Subclinical Heart Damage More Prevalent Than Thought After Moderna Vaccination: Study
Damage to the heart is more common than thought after receipt of Moderna’s COVID-19 booster, a new study indicates.
One in 35 health care workers at a Swiss hospital had signs of heart injury associated with the vaccine, mRNA-1273, researchers found.
“mRNA-1273 booster vaccination-associated elevation of markers of myocardial injury occurred in about one out of 35 persons (2.8%), a greater incidence than estimated in meta-analyses of hospitalized cases with myocarditis (estimated incidence 0.0035%) after the second vaccination,” the researchers wrote in the paper, published by the European Journal of Heart Failure.
In a generally healthy population, the level would be about 1 percent, the researchers said.
The group experiencing the adverse effects was followed for only 30 days, and half still had unusually high levels of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T, an indicator of subclinical heart damage, at follow-up.
The long-term implications of the study remain unclear as little research has tracked people over time with heart injury after messenger RNA vaccination, which is known to cause myocarditis and other forms of heart damage.
“According to current knowledge, the cardiac muscle can’t regenerate, or only to a very limited degree at best. So it’s possible that repeated booster vaccinations every year could cause moderate damage to the heart muscle cells,” University Hospital Basel professor Christian Muller, a cardiologist and the lead researcher, said in a statement.
Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
None of the patients experienced a major adverse cardiac event, such as heart failure, within 30 days of booster vaccination, and none had electrocardiogram changes.
The people with elevated levels were advised to avoid strenuous exercise, which may have mitigated more serious problems, the researchers said.
No imaging was done to examine the participants’ hearts, despite imaging being recommended by many cardiologists in cases of suspected vaccine-induced myocarditis.
It’s possible that imaging would have revealed inflammation, which could cause scarring or irregular heartbeat, Dr. Andrew Bostom, a heart expert in the United States who was not involved in the research, told The Epoch Times.
Dr. Anish Koka, an American cardiologist, said that the findings were “super useful to see how ‘cardioactive’ the booster is” but that it was hard to say how significant the elevated troponin levels were, particularly without a comparison to baseline levels. “There is really nothing clinically concerning at 30 days to report,” he said on Twitter.
Study Methods
Researchers posited that the incidence of vaccine-associated heart injury was more prevalent than previously thought following messenger RNA booster vaccination because of a lack of symptoms or mild symptoms.
They defined injury as a sharp increase in high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T on the third day after vaccination without evidence of an alternative cause. The levels of cardiac troponin had to hit the upper limit of normal, 8.9 nanograms per liter in women and 15.5 nanograms per liter in men.
All workers at the University Hospital Basel scheduled to receive a Moderna booster for the first time were offered a chance to participate in the study, unless they experienced a cardiac event or underwent heart surgery within 30 days of vaccination. The workers received a booster, which is half the dosage level of the primary series shots, from Dec. 10, 2021, to Feb. 10, 2022. The cohort ended up being 777 workers, including 540 females. The median age was 37 years.
Among the participants, 40 had elevated levels of cardiac troponin. Alternative causes were identified in 18. For the other 22, the researchers determined they had “vaccine-associated myocardial injury.” The median age of the 22 was 46. All but two were women, making the percentage of women with elevated levels higher than the percentage of men (3.7 percent versus 0.8 percent), which contrasts with most of the previous literature on vaccine-induced myocarditis. That could stem from women receiving a higher vaccine dose per body weight, the researchers said.
Baseline levels were not recorded because the hospital’s COVID-19 task force and the researchers decided that the study “should interfere as little as possible with the motivation of the hospital staff to obtain the mRNA-1273 first booster vaccination and the logistics of booster vaccination itself.”
None of the people with elevated markers had a history of heart disease. While half experienced symptoms, most symptoms were nonspecific like fever. Two participants suffered from chest pain. And two, according to the Brighton Collaboration case definition, likely suffered myocarditis.
Testing was done for high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T because of its sensitivity.
“This marker is extremely sensitive—with other methods such as MRI we wouldn’t have been able to detect any damage to the cardiac muscle, as it only becomes visible once the damage there is about three to five times greater,” Dr. Muller said.
