Anyone who kept kids out of school for 2 years, forces masks on toddlers, or makes getting vaccinated a requirement of holding a job or eating at a restaurant is indeed a villian. I appreciate your efforts for civility, but those actions need to be properly condemned so that they do not happen again.
Dr. Hoeg, I want to say that I appreciate your writing style. It communicates the essential points of the analysis without over-complicating the discussion with overtly technical language. It is a form of transparency that we need more of. Too often, studies and commentary serve the opposite ends. That is not to say that technical discussion is not warranted at times. But your piece here contributes to a model that more should strive toward: to communicate directly and clearly so that the merits of the thought can be clearly parsed.
Also, there is a _huge_ discrepancy in deaths in 2020 in the 35-44 y.o. group between the CDC ("10,4490" deaths shows that the number was likely edited rather than coming directly from a spreadsheet) and https://deadorkicking.com/death-statistics/us/2021/ (88,876). Since deadorkicking relies heavily on state death records and because the CDC number was likely edited by hand, the weight of the evidence favors deadorkicking.
In any case, the increase of 29% in US working age mortality between 2019 and 2021 fits both the CDC and deadorkicking numbers.
One would expect that maybe the CDC, if it didn't already know the answer, would be putting out press releases about the progress of its investigation into the cause.
It would be good for Aaron Siri to file an FOIA suit to get the emails about this data from the CDC.
It seems to me that while this article by Traci is well argued, many on the pro-vaccine side are missing the forest from the trees. (1) It is abundantly clear from many studies, including the recent Thailand one, that there is an increased risk of myocarditis following mRNA vaccination in young men. This is not in doubt. (2) With the current Omicron strain virtually everybody is going to get COVID so vaccination would seem to have little point unless it prevented hospitalization and deaths to a greater degree than the harms/adverse events in the relevant target group under examination (i.e. young males between ages 18-39). (3) It is also clear that those who have been infected by COVID are not going to benefit from vaccination. (4) Given that it is now well established that the mRNA vaccines prevent neither infection nor transmission, there can be absolutely no public health reasoning for enforcing/mandating vaccination in any group. Thus the choice of whether to be vaccinated/boosted or not at this stage of the game should be entirely up to the patient after being presented with the full and open facts. (And to Pfizer and Moderna: perhaps you should both be fully open and transparent and release all those facts to the public). (5) It is quite evident that others, especially the Nordic countries, have realized that there is a safety issue with vaccinating/boosting those under 50 (cf. Denmark) and hence have effectively banned vaccination for those under 50. Denmark is not exactly some far right country! (6) A primary guiding factor in medicine is "First do no harm". Given the massive age stratification for bad outcomes from a COVID infection, surely for those with absolutely minimal risk it would be better to stay far away from mandates. and indeed, I would go so far as to say that Universities and hospitals currently enforcing boosters are committing morally repugnant acts. It's one thing to recommend something that may or may not be helpful to a given individual depending on their age, gender, health, etc... but quite another to enforce something.
There is a curious lack of curiosity about the 29% increase in deaths of US working age adults in 2021 v. 2019 by the CDC and the Sensible Medicine authors.
This “self-controlled case series (SCCS)” method is likely to understate the cardiac risk of mRNA vaccine. If there is a higher risk in the first 4 weeks than in weeks 5-25, it would be common sense that there is also an elevated cardiac risk in weeks 5-25. It would be strange to have elevated cardiac risks for 4 weeks, and then risk immediately comes back down to unvaxed baseline at week 5 and onward. Wouldn't it?
