Fact Check: COVID-19 can cause myocarditis
The vaccines do causes myocarditis - that COVID itself can cause it is claimed in a February 2022 study, but I have some doubts.
Can COVID-19 cause Myo and Peri-carditis?
We know that the vaccines do cause myo- and peri-carditis - that COVID itself can cause these problems is claimed in a February 2022 study, but I had some doubts about that study. It turns out that a new Israeli study finds that COVID-19 does not cause long term cardiovascular issues.
Israeli Study finds that COVID-19 does not cause Myocarditis and Pericarditis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
Tuvali O, Tshori S, Derazne E, Hannuna RR, Afek A, Haberman D, Sella G, George J. The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients-A Large Population-Based Study. J Clin Med. 2022 Apr 15;11(8):2219. doi: 10.3390/jcm11082219. PMID: 35456309; PMCID: PMC9025013.
Should the US Veterans Affairs study be retracted? I don’t know but I have doubts about it.
The Veterans Affairs study (February 2022) claims that COVID-19 causes long term cardiovascular issues.
Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19
Here is the link:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3
What is great about the study is that has a very large cohort.
I have two doubts, though.
First doubt: in practice it is not an open-data study as is claimed.
This study claims quite clearly at the top that it is an open data study. That means anyone can look at the data and examine it to see if their claims are true.
It says you can see the data if you are behind the Veteran’s Affairs firewall - claiming that it is an open data study is rather dishonest, then, because only a very select group of people can examine the data. However, there is also an email address you can email if you would like access to the data.
This was the strange reply I received when I sent a message requesting the data using the email address supplied:
Maybe this is just a stuff-up.
But I can’t help thinking that an email address where the maximum message size that’s allowed is 0KB is not really meant to receive any messages.
Perhaps it is because I’m not behind the Veteran’s Affairs firewall, when sending my message? But I think they can hardly claim it’s an open data study in that case.
Doubt 2: There were people in the control group who had the vaccine beforehand and have apparently not been excluded.
Basically the problem with their statistical analysis is first that it is not open and transparent - the relevant analysis is not even in the body of the study but in a supplementary table.
The real problem with the statistical analysis is that a small percentage of the control group had already had the vaccine. Now apparently they could not exclude those people from the control group, as they did with anyone in the control group who had the vaccine later on.
And what is even more suspicious is that it appears that the number of people who had the vaccine already in the control group is large enough that it could even contain all the myocarditis cases in the study.
Perhaps this study should be withdrawn. I have real doubts about that process.
The whole process was rather convoluted I had to download the supplementary tables to get to these analyses, which seemed a bit peculiar. Why didn’t they simply include these tables in the main study, considering this would probably be the main question many people would be asking?
They are very careful in their language in the body of the study (my italics), which makes me a little suspicious too; although perhaps they’re just being scientifically cautious:
The results suggested that COVID-19 was associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in both analyses (Supplementary Tables 21–24).
Apparently they had two groups, COVID-19 group and contemporary control. When they censored (ruled out) someone from “COVID-19” group at the time when they were vaccinated, they apparently looked at whether or not they had myo- or pericarditis, and then looked at whether the person in the contemporary control group had myo- or pericarditis.
They give the rates of myo- and peri-carditis in the table.
Here is one of the supplementary tables:
Inverse Probability Weighting.
Note the dagger reference sign in the above table, which applies to all the entries in the table:
Inverse Probability Weighting is used when you don’t have all the data you need to come to a particular conclusion, and must rely on making inferences from incomplete data. This is a little suspicious, don’t you think? What is kind of weird about it is that they are comparing two similar groups, both of whom have a small percentage who have been vaccinated beforehand.
“Algorithmically selected” means that a computer program was designed to select data according to an algorithm. The SAS computer code is actually supplied, which is good.
A weird Question - were the people who had been vaccinated before cohort enrolment the ones who had myo- and peri-carditis?
