OCARDITIS!

The medical profession issues another flawed mission accomplished announcement on Covid vaccine-induced myocarditis.

Let us presume that the mRNA scripts contained in the pseudo-vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 are escaping the site of injection - or, in many cases, entering the bloodstream directly, since the authorities have advised against “aspirating” the syringe during intramuscular injections, meaning there is no way to check against doing so¹ - and that they must primarily be taken up by the cells of the vascular epithelium, especially in capillaries, where blood flow is slowest: Would this explain why the hearts of teenaged and young adult males are more symptomatically affected than others? I think it quite easily would. Compared to girls and women of the same age, teenaged boys and adult men have larger hearts, implying more coronary capillary volume; and the former are believed to experience cardiac distress in less clearly centered locations - such as the back or neck - leading further to under-diagnosis.² And compared to older men, younger males have smaller absolute amounts of capillary volume outside of the heart (blood vessels, including capillaries multiply with the rest of the cells in the body during growth or weight gain, whether via added muscle or fat). If the older are more heavily-built on average, than the younger will have more slowed-down blood in their heart proportionally at any given moment.

A lipid nanoparticle or adenovirus particle waiting for a capillary epithelial cell to absorb it will see the inside of the myocardium more often, in the body of teenaged boy.³

The myocardium - the muscular wall of the heart - is more or less a thick sheet of muscle cells latticed with capillaries. Even if myocardial capillary volume in leaner men is a small portion of overall capillary volume, that small portion could easily be an order of magnitude larger than the corresponding portion for heavier men. The disparity in outcomes by age group would therefor merely be a statistical artifact of lower body masses among younger males on average. Thus, the disparity itself is consistent with what would be seen if the spike protein scripts are proliferating throughout the body in all recipients (or in a perfectly random sample of all recipients).⁴

This leads to a paradox: Alarming as myocarditis is on its own, it must in reality be “competing” for harms associated with distribution of the spike protein script throughout the body - with the specter of immune dysregulation and autoimmunity, of course, already looming even before systemic distribution comes into play. If direct expression of spike protein in capillaries throughout the body is likely to more dramatically shorten the lives of young Covid vaccine recipients than autoimmunity, however, it is still hard to know what to worry about the most: Blood clots, heart tissues, the nervous system, the lungs, the kidneys, the reproductive system? All of these, of course, with their own yet-innumerable hosts of potential spike-associated etiologies waiting to become clinically manifest so that they can be retroactively dissected.

Or, as the medical community “party line” would apparently put it, the current rates of observed myocarditis could not offer a better possible reason to celebrate the safety of the Covid vaccines!⁵

All [15 hospitalizations for acute myocarditis identified by the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Regional Immunization Practice Committee] resolved with conservative management. No one was admitted to the ICU or required readmission after discharge. […]

"The vaccinated population was diverse, [and] the myocarditis cases were few," commented Biykem Bozkurt, MD, PhD, of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.⁶

The currently reported heart inflammation indicating a subclinical avalanche of post-Covid vaccine harms that will reveal themselves in the coming months and years seems to be fairly benign, everyone! Hooray!

In criticizing “science journalism’s” dismissal of the paper by Høeg, et al. three weeks ago,⁷ I was careful to acknowledge that the paper does indeed succumb to the hazard of trying to translate an imprecise signal for harms into a tangible measurement. This can’t really be done. The bigger point is that the signal is there, but being willfully ignored.

But apparently, willful ignorance isn’t satisfying enough, to the addled mind of the medical establishment. The same outlet which highlighted the dismissal of Høeg, et al.’s paper is now engaging in the same flawed exercise for which that paper’s conclusions were dismissed. In the article appearing in MedPage Today on September 15, blogger David Gorski was quoted delivering the “fatal blow”:

"There's a signal," he wrote. But, from the evidence we have thus far: "It's not yet clear how large the risk of myocarditis is in this age group."⁸

Yet in yesterday’s article, this outsourced acknowledgement of the limits of our current possible knowledge is totally and retroactively rescinded:

A study in a relatively diverse population reaffirmed acute myocarditis as a rare and fairly mild event affecting young men after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.

Setting aside, for now, the incredibly limited scope of the study being reviewed - 15 patients! - an observer has to wonder why the medical establishment cares whether the currently recognized cases are “mild” (a medical impossibility) and “rare” or not. What is the difference? Dismissing the signal as irrelevant already marginalizes the loss of life that may be suffered by the teens and young adults clinically diagnosed to date, as well as omits acknowledgement of the vastly greater loss of life that could result from yet-unmeasured, subclinical myocarditis - including that which, again, may only be a reflection of the non-specificity of heart pain in women.

