Moderna has fewer breakthrough cases than Pfizer's, but higher myocarditis rates

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/11/moderna-says-covid-vaccine-has-fewer-breakthrough-cases-than-pfizers.html

by jelliclesfarm • 5 years ago

53 58 5 years ago

vmception4• 5 years ago

higher, but low, but higher

have you seen the new psyop where vaccine holdouts now get the shot but believe they can quickly remove it, similar to reacting to venom? I’ve been starting to think of things like that at their level of comprehension. I’m getting better at it. Will be procedurally generating this benign nonsense soon.

I started noticing someone was already doing it after the prior psyop was so obvious. Many anti vaxxers began believing could only avoid “shedded spike proteins of the vaccinated” by social distancing and masking up forever. Ironically gaining compliance with all guidelines but in a way they believed was original and never having to argue with them ever.

Got to think like them! Similar to what comedians do.

ifyoubuildit2• 5 years ago

have you seen the new psyop where vaccine holdouts now get the shot but believe they can quickly remove it, similar to reacting to venom? I’ve been starting to think of things like that at their level of comprehension. I’m getting better at it. Will be procedurally generating this benign nonsense soon.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with anything you're saying here, but more and more I wish I had some kind of debugger that I could run on internet comments, and it would show me all of the inputs that a commenter saw that led to the comment in question. All the various social media threads, conversations with friends/family/doctors, published papers, news articles, every single input that factored into what was written.

I say this because this comment to me seems like nonsense, because it doesn't line up with any of my inputs. Which of course doesn't mean it actually is nonsense, it just looks that way to me.

I think if we had this capability, people would actually be able to understand each other. Instead we just have everyone thinking that the sum of their own inputs is the ground truth, and everyone else is a nutjob.

vmception4• 5 years ago

Haha Ive been advocating for something similar! And by advocating, I mean saving what people say and bringing it up to them months later for public shaming, to reveal how idiotic their influences are. Because right now everyone is just part of a gradient in a void, indistinguishable from the last person that said something similar to them.

Scoundreller3• 5 years ago

Not really a surprise, moderna has a much higher dose, mcg for mcg. 100 vs 30.

At least where I am, booster doses using moderna are recommended at half doses (50mcg).

They both use the same spike protein sequence.

No idea how the excipients differ between the two, but neither has adjuvants.

brundolf• 5 years ago

Wow I didn't realize that about the dose difference, I wondered why they gave us a half dose for our booster

Scoundreller3• 5 years ago

What’s interesting is that in the initial trials, moderna tested 50, 100 and 250mcg in humans and ultimately decided on 100mcg as the sweet spot.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-t...

Meanwhile pfizer tested 10, 30 and 100 and ultimately settled on 30mcg as their sweet spot.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4

Was this due to differences in the vaccine itself, different study environments, or different tolerances for the balance between side effects and effectiveness?

staticassertion8• 5 years ago

It's more than 'not really a surprise', it is obvious and I'm pretty sure this had already been widely discussed months ago.

Scoundreller3• 5 years ago

The problem is teasing out whether differences in vaccine effectiveness are due to the vaccine or which patients got which.

I don’t think we’ve done any blinded head to head studies of one vs the other.

native_samples• 5 years ago

Obvious in what way? It wasn't obvious to governments. So far only the Nordics and France have banned Moderna (and only for the under 30s). And at the beginning, there was no mention of heart damage for anything.

tomp• 5 years ago

numbers:

Burton cited data from France on males ages 12 to 29. It showed there were 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 people for Moderna’s vaccine compared with 2.7 cases per 100,000 people for the Pfizer vaccine.
there were 86 breakthrough cases per 100,000 people for the Moderna vaccine. That compares to 135 breakthrough cases per 100,000 for Pfizer’s, he said

Are the differences meaningful? Assuming the data is real, Pfizer does seem quite a bit safer!

exegete• 5 years ago

It’s a good question. Is there a statistical test that can be / has been done with the data? Are the numbers between Pfizer and Moderna statistically different (and are they different than the incident rate in the general population)?

contravariant• 5 years ago

For things that happen with a small probability over lots of trials you can generally assume they're approximately Poisson distributed.

Which on its own isn't too helpful but then you know that the standard deviation is equal to the square root of the average. In this case both values bracket 100 so the square root should be around 10 making this a difference of roughly 5 standard deviations.

This isn't a Gaussian distribution so the 5-sigma limit used in physics can't be applied directly, but it's still a pretty big difference, especially for medical data.

You could (and in some cases should) do the work to get a proper number for the significance but this back of the napkin estimate suggests it's a statistically meaningful difference. And this being a calculation that can be done at the top of one's head, it is useful when the news reports on a change in some statistic that isn't anywhere close to significant.

staticassertion8• 5 years ago

I wouldn't draw that conclusion. That's a 50% increase in break through cases with Pfizer, which seems like a far greater threat than even a 5x increase of myocarditis.

Especially when you take into account that your risk of developing myocarditis is higher if you get Covid.

Mikeb854• 5 years ago

For that age group it's not a risk at all though.

credit_guy• 5 years ago

It's difficult to judge the tradeoff between Covid and myocarditis. I got my Moderna booster shot about 2 weeks ago, and I felt palpitations next day. Was that myocarditis. Maybe. I guess I'll never know. Did it bother me? Very little. I'm quite happy that my immunity to Covid went up. I'll personally trade a few palpitations for good Covid immunity.