So, the risk over the full 25 weeks is probably higher than the risk for the unvaxed.
a) It is clear there is a temporal association between vaccines and death. The only reason they did not find it is because of bad definitions of risk and control periods.
b) Not only that, the first first few weeks (not just the first 1 week) are probably affected by a healthy vaccinee effect. They have negative associations (See Supp Fig 4).
c) Their sensitivity analysis was bad. Take a gander at Supp Fig 4. Notice how it is not color coded the way the other figures are. A cynic would suppose this was done to downplay signals of harm. They even outright dismiss a significant association with death as being “unstable”. If they say so!
d) In any case, ONS data has been absurdly unreliable throughout the pandemic:
We see that ages 10-24 have heart disease causing 2.9% of deaths. But in the SCSS: “Of the 585 deaths which occurred within 12 weeks of receiving a COVID-19 vaccination, 105 were due to a cardiac event.” That’s 18%!
e) The authors also calculated things wrong. If people die between dose 1 and dose 2, then the time til death is <12 weeks. If they died after dose 2, they have yet a second chance to die within 12 weeks of a shot. So the first 12 weeks will be double-stacked. So that explains the “cliff” where deaths drop off. But even if you do some guesstimation and cut the height of those first 12 weeks in half, there would still be a suspicious graph that looks like vaccines are associated with death.
You are totally right about SCCS studies possibly just comparing injured people to injured people and finding no difference. I think it should be standard practice to do brute force calculations of all possible combinations of risk and control periods. Then report the maximal risk found. Then have others replicate.
From Steve Kirsch's slide 32 at https://www.skirsch.com/covid/TheData.pdf , I note a striking similarity in thought process between the academic vax advocates and the virus skeptics.
1. Vax advocates say that VAERS use by vax skeptics is "dumpster diving." But when VAERS is used by mainstream "scientists," VAERS is useful. This is cherry-picking data, which virus skeptics do when they point at local infection in households as being caused by local poisoning, but ignore infection that occurs when people travel, which cannot be due to local poisoning. The ebola outbreak in Haiti is an example of UN peacekeepers infecting Haiti. There would be no need for travel bans if all disease were caused by local poisons.
2. "You don't know how to interpret the data." Steve calls this "gaslighting," which may be based on the fact that the academic critics can't point out exactly what's wrong with the vax skeptics' interpretation. The virus skeptics say that viralists are reading the data through a virus lens, which implies that the viralists are misinterpreting the data.
3. Vax advocates about VAERS covid vax adverse event reports: "It's just over-reporting." This is a statement with no justification, which we see a lot with vax skeptics, "it's just 'epitomes", despite PCR showing nucleic acid multiplication after cell culturing, which doesn't occur with epitomes.
4. "Correlation isn't causation." Surely, correlation is a problem when there are many confounders, which is why temporality is so important in proving vaccine harm. Also, a mechanism for harm has to be determined in order to answer how vaccine harm can occur. There is a _surprising_ lack of curiosity by vax advocates about the 17.7% elevated excess mortality in the US working age population in 2021 v. 2020 and they aren't concerned that the CDC isn't talking about that mortality nor examining causes for the mortality nor giving guidance about how to investigate covid vaccine injury. Nobody cares that there was a HUGE jump in US working age mortality in 2021? Both the virus skeptics and the vax advocates follow the maxim, "Ignorance is bliss." Yet they both claim that they are doing science.
I had a question about Table 2: There are two 18-39 groups - MRNA and not MRNA. What is the composition of the "not" group? Both 18-39 groups have very similar cardiac death rates and risk ratios, so it implies (to my untrained eye) that there is no difference in risk for MRNA vs. "not." (whatever "not" means).
Dr Hoeg - since you asked for feedback... I do think you got some things wrong, even though I think you usually get most things right:
1) You state this: "It taught us there was a higher-than-expected rate of death in the first 28 days after their last dose of mRNA vaccine in 18–39-year-old males by 84% compared with weeks 4-25 post-vaccination. " Important to say that this was *cardiovascular death only* showing this increased rate in this first month.
2) Along those lines, it also seems important to mention that the *all cause death rate* was the same in the first month as the next 5; implying that any extra cardiac deaths were balanced out for by fewer deaths in other categories. So even within the profound limitations of this study, it was still a fine idea for young men to get vaccinated if mortality is your primary concern. Especially since the study attempted to exclude any deaths from covid -- a necessary step given the lag time in protection vs covid, but it seems worth a mention in the discussion: the beneficial effect of the vaccine was not being measured in this study, only the potential risks.
