Covid and vaccines

[Lindberg]

Fair enough.

“At this point it's non-controversial to say there's a causal link between the vaccines and myocarditis.” seems like just such a statement. It lacks context, scale, and significance.

Ok, here's a direct quote from the CDC: "Evidence from multiple monitoring systems in the United States and around the globe support a causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (i.e., Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech) and myocarditis and pericarditis." And the next sentence after you quoted was a link to the source of that quote, so I don't know what context I was missing.

 

[Palmpilot]

...Add: my understanding is VAERS is used to drive later, statistically valid studies such as this, which shows the risk from myocarditis is low from both Covid and vaccines but considerably higher for those who had the disease: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/...ses-higher-risk-for-myocarditis-than-vaccines

VAERS enabled researchers to focus on myocarditis rather than some other condition that did not appear to be reported by VAERS respondents.

For convenience, here's the paper that is linked in that article:

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.059970

 

[Llewtrah381]

It's not just doctors and medical professionals posting to VAERS?

No. Anyone who receives a vaccine can. When I was giving shots at a Public Health clinic we provided everyone with info re how to enroll in VAERS. They (“we” - in my capacity as a recipient) got periodic texts asking us for any symptoms.

As said, anyone could provide any kind of feedback; IIRC there wasn’t even any proof a shot had been received by the respondent. I’m pretty sure it’s in the realm of possibility people who never got shots could register and say it made their hair turn purple if they wanted.

Add: It’s not intended to specifically provide validated adverse reaction data - it’s intended to help identify what to study further. It’s also completely possible for people to say they developed myocarditis based solely on what they think that means, that their chest twinges or shortness of breath or whatever were myocarditis, etc.

 

[GaryM]

VAERS has it's flaws, as noted by @Liewtrah381, but it's not useless. The data may be better when reported by a healthcare professional, but VAERS allows self-reporting, or third-party reporting, which makes for noisier data that could only indicate correlation, not causation...but if trends emerge in the data, it does get looked at more closely to see if there might be a causal link.

There was a VAERS entry made early on, as vaccination started becoming highly political, by someone who claimed the Covid vaccine turned him into the Incredible Hulk.