It could be the case, for example, that “neck pain” after Covid vaccination is in fact the result of myocarditis in female recipients. Here is one possible instance, after injection with the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) vaccine:

[37 years old] Feeling ill by the time I returned home after receiving the Covid shot. Upset stomach, nausea, loss of appetite weakness, chills, sweats, shaking, headache, soreness and aching in back and neck, tingling, numbness, sensation of cold in arm that received the injection, pain, loss of strength. 24 hours bed rest. Increased fluids, acetaminophen, naproxen. Still sore, achy, feeling weak nearly 48 hours after receiving the shot.⁹

And others, after Pfizer / BioNTech:

[13 years old] Prolonged uncontrolled status migrainosus, not controlled with triptan or even IV medications in the hospital; severe and painful muscle spasms in neck/shoulder area. [No listed screening for myocarditis.]¹⁰

[27 years old] Dizzy; Nauseous; Neck hurts; Hot flashes; Site is still bleeding; […] The patient did not receive any treatment. All the events were reported as non-serious.¹¹

[44 years old] Anxiety, Head discomfort, Cough, Headache, Electrocardiogram, Neck pain, Feeling abnormal, Pain, Feeling jittery, Palpitations […] Basic vital signs completed on 09/22/2021, along with EKG [not a diagnosis for myocarditis] on 09/22/2021.¹²

[38 years old] Chills; Aches; Drowsiness; Dizziness; Nausea; Extreme pain starting from left arm up the left side of neck […] The events did not result in doctor or other healthcare professional office/clinic visit, and emergency room/department or urgent care.¹³

[41 years old] Pain in left neck from shoulder to ear for 48 hours […] The events did not result in doctor or other healthcare professional office/clinic visit, emergency room/department or urgent care.¹⁴

[16 years old] Bad sore neck on the left side; exact side that she had the vaccine arm, she had on the left side; she can hardly move her neck; Flu like symptoms; Chills really bad; real shaky. [No listed screening for myocarditis.]¹⁵

If any of these are in fact undiagnosed myocarditis, they could result in years or decades of shortened lifespans. The human body, it would apparently astonish many doctors to discover, needs heart muscle to live; and the muscular cells of the myocardium renew at such a near-glacial rate that they were long believed incapable of healing at all. There is not, according to current medical understanding, any such thing as “mild” damage to the heart muscle; only less immediately lethal.¹⁶ The un-screened reactions above are all related to Covid vaccinations occurring from mid-August to September. They could correspond to thousands or millions of similar reactions over the last ten months.

The self-evidence of heart pain in men, in other words, is possibly the only reason that a specific clinical source has been aggressively screened for, and discovered, at all. All other signs of possible Covid vaccine harms among the young, especially younger women, are easily waived away as “aches,” without any attempt to assess actual patient health. And it is only by this “accident” of selective exception to the widespread refusal to peer behind the curtain, that the risk of myocarditis has become the openly-acknowledged controversy that it is.

But the party line of the medical profession does not seriously acknowledge the possibility of subclinical myocarditis lurking underneath the currently visible set of cases (except, of course, when doing so by accident in dismissing the current signal as “just a signal”); this possibility is referred to, more or less, as a “limitation” on the accuracy of current guesses, as if it is a mere rounding error that is just as likely to disappear when attacked by more rigorous exclusion of “false positives”.¹⁷ Incredibly, one of the only - if not the only - official acknowledgements of the fact that myocarditis may be more widespread than what has currently been measured - the sheer, obvious impossibility of ruling out that it isn’t! - comes from the FDA, in their approval letter for the Pfizer Covid vaccine (emphasis added):

We have determined that an analysis of spontaneous postmarketing adverse events reported under section 505(k)(1) of the FDCA will not be sufficient to assess known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis and identify an unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis.¹⁸

Party line-affirming researchers and “science journalists” don’t highlight the risk of subclinical myocarditis because it doesn’t occur to them to do so; and it doesn’t occur to them to do so because they don’t actually care about the issue at all.¹⁹ So, again, it is only with a mixture of exasperation and befuddlement that one can regard this sudden attempt to re-litigate the controversy. If the possibility of literally universal cardiac damage from Covid vaccination among younger recipients doesn’t elicit the slightest grain of interest among the establishment, why should the largely academic quibble over quantifying the current signal continue to inflame the animal spirts? We may hazard a guess: The reputation of the Covid vaccines is the end in of itself.