3) I do not think the Israel study on EMR calls for cardiac emergencies in young people should be mentioned at all unless you are prepared to defend it. It was a transparently awful study! Health Nerd did a detailed take-down, but a 3 minute glance was enough to see it is not of high enough quality to draw a single conclusion from: https://twitter.com/gidmk/status/1522036306372882432?lang=en
4) I agree that it is a worrisome trend to find heroes and villains in scientific discussion, but Dr Ladapo crossed the line when he went on Fox news to promote his study and literally said, "this vaccine, it would increase cardiac deaths in young men by 84%" in claiming it would not have gotten an EUA had this been "known." (I quote directly from: https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1579653043897139201?s=20&t=6GDJEgSp6naWzW4vOxiSTA) This is a preposterous claim, not at all based on the evidence his study provided. That would require a comparison of vaccinated to unvaccinated young men in this cohort. By deliberately fueling fears about a vaccine, and misrepresenting a study he understands very well, Dr Ladapo crossed into "villain" territory, I'm afraid. Deliberately misrepresenting data is always villainous, whether done by people with warm personalities and nice smiles or the icy bureaucrats at the CDC!
5) If one were to accept this study at face value, despite not having listed authors or holding up well to scientific analysis, what would be the mechanism of this increased rate of CV deaths? Clearly not myocarditis, given the very low death rate in post-vax myocarditis. If it's sudden cardiac death, the first month would probably be an inadequate window to find it. Given the tiny number of deaths in the cohort of interest (9-10), why were the ICD-10s not listed? I'm not clear the claimed 84% incr CV death increase in this time window is bio-plausible.
Overall, I think the July 2021 study you co-authored remains the most compelling single work on the cost-benefit calculus for vaccinating this cohort of young men (although the myocarditis rates you were working with would have to be revised significantly *higher* with the studies since then, as you mention in your piece). A rational viewpoint is that the risk of hospitalization is higher if you give avg risk young men <30 a 2nd shot (or probably booster) due to post-vax myocarditis than if you tell them to opt out and take their chances with covid. Age 30-39, I am not at all sure, especially for the rare ones who are non-immune. Your study, and all that has followed, is adequate to limit mRNA vaccination programs for men 12-29 to those at high risk, based on overall hospitalization risk. This Florida study literally adds nothing to the conversation, as its dubious claim that CV death risk is higher in this vaccinated cohort is neither seen in all-cause mortality nor is easily supported by common sense or scientific data, and is undermined by its own poor methodology. I admire your desire to support your friend and colleague, but sometimes we have to let our friends hoist themselves on their own petards.
Hello from the UK
Many thanks for your post. I appreciate that time has moved on from this article but I Like to keep things simple and say the following:
Vaccines contain poisons if anything.
Poisons have never been good for ones health.
However, I used to think vaccines were of some use before I came to this conclusion. In 2020 I researched properly and changed my mind.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/what-is-the-flu-aka-covid-19-and
And what do you think about this, voting to this vx to the childhood immunization program
https://www.regulations.gov/document/CDC-2022-0111-0001
Would you comment on this please:
Myocarditis in SARSCoV infection vs. COVID /fcvm. vaccination: A systematic review and metaanalysis Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), France Bibhiti Das, University of Mississippi Medical Center, United States *CORRESPONDENCE Paddy Ssentongo pssentongo@pennstatehealth.psu.edu SPECIALTY SECTION This article was submitted to Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Prevention, a section of the journal Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine RECEIVED ACCEPTED PUBLISHED CITATION May July August Voleti N, Reddy SP and Ssentongo P ( ) Myocarditis in SARSCoV infection vs. COVID vaccination: A systematic review and metaanalysis. Front. Cardiovasc. Med. : . doi: . COPYRIGHT © /fcvm. . Voleti, Reddy and Ssentongo. This is an openaccess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Navya Voleti, Surya Prakash Reddyand Paddy Ssentongo* Department of Medicine, Penn State Health Medical Center, Hershey, PA, United S
Anyone who kept kids out of school for 2 years, forces masks on toddlers, or makes getting vaccinated a requirement of holding a job or eating at a restaurant is indeed a villian. I appreciate your efforts for civility, but those actions need to be properly condemned so that they do not happen again.