So that’s the suspicion that I can’t rule out on looking at these charts: that the rates per 1000 of myo- and pericarditis were actually in the people in both groups who had been vaccinated before cohort enrolment began.
This seems possible as the pre-enrolment vaccination rate in the group “COVID-19 participants” was 2.25 per 1000, the rate of myocarditis was 0.37 per 1000, rate of pericarditis was 2.11 per 1000; both of these could be myo- and pericarditis in the people who were vaccinated before enrolment.
The pre-enrolment vaccination rate in the group “Contemporary control” was 1.62 per 1000; rate of myocarditis was 0.07 per 1000, rate of pericarditis was 1.15 per 1000; both of these could also be among the people who were vaccinated before enrolment.
And so that’s it. The other three charts, Table 22-24, show similar figures; I can see nothing in the charts or the study to say that they censored the COVID-19 participants and contemporary control participants who were vaccinated before the study; indeed, the fact that they include the figure of pre-study vaccination rates in the table notes to me implies that they couldn’t rule them out, because perhaps they didn’t know who they were. Or perhaps they did know very well who they were, and that they had myo- or peri- carditis, and wanted very much to include them in the study in order to hide what they already knew.
One would hope they would have done this, but after a cursory look at the SAS code I can’t seem to find them doing this in the SAS code either. Here is the link to the code:
https://github.com/yxie618/longCVD/blob/main/SAS_vacc.txt
And, if the rate of pericarditis was among the people in both cohorts who had already been vaccinated prior to the study, that would be an astonishingly high rate; 93% and 70%, within one year after the beginning of the study.
Is this possible?
Of course without access to the data it can’t be ruled out, can it?
Motive
Veterans Affairs have a motive, too, for wanting a study that produced this result, for they had mandatory vaccination for their workers, and pushed the vaccine onto veterans.
Another Study with dubious results
This CDC study is subject to quite a few limitations, but the one that seems most relevant to this discussion is the third limitation listed.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
Third, encounters for COVID-19, myocarditis, and COVID-19 vaccination occurring outside of hospital systems that contribute to PHD-SR are not included within this data set.
I would have assumed that most people would have been vaccinated in a pharmacy or their doctor’s office.
Is myo- and peri-carditis more likely to be caused by the vaccines than by COVID-19?
When people catch the Omicron variant of COVID-19, the disease infects the upper respiratory tract. The Alpha and Delta variants infect the lungs as well. My question is, can the virus then infect the blood? I think it’s pretty unlikely for Omicron to be able to do this.
While AABB issued a statement saying that no one has ever contracted COVID-19 from a blood transfusion, perhaps this is because people with symptoms were not allowed to donate; or perhaps it is only in a very serious case of COVID-19 (Alpha or Delta variant) that this can occur?
On the side of ‘yes’ some Johns Hopkins cardiologists say that it can enter the blood supply and affect the heart and the blood vessels in a very serious case of Covid.
Metastudy suggests myocarditis following Covid infection is rare
Howver this metastudy published in November/December 2020 says that myocarditis following Covid infections is very rare. It is worth noting that this study was done while the main variants were the harmful variants, Alpha and Delta; Omicron did not emerge till a year later, December of 2021, and the metastudy was published before anyone had been vaccinated (the first emergency use authorization (EUA) for use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was issued in December 11, 2020 by the FDA )
But we do know all the vaccines are associated with increased myo- and peri-carditis.
What we do know definitely is that all the vaccines are associated with myo- and peri-carditis, not just the messenger RNA ‘vaccines’ such as Pfizer that get the body to produce the spike protein; even the Johnson and Johnson and Novavax vaccines and the Astra Zeneca vaccine are associated with increased myocarditis rates.
Omicron is better than a vaccine
So with the mildness of Omicron variant, which Bill Gates says is more effective at producing natural immunity than a vaccine, why are we still vaccinating people?
Israeli study has a very different result.
