice has been the presumption that all people are identical, and one treatment size fits all. Every doctor understands the fallacy of that, yet most seem willing to accept it.