The younger male recipients who, by accident, have made one of the harms of the Covid vaccines visible are, in the eyes of the medical establishment, a font of heresy which must be quelled. That is all that their “fairly benign” irreversible loss of cardiac function represents.

Well, that and an excellent opportunity to celebrate the fact that white recipients were disproportionately affected. From the MedPage Today review of the new study (emphasis added):

Notably, of the [2,392,924] people vaccinated in the KPSC system [which was screened for hospitalizations with diagnosis of myocarditis up to 10 days after Covid vaccination], 37.8% were Hispanic, 31.2% were white, 14.3% were Asian, and 6.7% were Black. […] Of the 15 men who developed myocarditis, nine [60%] were white, four were Hispanic, one was Asian, and one was of unknown ethnicity.

Here are the same “fairly benign” results in the study’s own table:²⁰

This, grotesquely, is the outcome which inspires the declaration in the subhead and earlier quote that myocarditis “[does] not disproportionately affect minorities” and that “[t]he vaccinated population was diverse, [and] the myocarditis cases were few.”²¹

Oh, but the farce doesn’t stop there. Regarding both the pool of KPSC members who received a Covid vaccine (before July 20) and who were reported to the provider for hospitalization with myocarditis (emphasis added):

We included Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC) members aged 18 years or older

Thus, the study excludes the group potentially most vulnerable to the outcome being measured.²²

When confronted by the provocative calculations of the paper by Høeg, et al., the medical profession lashed out at the idea of measuring the scale of myocarditis at all, in a fit of callous indifference to the harms being wrought by the widespread experimentation on children which they have endorsed. But as soon as an opportunity arrives to portray the rate of harms in a positive light - via, what else, distortion and omission - they reverse position, latching onto the data with (lamentably un-diverse) white knuckles. Outright, flippant dismissal may be more morally repugnant than the attempts to dispel the truth away with statistical manipulations; but at least it is more intellectually rigorous.

Bozkurt, for example - the researcher quoted by Lou in yesterday’s article - is the author of another paper reviewed by Lou in July.²³ Incredibly, Bozkurt’s own comments in July echo the possibility that current rates of post-Covid-vaccine myocarditis are significantly underreported, due to insufficient follow-up, especially among women:

Bozkurt and colleagues' analysis of VAERS through June 6 revealed 6,235 reported cases of chest pain, with 69% of these cases reported in women as opposed to men.
"Despite a higher prevalence of chest pain in women, diagnostic evaluation, including ECG, laboratory biomarkers, echocardiography and MRI was performed and reported more often in males compared with female patients presenting with chest pain after COVID vaccination," the group observed.

But what, in the paper from July, is ultimately made of this acknowledgement of uncertainty over the impacts of this mass experiment on young subjects?

Despite rare cases of self-limited myocarditis, the benefit-risk assessment for COVID-19 vaccination shows a favorable balance for all age and sex groups; therefore, COVID-19 vaccination is currently recommended for everyone 12 years of age and older

1. It seems that confirming this suspicion - that not aspirating is the widespread practice during Covid-vaccinations - was as simple as looking up the current guidelines. See Campbell, John. “Inadvertant intravenous injections.” (2021, September 26.) youtube.com. The CDC and WHO guidelines are presented circa 13:40.

Younger, lower-weight recipients may also be more likely to have larger veins closer to the surface of the shoulder. A series of studies throughout the 00’s and 10’s give conflicting results and opinions, some essentially condemning aspiration as an outdated superstition among nurses with literally zero actual real-world risk to non-aspiration; these, however, may be based on safety results among older recipients. In Thomas, C. et al. (2016.) “Blood Aspiration During IM Injection,” the shoulder is the second most-common site for presence of blood in aspirated intramuscular injections (12% of injection-aspirations producing blood). However, as the paper is paywalled (with a frankly outlandish access price), the details of patients receiving injections in the study are unclear.

Campbell’s reporting is also supported by anecdotes (and common sense expectations) that poorly- (or not at all-) trained clinic staff are injecting the Covid vaccines generically into “the arm,” where veins are much more surface-accessible.

2. For a summary, see Fields, Lisa. “6 Symptoms of Women's Heart Attacks.” (2015, February 15.) WebMD.

“Women don't always get the same classic heart attack symptoms as men, such as crushing chest pain that radiates down one arm. Those heart attack symptoms can certainly happen to women, but many experience vague or even “silent” symptoms that they may miss. […]

“Pain in your arm(s), back, neck, or jaw. This type of pain is more common in women than in men. It may confuse women who expect their pain to be focused on their chest and left arm, not their back or jaw.”