But that's just a case of 1. How severe is the myocarditis other people experience? According to a study I just googled [1], out of 2 million people, only 32 were hospitalized with myocarditis or pericarditis, with median hospitalization time of 1 to 2 days, no ICU, and no deaths. Doesn't sound so bad to me.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782900

Tagbert• 5 years ago

My understanding is that the incidence of myocarditis is much higher in a COVID infection than from any of the vaccines.

gfosco• 5 years ago

Any source available on this?

aemreunal• 5 years ago

You can easily find sources with a simple Google search. I searched for "myocarditis risk of covid vs covid vaccine" and the second organic result is from Nature [1] and states:

Previous research co-authored by Balicer found that in this age group, becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 made a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis — a much more significant risk than is observed following vaccination.

Sources are in the article. You can easily find sources for COVID, please try searching it yourself first.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y

staticassertion8• 5 years ago

It's hard to Google for sources on this since you just get people talking about the vaccine. Here's something I found:

Across all ages, the risk of myocarditis was almost 16 times higher for people with COVID-19 compared to those who aren’t infected. The myocarditis risk is 37 times higher for infected children under 16 years and seven times higher for infected people ages 16-39 compared to their uninfected peers.

https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/16388

vimy3• 5 years ago

Anecdotal: Had covid twice. No heart complaints.

Had two vaccine shots. Both times, 10 days after the shot, my heart hurt like hell. Really painful and scary experience. It lasted a couple days and back to normal.

ahevia2• 5 years ago

Another Anecdotal: Had COVID once. Heart pain went back to normal after a week of testing negative. No side effects from both vaccine shots. I’m a young male too so I’m in the risk group for these side effects.

Sucks folks are experiencing them though. Definitely a scary time.

Qu3tzal• 5 years ago

How would you get vaccinated twice and get covid twice? I thought most countries allowed to do one shot only if you recovered from covid once.

mint22• 5 years ago

Could you elaborate on the timeline and circumstances of getting Covid twice and getting fully vaccinated? Time line, which vaccines, how did Covid happen?

Don’t think I’m questioning it, I’m just surprised so I want to hear more because I thought even getting Covid twice was fairly rare, after all isn’t that a widely held conception by survivors who don’t want vaccinated.

lovethyenemy• 5 years ago

Adding more anecdata:

1. Had covid early 2021, felt like a mild cold for a week, couldn't smell my farts for 3 weeks. No heart issues.

2. 8 months later, got the Pfizer double dose, and had 6 weeks of heart pain and palpitations. Finally got in to see the doctor after the pain was basically gone, and the EKG showed an irregular heart beat and I was told to go to the emergency room... Got an echocardiagram the next week which turned out normal, thankfully.

Still waiting on that $1,000+ medical bill to come in the mail for the 20 minute echocardiagram...

Mikeb854• 5 years ago

But what's the risk profile of Moderna + myocarditis versus Pfizer + breakthrough case (and remember, odds of contracting Covid at all are less than 1) + myocarditis?

Any stats on how many 13-29 year olds vaccinated with Pfizer have gotten myocarditis from a breakthrough case specifically?

bigodbiel• 5 years ago

Meanwhile the mechanism behind peri/myocarditis and why it mainly affects young males is still unknown. Needle aspiration, LNP, spike protein exosome... ? this all being bleeding edge technology and applied at such scale is really is amazing.

kennywinker2• 5 years ago

Without being applied at massive scale we probably wouldn't even be able to link the two. 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 (moderna) or 2.7 cases per 100,000 (pfizer) would be very hard to detect if we weren't giving out billions of doses. For perspective, the global before-covid rate of myocarditis was something like 1.5 cases per 100,000.

mrbadideas• 5 years ago

Is it possible for cases of myocarditis to go undetected? For instance can people just ignore the symptoms and go without treatment?

narrator• 5 years ago

Lots and lots of flagged and deleted posts here. I thought Hacker News was outside of what Eric Weinstein likes to call the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex[1]. That the DISC is deeeeeply troubled by the comments on this story should tell you everything you need to know about this topic. Speaking of which, is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN?

[1] https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression...

jbd28• 5 years ago

Plenty of independent ideas are also nonsensical

loonster• 5 years ago

For popular controversial posts like this, the mods often override the flags and show everything.

staticassertion8• 5 years ago

There are tons of flagged and deleted posts on every HN thread because there are tons of really bad posters on HN. Honestly I think some of the absolute dumbest things I've ever read on the internet were on this site. Thank god we can flag the really low signal garbage.

is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN?

Not for deleted but you can "show dead" in your HN settings.

ahevia2• 5 years ago

One of the deleted comments was calling HN a breeding ground for conspiracies for sharing an CNBC article? Another was spewing a complaint about having to wear masks.

It isn’t censorship or suppression to delete comments that insult a community and provide nothing constructive to a conversation.

I also don’t care to define what “constructive” is in this context.The HN Mods can handle that.

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

Lots and lots of flagged and deleted posts here.

No there are not. Your account is old enough to have known that there aren't even that many comments at all on this page. IIRC, comments never get deleted, only flagged.

That the DISC is deeeeeply troubled by the comments on this story should tell you everything you need to know about this topic.

Even accepting your premise of the "DISC" from contrarian podcaster on a wiki with few citations of any claims: No, one little "clue" doesn't tell anyone "everything they need to know" about a topic.

Speaking of which, is there anything like Snoo for reddit that keeps track of deleted and flagged posts on HN?

I'm not aware of one.

josephcsible• 5 years ago

I think GP is using "deleted" colloquially to mean what this site calls "dead", which definitely happens to comments all the time.

vmception4• 5 years ago

What does it tell us about the topic? That rhetorical comments are inbound?

Moderna has fewer breakthrough cases than Pfizer's, but higher myocarditis rates

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