Dr. Hoeg, I want to say that I appreciate your writing style. It communicates the essential points of the analysis without over-complicating the discussion with overtly technical language. It is a form of transparency that we need more of. Too often, studies and commentary serve the opposite ends. That is not to say that technical discussion is not warranted at times. But your piece here contributes to a model that more should strive toward: to communicate directly and clearly so that the merits of the thought can be clearly parsed.
Thank you.
We see evidence of the CDC using Simpson's Paradox to attempt to obscure a multiple-sigma increase in US working age mortality in 2021 v. 2019.
See Fig. 1 at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm
Also, there is a _huge_ discrepancy in deaths in 2020 in the 35-44 y.o. group between the CDC ("10,4490" deaths shows that the number was likely edited rather than coming directly from a spreadsheet) and https://deadorkicking.com/death-statistics/us/2021/ (88,876). Since deadorkicking relies heavily on state death records and because the CDC number was likely edited by hand, the weight of the evidence favors deadorkicking.
In any case, the increase of 29% in US working age mortality between 2019 and 2021 fits both the CDC and deadorkicking numbers.
One would expect that maybe the CDC, if it didn't already know the answer, would be putting out press releases about the progress of its investigation into the cause.
It would be good for Aaron Siri to file an FOIA suit to get the emails about this data from the CDC.
It seems to me that while this article by Traci is well argued, many on the pro-vaccine side are missing the forest from the trees. (1) It is abundantly clear from many studies, including the recent Thailand one, that there is an increased risk of myocarditis following mRNA vaccination in young men. This is not in doubt. (2) With the current Omicron strain virtually everybody is going to get COVID so vaccination would seem to have little point unless it prevented hospitalization and deaths to a greater degree than the harms/adverse events in the relevant target group under examination (i.e. young males between ages 18-39). (3) It is also clear that those who have been infected by COVID are not going to benefit from vaccination. (4) Given that it is now well established that the mRNA vaccines prevent neither infection nor transmission, there can be absolutely no public health reasoning for enforcing/mandating vaccination in any group. Thus the choice of whether to be vaccinated/boosted or not at this stage of the game should be entirely up to the patient after being presented with the full and open facts. (And to Pfizer and Moderna: perhaps you should both be fully open and transparent and release all those facts to the public). (5) It is quite evident that others, especially the Nordic countries, have realized that there is a safety issue with vaccinating/boosting those under 50 (cf. Denmark) and hence have effectively banned vaccination for those under 50. Denmark is not exactly some far right country! (6) A primary guiding factor in medicine is "First do no harm". Given the massive age stratification for bad outcomes from a COVID infection, surely for those with absolutely minimal risk it would be better to stay far away from mandates. and indeed, I would go so far as to say that Universities and hospitals currently enforcing boosters are committing morally repugnant acts. It's one thing to recommend something that may or may not be helpful to a given individual depending on their age, gender, health, etc... but quite another to enforce something.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Dana
There is a curious lack of curiosity about the 29% increase in deaths of US working age adults in 2021 v. 2019 by the CDC and the Sensible Medicine authors.
2021: 913,780 deaths
https://deadorkicking.com/death-statistics/us/2021/
2019: 707,265 deaths
There were 206,515 more working age deaths in 2021 v 2019.
https://deadorkicking.com/death-statistics/us/2019/
You'll have to do the arithmetic yourself.
This “self-controlled case series (SCCS)” method is likely to understate the cardiac risk of mRNA vaccine. If there is a higher risk in the first 4 weeks than in weeks 5-25, it would be common sense that there is also an elevated cardiac risk in weeks 5-25. It would be strange to have elevated cardiac risks for 4 weeks, and then risk immediately comes back down to unvaxed baseline at week 5 and onward. Wouldn't it?