3. Edit, October 25: The original version of this footnote described the Astrazeneca and Janssen vector viral particles as having adenovirus cellular entry proteins. After a revisit of the Astrazeneca trial protocol and further reading, my impression is that the particle expresses the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, implying no interaction with the CAR receptor, but an obvious significant risk of clotting upon entrance into the bloodstream (the Janssen version uses an edited, “stabilized” version of spike protein, but in the real world this does not seem to have made any difference in the toxicity of the protein).

4. It exceeds my rudimentary grasp of physiology to litigate whether the same disparity would be a signal for more indirect mechanisms leading to post-Covid vaccine myocarditis - those which propose, vaguely, that generic autoimmune triggering is somehow manifesting in muscle tissue but not other tissues. The worst case scenario for this mechanism, I would guess, would be that the current cases of myocarditis prove to involve “giant cells,” which are plausibly a system-wide immune dysfunction that is clinically manifested as myocarditis. However, it’s just as plausible that expression of the spike protein within the myocardium could lead to giant cell myocarditis.

5. Lou, Nicole. “Post-Vax Myocarditis Fairly Benign Even in a Diverse Population.” (2021, October 4.) MedPage Today.

Which reviews: Simone, A. et al. “Acute Myocarditis Following COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination in Adults Aged 18 Years or Older.” JAMA Internal Medicine.

6. Yea, and in that Year 1 of our Vaccine, Science did proclaim that the vaccinated population was diverse, and the myocarditis cases were few.

7. See “Myo-Card Me a River.”

8. See Fiore, Kristina. “Myocarditis VAERS Analysis Sparks Social Media Uproar.” (2021, September 15.) MedPage Today.

9. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1730983

10. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1689537

11. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1718230

12. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1722498

13. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1725601

14. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1725625

15. https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1718318

In contrast, some results for neck pain in younger female recipients do indicate follow-up potentially ruling out myocarditis, such as https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1719241 and https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1725823, and others with ambiguous results such as https://openvaers.com/covid-data/covid-reports/1693256

16. In the best case scenario, the myocarditis observed after Covid vaccination is not correlated with cellular damage, as opposed to myocarditis resulting from viral infections which spread to the heart. This, however, may in fact be impossible, if the inflammation itself damages or disregulates myocardial muscular structure and contraction.

17. As in Lou’s article:

“Lee and colleagues [the authors of the reviewed study in the article] acknowledged the possibility of subclinical cases being underdiagnosed, along with other study limitations, such as the observational design and short follow-up time.

‘No relationship between COVID-19 mRNA vaccination and postvaccination myocarditis can [be] established given the observational nature of this study,’ they cautioned.

18. See https://www.fda.gov/media/151710/download. Accessed October 5, 2021:

We have determined that an analysis of spontaneous postmarketing adverse events reported under section 505(k)(1) of the FDCA will not be sufficient to assess known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis and identify an unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis.

Furthermore, the pharmacovigilance system that FDA is required to maintain under section 505(k)(3) of the FDCA is not sufficient to assess these serious risks.

Therefore, based on appropriate scientific data, we have determined that you are required to conduct the following studies:

4. StudyC4591009,entitled“ANon-InterventionalPost-ApprovalSafetyStudyof the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in the United States,” to evaluate the occurrence of myocarditis and pericarditis following administration of COMIRNATY.

We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this study according to the following schedule:

Final Protocol Submission: August 31, 2021

Monitoring Report Submission: October 31, 2022

Interim Report Submission: October 31, 2023

Study Completion: June 30, 2025

19. As, once again, made resoundingly clear by the posts discussed in “Myo-Card Me a River.”

20. (Simone, A. et al.)

21. Naturally, selection bias rules out actually concluding anything about which groups of recipients were more affected. Nonwhite recipients may have simply been more likely not to seek care, or to seek care outside of the hospital system, or to not be referred for hospitalization by primary care.

22. Additionally, only 25% of Covid vaccine recipients in the KPSC pool were under the age of 34: "Of 2,392,924 KPSC members who received at least 1 dose [...] Median age was 49 years (IQR, 34-64 years)" The authors do not appear to have gone through the trouble of calculating a separate magic statistical odds ratio for any age group, including the 598,231 recipients between 18-33, as other studies have done.

23. See: Lou, Nicole. “Post-Vax Myocarditis Playbook Has Mostly Worked So Far, Uncertainties Aside.” (2021, July 20.) MedPage Today.

Which reviews: Bozkurt, B. et al. “Myocarditis With COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines.” Circulation.

Perhaps the mantra “Uncertainties aside” can supplant the discarded Hippocratic Oath.

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