A Sensible Take on the New Florida Cardiac Death Study
Fact-Check: Ignore the “Fact-Checkers”
A Sensible Take on the New Florida Cardiac Death Study
Fact-Check: Ignore the “Fact-Checkers”
A new study conducted by Florida's health department showing concerning findings about the safety of mRNA vaccines has swept up a storm across social media and scientific circles. Public health experts, journalists, and editors of scientific journals have lambasted the study as pseudoscientific and ideologically motivated.
Science magazine’s Editor in Chief Holden Thorpe wrote a peculiarly scorching takedown - in a supposedly premier science magazine - of Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joe Ladapo, accusing him of harbouring "anti-science views" and propagating "dangerous misinformation."
Needless to say, the outrage over this study is highly selective and politically driven. Dr. Ladapo has not conformed to the Covid orthodoxy of universal masking, vaccinating, and boosting and he was appointed by Republican governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, who the Left abhor since he has Trump's appeal, without the puerile antics.
Ladapo’s political affiliations and ethnic background make him vulnerable to an especially damning kind of backlash that is widely accepted in mainstream media. Recall "Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy," according to the L.A Times.
More importantly, highly flawed studies used to support masks and mRNA vaccines never received a quarter of the outrage this one has. The initial trials were never designed to test for transmission or severe disease.
Dr. Peter Doshi — one of a handful of dissenters at the time — stated in the BMJ, symptomatic infections were not a robust end-point to use in the vaccine trials to make sweeping public recommendations.
Yet, on this tenuous basis vaccines were widely mandated and federally coerced. Joe Biden, Fauci, CDC officials, and news anchors on MSNBC said those who get the vaccine will never get Covid.
Joe Biden, Fauci, CDC officials, and news anchors on MSNBC said those who get the vaccine will never get Covid. Where were all the popular scientists when such utter falsehoods — or at the very least, wildly speculative assertions — were made by those with the most political and scientific authority?
Most recently, the CDC has supported universal bivalent shots for kids as young as 5 years of age based on zero clinical data.
They have recommended all Americans get the fourth shot. A scientifically baseless recommendation made to all Americans has received no outrage by media members and blue-check scientists. Yet, a new study by Florida driving a state-wide recommendation against mRNA vaccines has prompted explosive outrage in the press.
Now, on to the study. As stated in the press release:
“This analysis found that there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. With a high level of global immunity to COVID-19, the benefit of vaccination is likely outweighed by this abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death among men in this age group. Non-mRNA vaccines were not found to have these increased risks.”
For those who have been honestly following the harms of mRNA vaccines, this study is congruent with other data points. However, there are several limitations in the study design. Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg — who is affiliated with the Florida Health Department — wrote a rigorous, balanced analysis in Sensible Medicine, noting potential flaws in the data. Among a few issues, she notes "the signal we are talking about is 10 extra deaths total and an approximate doubling of expected number of cardiac-related deaths proximal to the vaccine." Given the wide confidence interval, it isn't clear how significant this increase is. The raw numbers are quite low.
This type of study ought to be replicated in larger populations so the results are reliable.
However, we mustn't use an ambiguous signal found in a study specifically looking at cardiac-related deaths to dismiss all concerns about vaccine cardiac damage in young males. Other, higher-quality data tell a more clear picture. Beyond the 1/2,000 risk of myocarditis in young men I've written about several times, a robust study conducted by MIT researchers earlier this year found an alarming association between vaccination and acute cardiac events.
Using nationalised health care data in Israel, researchers from MIT compared Emergency Medical Services (EMS) calls for acute cardiac events (cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome) in the 16 to 39-year-old population with the timeline of mass administration of the first and second vaccine doses.
As first doses of the vaccine were administered, cardiac arrest EMS calls rose precipitously. When second doses of the vaccine peaked around March 7, cardiac arrest calls were also at their highest. For both cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome EMS calls, the study finds a more than 25 percent rise during the interval January–May 2021 (when vaccines were rolled out), compared with the years 2019–2020.
Misleading "fact-checkers" critiqued the study for not proving causality (which is technically true as the researchers openly admitted), but what else might have caused this surge in cardiac events at this time?
Covid is not a plausible explanation, nor is intake of "herbal supplements" or other nebulous scapegoats which recent bizarre articles in the mainstream media point at.
The reality is the risk of cardiac death from the vaccine seems extremely low. It's worrisome but the data is unclear. More investigation needs to be done.
What is incontrovertible is men face an alarmingly high risk of heart inflammation after mRNA vaccination. On the other side of the equation, young, healthy men face a near-zero risk of serious Covid outcomes such as death, hospitalisation, and "long Covid.” This strangely doesn't get mentioned enough. Just because there may be a very low risk of cardiac death - again, we need better data - after getting jabbed, doesn't mean it is overall safe and beneficial.
No one gets a medical intervention because it "most likely won't kill you." There has to be a demonstrated upside. This was all considered common knowledge prior to 2021. Without all the political and cultural ramifications, no credible doctor, public health expert, or journalist would disagree with making rational cost-benefit decisions based on solid data.
The backwardness of the current era is still utterly mystifying. In attempting to zealously eradicate one disease, we have created another one, far more illusory and pernicious.