So, the risk over the full 25 weeks is probably higher than the risk for the unvaxed.
The 84% increased risk is a lower bound.
Dr. Hoeg, I would appreciate if you could address this criticism of using the wrong denominator in the Florida SCCS?:
https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1579464104519290880
Also, regarding the the SCCS in the UK, look at Supplementary Figure 2:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22272775v1.full-text
a) It is clear there is a temporal association between vaccines and death. The only reason they did not find it is because of bad definitions of risk and control periods.
b) Not only that, the first first few weeks (not just the first 1 week) are probably affected by a healthy vaccinee effect. They have negative associations (See Supp Fig 4).
c) Their sensitivity analysis was bad. Take a gander at Supp Fig 4. Notice how it is not color coded the way the other figures are. A cynic would suppose this was done to downplay signals of harm. They even outright dismiss a significant association with death as being “unstable”. If they say so!
d) In any case, ONS data has been absurdly unreliable throughout the pandemic:
https://www.normanfenton.com/post/two-studies-on-adverse-cardiac-events-in-young-people-following-vaccination-which-is-more-credible
d) On page 11 of this report:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32501203/
We see that ages 10-24 have heart disease causing 2.9% of deaths. But in the SCSS: “Of the 585 deaths which occurred within 12 weeks of receiving a COVID-19 vaccination, 105 were due to a cardiac event.” That’s 18%!
e) The authors also calculated things wrong. If people die between dose 1 and dose 2, then the time til death is <12 weeks. If they died after dose 2, they have yet a second chance to die within 12 weeks of a shot. So the first 12 weeks will be double-stacked. So that explains the “cliff” where deaths drop off. But even if you do some guesstimation and cut the height of those first 12 weeks in half, there would still be a suspicious graph that looks like vaccines are associated with death.
You are totally right about SCCS studies possibly just comparing injured people to injured people and finding no difference. I think it should be standard practice to do brute force calculations of all possible combinations of risk and control periods. Then report the maximal risk found. Then have others replicate.
From Steve Kirsch's slide 32 at https://www.skirsch.com/covid/TheData.pdf , I note a striking similarity in thought process between the academic vax advocates and the virus skeptics.
1. Vax advocates say that VAERS use by vax skeptics is "dumpster diving." But when VAERS is used by mainstream "scientists," VAERS is useful. This is cherry-picking data, which virus skeptics do when they point at local infection in households as being caused by local poisoning, but ignore infection that occurs when people travel, which cannot be due to local poisoning. The ebola outbreak in Haiti is an example of UN peacekeepers infecting Haiti. There would be no need for travel bans if all disease were caused by local poisons.
2. "You don't know how to interpret the data." Steve calls this "gaslighting," which may be based on the fact that the academic critics can't point out exactly what's wrong with the vax skeptics' interpretation. The virus skeptics say that viralists are reading the data through a virus lens, which implies that the viralists are misinterpreting the data.
3. Vax advocates about VAERS covid vax adverse event reports: "It's just over-reporting." This is a statement with no justification, which we see a lot with vax skeptics, "it's just 'epitomes", despite PCR showing nucleic acid multiplication after cell culturing, which doesn't occur with epitomes.
4. "Correlation isn't causation." Surely, correlation is a problem when there are many confounders, which is why temporality is so important in proving vaccine harm. Also, a mechanism for harm has to be determined in order to answer how vaccine harm can occur. There is a _surprising_ lack of curiosity by vax advocates about the 17.7% elevated excess mortality in the US working age population in 2021 v. 2020 and they aren't concerned that the CDC isn't talking about that mortality nor examining causes for the mortality nor giving guidance about how to investigate covid vaccine injury. Nobody cares that there was a HUGE jump in US working age mortality in 2021? Both the virus skeptics and the vax advocates follow the maxim, "Ignorance is bliss." Yet they both claim that they are doing science.
