Okay, I need a separate thread to talk about the figure in @EricTopol’s @ScienceMagazine Perspective article.
First Panel, SARSCoV2 & a heart cell. And an ACE2 receptor. Nice.
Second Panel: Some myocytes surrounded by inflammatory cells. I don’t recall reading about that…
Nice that they at least mentioned clot. Too bad they couldn’t show one. 🙄
Main figure: Looks like a recycled myocardial infarction. I don’t think this is the kind of thing one sees in critical illness. Certainly not consistent with what was seen in my yardstick paper.
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Working as a scientist in industry, it took me a long time to understand the differences between the research I do now & the research I did as an academic.
Too many of my colleagues, facing the reality of vaccine-associated myocarditis, are either burying their heads in the sand or throwing up their hands.
In an effort to promote vaccination, they are making what I believe are misguided actions.
I believe vaccination for COVID is our best way back to a normal life. And we need to be honest with people about what we know.
We also need to acknowledge that there is a great deal we can do to minimize the harms of our interventions.
Regarding what we know—we need to be honest about who is affected, and how frequently. We shouldn’t try to make marginally valid comparisons to COVID. The folks you want to persuade won’t believe you anyway. Most people think differently about an active interventions & disease.
Let’s be clear: 2 months of safety data for a new drug or vaccine is at best marginally better than 1 month for identifying acute AEs. And it has almost no power in identifying chronic/long term AEs.
A 2-month cutoff is not a routine cutoff for evaluating AEs in drug or vaccine development.
Of course, all cutoffs are arbitrary to some degree, but there are typical timeframes that are routinely used: eg 1 month, 1 year.
In the setting of a pandemic, we have to weigh potential risks with benefits. Every day we wait to accumulate more data is a day we are not immunizing.