After looking at the reality of how COVID affects the heart, I now sample a small, horribly fascinating sample of the mountain of misinformation on vaccination adverse effects out there.
Issues of myocarditis and sudden cardiac death in particular were and are still used to create fear, anxiety and contributed to 250,000 avoidable deaths of Americans who chose not to get vaccinated. Misinformation matters.
Vaccination and Myocarditis.
Myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), and pericarditis (inflammation of its capsule), became the whipping boy of the anti-vaccine movement after its early identification as a side effect of the mRNA vaccines mainly affecting young men after the second vaccine.
Yet data clearly showed myocarditis following COVID-19 infection affected 50–180 per 100,000 people and COVID-19 vaccination 2–8 per 100,000. Evidence showed that when caused by vaccination it was mild, transient and had a good outcome when compared to the myocarditis following COVID infection which had a mortality of 30% in hospitalised patients.
All very reassuring in terms of risk benefit, but was nonetheless followed by an avalanche of pseudoscience, anecdote, and delusions regarding the dangers of COVID vaccines.
Vaccination and Sudden Death.
Sudden death is tragic and the grief very difficult to come to terms with at any age. This is particularly so when it affects young people often with undiagnosed underlying problems affecting the heart or blood vessels. It is difficult to imagine how hard it must be to come to terms with the loss of a youngster when there had been no warning of what was to come.
Antivaxxers claiming that sudden deaths are due to vaccination makes life harder for the bereaved. If they are taken in by this they will have to deal with inappropriate anger and hatred towards public health doctors, the vaccinators, drug companies, politicians, scientists and just about anyone who advocates vaccination. That will make their grief more complex and create harm.
Data shows that COVID vaccines are not associated with any substantial increase in mortality at all, cardiac or otherwise. Nonetheless this has become a cash cow for those who sell supplements, treatments for vaccine damage and those who seek political gain on the back of anti-vaccine sentiment. I find it particularly problematic when health professionals jump on the bandwagon. Let’s have a look.
Vaccination and the risk of cardiac arrest
Dr Peter McCullough is an American cardiologist who added to his long list of anti vax pseudoscience with a truly dreadful paper suggesting a 1236% increase in cardiac arrest deaths due to vaccines. He ignored the effect of COVID19 itself which was responsible for at least 80% of these deaths and, typically, extrapolated the finding from a small survey to claim 50,000 excess cardiopulmonary deaths due to vaccines across the USA.
In his usual voluminous yet cherry picked references, he makes no mention of the large studies which show no link in excess deaths to the vaccine. This doggy-do of a paper has been downloaded 1,600 times and becomes a part of cyberspace “truth” by those who won’t see through its awful methodology. Why produce such nonsense?
Misinformation strategy
The strategy is clear, be prolific, pay to publish sensational sounding papers, then claim the inevitable retraction is due to censorship of the brave little guy standing up against Big Pharma etc. That McCullough has his board certification removed by the American Board of Internal Medicine only adds to the illusion of persecution. All this creates an alternative and lucrative career.
Quantity over quality
Earlier this year another McCullough paper relating to vaccine harms was retracted by the online publish platform Cureus, despite their dubious history of publishing nonsense.
Worse still, another astonishing example of junk science, in which he “suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases” when a post mortem had been performed on those dying at various times after vaccination. The lead author, as above, is an “epidemiologist and founder member of the McCullough Foundation”. Nepotism to say the least.
As usual this nonsense is amplified by the world’s leading antivaxx doctor, Joe Mercola who claims it was “censored” by the Lancet after they rejected it for publication immediately it landed on their pre-print server. That didn’t stop the headlines such as “COVID Vaxx bombshell – Terrifying Death Toll finally revealed”. I don’t use Twitter, but no doubt its prominent there too.
Capitalising on the said ‘persecution’, Mercola spreads the view of another medical antivax doctor and co-author Dr William Makis:
“This is a victory of SCIENCE over CENSORSHIP!! Incredible perseverance by first author Nicolas Hulscher who didn’t give up after LANCET pulled our paper within 24 hours after 100,000s of downloads [1,000 actually] for no legitimate reason. Big pharma put the squeeze on @TheLancet but has failed to stop us. Our paper was delayed by one year, and those actions of CENSORSHIP and CANCELLATION led to many deaths that could have been prevented. This paper could be a game changer.”
It has become a standard technique for antivaxxers to claim that they are being censored after peer reviewers reject their gibberish. This paper was eventually published in an obscure journal called Forensic Science International – for a $4230 fee. Another is for the nonsense to spread, viral like from a small number of antivax medical professionals endlessly quoting and magnifying each other through social media to reach a disproportionately huge audience.
