Thread by @ColdSpock

@TomSwarbrick1 Tom - Re: the caller, 13th September, saying a recent US study showed rates of Myocarditis hospitalisation from covid vaccination is 6 times higher than covid infection hospitalisation in male adolescents.
Some Pro Bono Executive Research Desk-ing follows...

So the study itself is here:
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
whereas a digestable Guardian story is here:
theguardian.com/world/2021/sep…
Some comments I have follow.

The study,posted as a preprint on the 8th September, is not yet peer reviewed. That is not to say it should be dismissed, but there may be doubts about the reliability of some of the data and methodologies. Use of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is possibly problematic

As the CDC's page for VAERS states "It is not possible to use VAERS data to calculate how often an adverse event occurs in a population".
Assoc. Prof. Swapnil Hiremath comments "The rate of myocarditis is much higher than the ones reported in Ontario: 160/million for 12-15 males

compared to 72.5/million from Ontario (which includes Moderna as well - which has higher rates of myocarditis than the Pfizer/BioNTech). Why would this be so?"
Furthermore, hospital admission treatment practices, severity or illness duration post vaccination were not assessed.

Vaccine related Mycoarditis is usually very mild, and full recovery normally occurs with rest, or occasionally corticosteroids. Likewise, the severity of disease and the continuing adverse outcomes of hospitalisation due to it, much more severe, did not feature in the analysis.

Regardless, for purposes of the UK vaccination proposals, let's take a worst case scenario and assume the paper is correct. The first thing to consider is that the study found the vast majority of Cardiac Adverse Effects occurred after the *second* dose.

This is quite possibly why the CMOs of the four nations agree on a single dosing strategy for adolescents in the UK. If you substitute the Dose 1 rates for Dose 2 rates in the relative hospitalisations calculation, Covid becomes the bigger risk to male children, 6-1 becomes 1-2

Next we need to look at where the Covid hospitalisation rate comes from, which is definitive, solid, data. The study used three rates for comparison of risk: 4, 15 and 21 admissions per million children per week.

So the first thing to notice is that the headline "6 times" figure only applies to boys who are perfectly healthy when prevalence is pretty low. A comorbidity is obesity, asthma, diabetes, etc. With any of those, Covid hospitalisation can be the more likely outcome.

Whether it is or isn't more likely, depends on prevalence. Unfortunately, PHE's age bands don't exactly correspond, so as these are numbers per 100,000, multiplying them by 10 probably indicates Medium-High prevalence in the UK, likely to rise for a while yet as schools return.

In summary, do not be unduly influenced if you hear this study of "children 6 times more likely to be hospitalised due to vaccination than covid". By all means take it into consideration, but due to issues, nuances and differences outlined above, it's UK applicability is limited.