This Holden Thorp?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/controversies-take-a-toll-on-holden-thorp-who-will-resign-at-chapel-hill/
DeSantis was pro-mRNA vaxx initially, but changed his mind when new evidence emerged.
https://www.flgov.com/2021/01/23/governor-ron-desantis-florida-putting-seniors-first-and-leading-the-nation-in-vaccinations-for-those-65/
For Thorp to smear him as "anti-vaxx" is cheap and sad.
I had a question about Table 2: There are two 18-39 groups - MRNA and not MRNA. What is the composition of the "not" group? Both 18-39 groups have very similar cardiac death rates and risk ratios, so it implies (to my untrained eye) that there is no difference in risk for MRNA vs. "not." (whatever "not" means).
Dr Hoeg - since you asked for feedback... I do think you got some things wrong, even though I think you usually get most things right:
1) You state this: "It taught us there was a higher-than-expected rate of death in the first 28 days after their last dose of mRNA vaccine in 18–39-year-old males by 84% compared with weeks 4-25 post-vaccination. " Important to say that this was *cardiovascular death only* showing this increased rate in this first month.
2) Along those lines, it also seems important to mention that the *all cause death rate* was the same in the first month as the next 5; implying that any extra cardiac deaths were balanced out for by fewer deaths in other categories. So even within the profound limitations of this study, it was still a fine idea for young men to get vaccinated if mortality is your primary concern. Especially since the study attempted to exclude any deaths from covid -- a necessary step given the lag time in protection vs covid, but it seems worth a mention in the discussion: the beneficial effect of the vaccine was not being measured in this study, only the potential risks.
3) I do not think the Israel study on EMR calls for cardiac emergencies in young people should be mentioned at all unless you are prepared to defend it. It was a transparently awful study! Health Nerd did a detailed take-down, but a 3 minute glance was enough to see it is not of high enough quality to draw a single conclusion from: https://twitter.com/gidmk/status/1522036306372882432?lang=en
4) I agree that it is a worrisome trend to find heroes and villains in scientific discussion, but Dr Ladapo crossed the line when he went on Fox news to promote his study and literally said, "this vaccine, it would increase cardiac deaths in young men by 84%" in claiming it would not have gotten an EUA had this been "known." (I quote directly from: https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1579653043897139201?s=20&t=6GDJEgSp6naWzW4vOxiSTA) This is a preposterous claim, not at all based on the evidence his study provided. That would require a comparison of vaccinated to unvaccinated young men in this cohort. By deliberately fueling fears about a vaccine, and misrepresenting a study he understands very well, Dr Ladapo crossed into "villain" territory, I'm afraid. Deliberately misrepresenting data is always villainous, whether done by people with warm personalities and nice smiles or the icy bureaucrats at the CDC!
5) If one were to accept this study at face value, despite not having listed authors or holding up well to scientific analysis, what would be the mechanism of this increased rate of CV deaths? Clearly not myocarditis, given the very low death rate in post-vax myocarditis. If it's sudden cardiac death, the first month would probably be an inadequate window to find it. Given the tiny number of deaths in the cohort of interest (9-10), why were the ICD-10s not listed? I'm not clear the claimed 84% incr CV death increase in this time window is bio-plausible.
Overall, I think the July 2021 study you co-authored remains the most compelling single work on the cost-benefit calculus for vaccinating this cohort of young men (although the myocarditis rates you were working with would have to be revised significantly *higher* with the studies since then, as you mention in your piece). A rational viewpoint is that the risk of hospitalization is higher if you give avg risk young men <30 a 2nd shot (or probably booster) due to post-vax myocarditis than if you tell them to opt out and take their chances with covid. Age 30-39, I am not at all sure, especially for the rare ones who are non-immune. Your study, and all that has followed, is adequate to limit mRNA vaccination programs for men 12-29 to those at high risk, based on overall hospitalization risk. This Florida study literally adds nothing to the conversation, as its dubious claim that CV death risk is higher in this vaccinated cohort is neither seen in all-cause mortality nor is easily supported by common sense or scientific data, and is undermined by its own poor methodology. I admire your desire to support your friend and colleague, but sometimes we have to let our friends hoist themselves on their own petards.