MY CAREFULLY SELECTED QUOTES:
Ye Editor
"Nature published a comprehensive study this week on cardiovascular risk including a total of over 11 million patients that has made a few headlines.
... this paper which presents data in an obtuse way that should never have passed peer review.
The results were presented as showing how dangerous the Covid virus was for cardiovascular complications without suitable controls to enable that conclusion to be drawn.
The evidence on vaccination risks was hidden and not presented in a meaningful way for different age groups.
Even then, they demonstrated a significant risk of myocarditis after vaccination, particularly after then encountering the virus but this key finding was hidden in the supplementary appendix.
Why?
The aim was to identify the cause of increased cardiac pathology.
It should have been a very simple study comparing four groups:
Not infected and never vaccinated
Not infected and vaccinated
Infected but not vaccinated
Infected and vaccinated
It is hard to believe the authors did not look at these groups, but whatever was found when comparing them remains a mystery.
Instead, the following groups were compared:
Not infected and never vaccinated data from 2017
Not infected, including vaccinated and not vaccinated
Infected but not vaccinated
Infected with vaccinated people included but using modelled adjustments
When studies with huge datasets use modelling and fail to share data prior to their adjustments alarm bells should start ringing.
Therefore, I took a deeper dive to see what else was questionable.
There were serious biases in the paper which need addressing but first let’s look at the critical question of myocarditis (heart inflammation).
Because of the known risk of myocarditis from vaccination it is worth looking particularly closely at the data presented on this.
Oddly, for the issue of the day, the data on myocarditis was all hidden in the supplementary appendix to the paper.
The risk of myocarditis appears to be an autoimmune (the immune system attacking the heart after interaction with the spike protein) rather than direct damage by the virus/vaccine spike protein.
Therefore, myocarditis could result from the virus or the vaccine.
The key question that needs answering is whether vaccination protects or enhances the risk from the virus.
... Hidden in the ... supplementary tables the authors reveal that 62% of the Covid patients had been vaccinated compared to 56% of the non-infected controls (not a great advert for vaccine effectiveness against infection).
... The data comprised medical records for U.S. veterans who were 90% male, three quarters white and had a mean age of 63 years.
There was a significant bias between these two control groups and those who tested positive.
The Covid patients (not just those who were sick with it – all those who tested positive) were more obese, saw doctors more often, had more cancer, kidney disease, lung disease, dementia etc.
... It has been well established that hospital transmission dominates as a source of spread
and SAGE has reported that up to 40.5% of cases could be traced back to hospital spread and a majority of hospitalised patients in June 2020 were linked to hospital spread.
In Scotland, in December 2020, 60% of the acutely ill with Covid acquired the infection in hospital.
Patients accessing hospital are highly likely to be less healthy than the general population.
Indeed, we know that the Covid patients in the study accessed hospital more frequently than the controls.
If the bias was related to hospital acquired infection then the whole study is called into question, as people who attend hospitals are more likely to be sick.
... The group that tested positive for Covid did badly: 13% ended up in (or began in) hospital and 4% in ICU.
The mean age was 63 years which may explain part of the high percentage of sick Covid patients, but it does, again, suggest this group may have been more vulnerable than the control.
... The risk of ICU admission for Covid was higher than for influenza, but it is important to understand how much of the cardiovascular risk resulted from the virus and how much from the stay in intensive care per se.
... the paper makes no attempt to unpick how many of the Covid patients tested positive only after being admitted to hospital.
... Having failed to examine the above two questions
– how much cardiovascular disease was a confounder of hospital transmission and how much is secondary to ICU harm
– the overall risk of consequent cardiovascular problems included all the above cardiovascular conditions
and thereby inflated the average for the Covid population as a whole."
Author Dr. Clare Craig is a Diagnostic Pathologist and Co-Chair of HART.