The researchers were not able to figure out the mechanism for the vaccine hurting the heart muscle.
The authors reported some conflicts of interest, including Dr. Muller reporting grants from drugmakers such as Novartis and Roche. The study was funded by the University of Basel and the University Hospital Basel.
Limitations include the lack of baseline levels and lack of imaging.
Previous Findings, and Pending Study
Several other prospective studies examine myocarditis following Pfizer vaccination.
In Thailand, researchers found that 29 percent of 301 adolescents developed cardiovascular effects, including chest pain, after a second Pfizer dose. Seven were diagnosed with heart inflammation.
Researchers in Taiwan established baseline electrocardiogram levels before a second Pfizer dose and recorded abnormal results following the administration in one percent of 4,928 primary school students. That included five students diagnosed with myocarditis or an abnormal heartbeat.
And an Israeli study of 324 health care workers with a median age of 51 who received a second Pfizer booster identified two cases of vaccine-induced heart injury on day three.
Other recent studies have confirmed that vaccine-induced myocarditis can kill, including a South Korean study that ruled out all other possible causes for eight sudden deaths following messenger RNA vaccination. Myocarditis was not suspected as a clinical diagnosis or cause of death before autopsies were performed, researchers said.
The Swiss researchers said more prospective studies are needed to examine post-vaccination heart injury. Long-term problems from the injuries, they stressed, remain unclear.
Moderna was required by U.S. authorities to conduct a prospective study to assess the incidence of subclinical myocarditis following a booster among adults, with a projected completion date of June 30, 2023. Neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nor Moderna have disclosed the results of the study as of yet.
Pfizer was required to conduct a similar study, with results due on Dec. 31, 2022, but the FDA changed the end date at the request of Pfizer.
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The damage of Covid lockdowns is only now becoming apparent
Ross Clark
There are still those, like Matt Hancock, who think that lockdowns were an unalloyed good – who, indeed, believe that in a future pandemic we must lock down harder and faster. But for the rest of us, the appalling toll of Covid lockdowns continues to become apparent.
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reveals today that the number of people who are economically inactive due to long-term sickness has grown by 400,000 to 2.5 million since 2019. More than half of these people – 135,000 – report depression and anxiety as either the primary or secondary cause of their absence from the workplace.
Where is the outrage over these figures?
The pandemic has left us with virtually zero economic growth, much of which is blamed on high inflation and rising interest rates. But an important underlying cause too often goes without comment: a sharp rise in economic inactivity.
We cannot grow richer as a country if ever more people are unproductive. Yet the figures for economic inactivity tend to get smothered by the more frequently-reported unemployment statistics. Since the 1990s, these have been based on answers to the Labour Force Survey (an ONS questionnaire) and do not include people on long-term sickness benefits.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Social Justice has published its latest termly tracker of school absence for the autumn term of 2022, showing that school attendance has not even nearly recovered from repeated lockdowns. It reveals that 1.7 million pupils – 24 per cent of the total – missed more than 10 per cent of their lessons. Meanwhile 125,000 pupils missed more than half their lessons. This latter figure has more than doubled since before the pandemic; by contrast it was 60,000 in the same term of 2019.
The implications of all this for society are still fully to be felt. There is a long-established link between school absence and the descent into crime. The rise in school absences suggests that there could be an extra 9,000 young offenders, 2,000 of them violent criminals, by 2027.
Yet where is the outrage over these figures? The scandal of school absences hardly shows up in the news agenda. Disgracefully, the whole issue of missed education was pushed aside by artificially inflated exam grades in 2020 and 2021, when GCSE and A level results were based on teachers’ predictions for their pupils, not on actual exam results. On paper we have a generation which looks extremely well-educated – yet which in reality has huge gaps in its education.
The government’s considered pandemic plan prior to Covid 19 was not to close schools. But, come March 2020, advisers and ministers panicked, dumped the plan and imposed lockdown, closing schools for months on end. We will be living with the consequences for a very long time.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-damage-of-covid-lockdowns-is-only-now-becoming-apparent/
*************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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