The Medical Community’s Failure to Weigh Costs and Benefits of COVID Vaccination
As a truth-seeking journalist writing on COVID-19 policies surrounding the young, I have been bewildered by the scientific establishment’s failure to have an honest, rational discussion of the data.
Being an ordinary, critical-thinking person with no scientific expertise, my impression was always that the costs and benefits of a medical intervention must be carefully weighed before making a decision. Moreover, I assumed there’s no “one-size-fits-all” medicine—everything from Tylenol, prescription drugs, to novel psychedelic therapies—that can be universally recommended.
According to the foremost public health experts, I was wrong.
This first dawned on me when I watched CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta last year refuse to acknowledge the risk of vaccine myocarditis in young boys on Joe Rogan’s podcast, then appear on CNN shortly after doubling-down on his assertions by presenting a study finding infection-induced myocarditis poses a greater risk compared to the vaccine (across the population, as opposed to young men specifically).
Publication after publication has printed articles quoting medical experts “debunking” concerns of vaccine myocarditis in young males using flawed CDC data or aggregate population-level data that shows the risk of COVID-19 induced myocarditis exceeding that from the vaccine.
This is incredibly dishonest. The conversation from the start has always been oriented around the specific risk in young men.
Among the most rigorous, comprehensive data we have on vaccine myocarditis is that from Katie Sharff and colleagues, who analyzed a database from Kaiser Permanente. They found a 1 in 1,862 rate of myocarditis after the second dose in young men ages 18 to 24. For boys ages 12 to 17, the rate was 1 in 2,650. Active surveillance monitoring in Hong Kong shows virtually identical figures.
After mortifyingly failing the Joe Rogan test, Gupta decided to promote his one-size-fits-all vaccine advocacy on a less questioning and critical-thinking platform: Sesame Street.
The second vaccine dose “gives you stronger, longer, and wider protection,” he stated on the kids’ program. “Hopefully the protection lasts a long time!”
Leading public health officials who do honestly discuss vaccine risks are immediately punished. In mid July, after Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health conceded the possible 1 in 5,000 risk of myocarditis for healthy young people at a conference promoting the fourth dose, a number of top “doctors” in the province rebuked his remarks.
“The incidence of myocarditis after vaccination is much lower than 1 in 5,000,” cardiac radiologist Dr. Kate Hanneman told CityNews, referring to the risk in the wider population.
As a result of the mainstream medical community’s failure to weigh the costs and benefits of vaccination, young people across North America have been coerced, misinformed, and marginalized. Virtually all across Canada, anyone unvaccinated between the ages of 15 and 30 (and over) were barred from exercising at a gym, dining in at restaurants, and attending large gatherings.
In the United States, a number of school districts are now bizarrely mandating the primary vaccine series for the fall despite newer variants and a seroprevalence rate in children of 75 percent (pre-Omicron).
As Megyn Kelly recently lamented, kids are now not only facing exclusion from sports and after-school activities, but also expulsion from their school in Connecticut if they don’t get double vaccinated.
The scientific community’s misleading claims have also permitted the violation of informed consent and a number of preventable vaccine-induced myocarditis incidents.
In a recent long-form investigative article (rejected by several publications), I interviewed a 33-year-old previously healthy and incredibly fit man who unwillingly got double-vaccinated to keep his job in law enforcement.
He didn’t hear the term “vaccine-induced myocarditis” until the doctor told him his diagnosis when he ended up in the hospital after almost dying from heart failure (210 beats per minute) following the second Pfizer dose.
Or take the recent viral story of a triple-vaccinated mother who followed the advice of public health authorities and got her 14-year-old son double-vaccinated, resulting in vaccine myocarditis.
We’ve known that teenage boys are at two to three times higher risk of vaccine myocarditis than COVID-19 hospitalization. We’ve known men under the age of 40 remain at elevated risk of vaccine myocarditis.
Yet, the government—as informed by “top epidemiologists”—has not created any public awareness surrounding this issue. Perhaps they’re worried this would discourage some people from getting vaccinated, and they want as many people vaccinated as possible.
Instead of making careful, age-stratified recommendations, they strongly encourage everyone to get three doses now. Hardly a few days go by without a Canadian government advertisement popping up on YouTube prompting teenagers and young adults to get boosted to “prevent serious illness.”
Many in the media and medical establishment rightfully promote vaccination in older cohorts to prevent serious illness or death, but react to any information that questions in the slightest the safety and efficacy of vaccination in children with a kind of religious opposition.
Supporting the vaccine means wisely recommending it to those who have more to gain and less to lose and being transparent about the real risks of vaccination in specific demographics—without either agenda-driven minimization or exaggeration. Obfuscating, downplaying, and misleading the public, on the other hand, undermines trust in the vaccine—a miraculous scientific innovation that has transformed the course of the pandemic by preventing numerous deaths and cases of severe disease.
Another very important metric in analyzing usefulness of a drug is the “number needed to treat“ or NNT. Sebastian Rushworth has a great article on this subject at https://sebastianrushworth.com/2022/06/14/should-the-patient-really-get-the-drug/