Mercola fails to mention it was again rapidly withdrawn, this time after readers complained about the inappropriate use of references, poor methodology, errors, misrepresentations, lack of factual support for conclusions and failure to recognise and cite disconfirming evidence. In other words, just about everything that could go wrong.
The authors are mainly affiliated to McCullough’s own “Wellness Company”. One (unqualified) author worked for Trump’s administration, and notoriously tried to alter science based public health messages.
The mechanics of misinformation
This paper in particular is a lesson on how to misinform. First, the authors trawled for any papers on post-mortems performed after vaccination and selected the 3% which suited their purpose. They don’t say why they rejected 97% of the evidence, suggesting cherry picking at its most extreme.
They appointed four un-named “independent” doctors who would verify that the deaths implicated vaccines. They found a total of 325 autopsies done at various times after vaccination and concluded that 74% of the deaths were directly due to the vaccine.
Looking a little deeper, I checked one of their main references, which accounted for 121 of their cases of death ‘caused’ by vaccines who in reality concluded “No relation between the cause of death and vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 was found”.
Another looked at an individual case when a man died, by all accounts of epilepsy, 17 days after contracting COVID19 and a full six months after his second vaccination. This was another case assessed as being due to vaccination.
Scanning through the others, (hidden in an appendix) reveals the reviewers seem to put any cause of death related to the heart and lungs, any time after the vaccination down to the vaccine, including cases of COVID19, and the death of a 70-year-old from pneumonia 234 days after vaccination.
So, the paper is clearly biased nonsense, but again, is doing the social media rounds as further ‘proof’ of something which is sensational, horrifying but patently false. It will be read many magnitudes people more than the huge, well performed studies which show the safety of vaccines. Cue more misinformation and mind-damage.
Meanwhile, McCullough is making lots of money out of prescribing very expensive drugs to his many patients with so called ‘long vaccination’ syndromes, despite there not being a shred of evidence they work, and again, medicalising misinformation for profit.
Misinformation’s political wing
As I’ve said before, antivaccination is now, sad to say, mainstream in US politics. Robert F Kennedy Jr, again claims that vaccines cause large numbers of sudden death in young people and that ‘no-one is talking about it’. People are talking about it, but any reasonable analysis reveal it is not actually happening or in any way due to vaccines. Trump will of course say anything that suits the moment, including tempting RFK with a role in a future Trump administration to wind back some of his voters who have migrated to RFK Jr.
By the by, RFK Jr appointed Del Bigtree, another prolific antivax careerist, who has compared public health doctors to Nazis and those who are subject to mandates to akin to Jewish victims of fascism as his campaign manager, which is the final nail in the coffin of RFK Jr’s credibility!
UK culprits
We too have our healthcare professional who have become social media polluters. Aseem Malhotra a UK cardiologist with half a million followers on Twitter has been a prolific spreader of misinformation and is currently being looked at by the regulators. John Campbell, a retired nurse educator, compounds the grief of victims of sudden death by linking their problems to vaccines. This is an excellent parody of some of the idiocy involved.
Another example of how social media is being manipulated is to be found in this sensitive news clip from C4, reporting the complexity of the sudden death, but followed by thousands of angry comments (bots?) linking their problem to vaccines. I can’t help but think many of these are intentionally designed to manufacture fear, division, and distrust.
Looking after your heart.
The reality is that vaccination against a virus which has major effects on the heart is important for those at risk and has saved many lives – it’s hard to be precise, but estimates are 19-30 million lives were saved in the first year of the vaccination campaign..
As I said in the last post, heart disease remains a big killer, and is largely preventable. We live in societies with incredible levels of inequality, poverty, and stress. This leads to poor diets, comfort eating, smoking, and drinking. Exercise has been engineered out of our lives, leading to those with time and money to have to create ways to stay fit, and leaving those who don’t at increased risk.
Misinformation adds to this toxic mix. I also call it “Reverse Education”. I feel for those whose minds are full of anti-science and hate generated by the success of the online antivaccination industry which dwarfs those who advocate real science.
When you need help, trust in your health care professionals is important, but can be undermined by the growing phenomenon of misinformation. There is a mountain of harmful gibberish out there of which this post looks at a tiny sample.
Thanks for reading this post.
Some time ago a meme came out that the PCR test for COVID had up to 90 % false positives. A paper was published using this fact and extrapolated it to the general population that the outbreak was grossly exaggerated. There had even been a court case in Portugal where during the early days of the outbreak a tourist had been found in court to have been ‘falsely imprisoned’ on the basis of a PCR test. The actual verdict was that it was up to a medical practitioner to decide on such actions not the hotel manager.
As to the meme, it was based on published paper that for someone who had had COVID and was tested at 8 weeks after the start of infection there was a 90% chance if a positive test result was obtained that were recovered and simply carrying residual amounts of virus in their body that was being picked up by the test. Yet it was the 90% false positive that was touted by so many.