And so we come to a recent, very large population based Israeli study which has proven my conclusions in this article to be correct.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
Tuvali O, Tshori S, Derazne E, Hannuna RR, Afek A, Haberman D, Sella G, George J. The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients-A Large Population-Based Study. J Clin Med. 2022 Apr 15;11(8):2219. doi: 10.3390/jcm11082219. PMID: 35456309; PMCID: PMC9025013.
They mention the Veterans Affairs study, and rather politely make excuses for the fact that their results differ from Xie et al.
Similar to our study, Xie et al. showed that individuals with COVID-19 infection are at increased risk of cardiovascular complications 30 days after infection, including pericarditis and myocarditis regardless of the need for hospitalization [30]. Comparable with our study, the study population was tested for the risk of inflammatory heart diseases regardless of previous SRAS-COV-2 vaccination. Yet, in contrast, in the study by Xie et al., the tested cohort was homogenous, comprising of US Department of Veterans Affairs with male predominance and young age. The difference in the population characteristics may explain the dissimilarity between the results of the studies as young males are known to exhibit a higher incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis.
Higher risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 18.28; 95% CI, 3.95 to 25.12; risk difference, 11.0 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 5.6 to 15.8) and pericarditis was observed in a large population study of recently published by Barda et al. [12]. Although both our study and the study by Barda et al. are based on Clalit Health Service patients, there are several important differences between the studies. Barda et al. were focused on COVID-19 vaccination, and thus the matching was designed to neutralize vaccination-related factors, while our study is on a non-vaccinated population. Barda et al. studied the occurrence of myocarditis and pericarditis from positive PCR results up to 42 days, while we study recovering patients starting 10 days after infection and for a significantly more prolonged time. Barda et al.’s analysis also ignores the timing of myocarditis and pericarditis. Finally, while Barda et al. have included many causes of myocarditis and pericarditis, we only included acute myocarditis and pericarditis in hospitalized patients which is more likely to be accurate.
Our current study has several limitations. First, although the potential number of participants who were considered for inclusion was large, the number of cases of myocarditis and pericarditis was small. This was mainly attributed to the limitation of a relatively short follow-up period due to the initiation of the massive vaccination program. Second, we included only cases of hospitalized myocarditis or pericarditis patients, whereas outpatient medical records were excluded from the study. This could possibly omit a small number of patients with mild disease. Furthermore, we included a diagnosis of myocarditis and pericarditis according to the medical records, without access to patient-based information regarding confirmation of the diagnosis.
Higher risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 18.28; 95% CI, 3.95 to 25.12; risk difference, 11.0 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 5.6 to 15.8) and pericarditis was observed in a large population study of recently published by Barda et al. [12]. Although both our study and the study by Barda et al. are based on Clalit Health Service patients, there are several important differences between the studies. Barda et al. were focused on COVID-19 vaccination, and thus the matching was designed to neutralize vaccination-related factors, while our study is on a non-vaccinated population. Barda et al. studied the occurrence of myocarditis and pericarditis from positive PCR results up to 42 days, while we study recovering patients starting 10 days after infection and for a significantly more prolonged time. Barda et al.’s analysis also ignores the timing of myocarditis and pericarditis. Finally, while Barda et al. have included many causes of myocarditis and pericarditis, we only included acute myocarditis and pericarditis in hospitalized patients which is more likely to be accurate.
Let me read that again:
The difference in the population characteristics may explain the dissimilarity between the results of the studies
Yes, because the Veterans Affairs study unvaccinated cohort was contaminated with enough vaccinated people to explain their finding myocarditis in that population.
CHANGE LOG
1:58am changed
This study (February 2022) claims that long term COVID-19 causes cardiovascular issues.
to
This study (February 2022) claims that COVID-19 causes long term cardiovascular issues.
2:02 am Also corrected the title at the top! Said 2020 at the start. Man I need a proof reader!
2:20am Added Motive section
30 September 12:04 pm Added the little bit at the end, from “Let me read that again,” on