Heart Problems After COVID Are Much Worse for the Vaccinated, Nature Study Shows – But It’s Hidden in the Appendix
/From [HERE] Nature published a comprehensive study this week on cardiovascular risk including a total of over 11 million patients that has made a few headlines. The aim was to identify the cause of increased cardiac pathology. It should have been a very simple study comparing four groups:
Not infected and never vaccinated
Not infected and vaccinated
Infected but not vaccinated
Infected and vaccinated
It is hard to believe the authors did not look at these groups, but whatever was found when comparing them remains a mystery.
Instead, the following groups were compared:
Not infected and never vaccinated data from 2017
Not infected, including vaccinated and not vaccinated
Infected but not vaccinated
Infected with vaccinated people included but using modelled adjustments
When studies with huge datasets use modelling and fail to share data prior to their adjustments alarm bells should start ringing. Therefore, I took a deeper dive to see what else was questionable.
There were serious biases in the paper which need addressing but first let’s look at the critical question of myocarditis (heart inflammation).
Because of the known risk of myocarditis from vaccination it is worth looking particularly closely at the data presented on this. Oddly, for the issue of the day, the data on myocarditis was all hidden in the supplementary appendix to the paper.
The risk of myocarditis appears to be an autoimmune (the immune system attacking the heart after interaction with the spike protein) rather than direct damage by the virus/vaccine spike protein. Therefore, myocarditis could result from the virus or the vaccine. The key question that needs answering is whether vaccination protects or enhances the risk from the virus.
The authors report 370 per million risk of myocarditis after Covid infection in the unvaccinated. The contemporary control rate was 70 per million and the historic one was 40 per million. What was wrong with the contemporary controls?
They made it clear they removed those who had been vaccinated from the calculation in the Covid arm but they did not state they did this for the control arm. Did vaccination lead to a 30 per million increase in myocarditis in the control arm? Given the cohort appears to be old and we know myocarditis incidence is worse in the young a one in 30,000 incidence is significant.
What about those who were vaccinated and had Covid? Once vaccination (and modelling) were included, the rate rose to 500 per million. It is not entirely clear whether supplementary Table 22 excludes those who were not vaccinated, but given that it does not state the unvaccinated were excluded from this data it is fair to assume the 500 per million relates to the whole population.
Given the higher risk of myocarditis after vaccination one might wonder whether this study showed protection from infection due to vaccination, as this would lower risk from the virus. Hidden in the legends of the supplementary tables the authors reveal that 62% of the Covid patients had been vaccinated compared to 56% of the non-infected controls (not a great advert for vaccine effectiveness against infection). [MORE]
