Professor Byram Bridle reviewed this important study today. It represents a significant improvement over the CDC’s previous reports on mRNA vaccine myocarditis. That said, Professor Bridle points out its numerous defects, not the least of which is its perpetuation of the CDC’s position that mRNA vaccine myocarditis is rare, mild and short-lived — even in the face of its own data proving otherwise.
Methods: The authors reached out to individuals aged 12 to 29 who had reported vaccine myocarditis to VAERS. They sought out cases where at least 90 days had passed since the onset of symptoms.
Several observations: 1) this paper, published in a prestigious LANCET journal, uses data from VAERS; 2) the time to follow-up was reasonably long - a median of 6 months after the onset of symptoms; 3) this was a cohort of severely ill patients - 25% had gone to the ICU; 4) the authors comment that they had no way of discovering if any patients died, although they think that none did; 5) the majority had abnormal heart tests or symptoms at follow-up (a median of six months after vaccine myocarditis onset):
125 of 393 with restrictions on physical activity
104 of 393 using prescription medication
81 of 151 cardiac MRIs were abnormal
71 of 311 electrocardiograms were abnormal
17 out of 279 echocardiograms were abnormal
10 out of 104 exercise stress tests were abnormal
One curiosity of this paper is that it reports what the patients thought regarding their recovery, as well as what their physicians thought about their recovery. It turns out that physicians were considerably more optimistic than the patients: physicians thought that 81% of their patients had recovered, while 50% of patients reported ongoing symptoms. The study authors speculate that this is perhaps due to depression or anxiety.
(There does not appear to be any analysis of how physicians took symptoms or cardiac test results into account when diagnosing recovery from myocarditis.)
Finally, in Appendix 1 of the study, a somewhat complete dataset on 228 patients is reported. There is no analysis of whether this group of patients is representative of the overall study group. The format of this dataset is unusual, with each column representing a single patient:
Reformulating this array into a database, more observations can be made:
The number of patients with no symptoms or abnormal cardiac tests was quite small: only those with highlighted results. This group of 25 had no abnormal symptoms or results on followup.
However, only 9 patients out of this “recovered/back to normal” group had full data available.
The majority of cardiac MRIs which were performed were abnormal (light blue) at followup.
The so-called “recovered” patients had abnormal troponins 39% of the time,
while the “not yet recovered” patients troponins were abnormal 58% of the time
Overall Assessment: It is inexplicable that this study, driven by CDC scientists, was not set up as a prospective study, as was Mansanguan et al (2022). Mansanguan demonstrates that mRNA vaccine myocarditis in young males is common.
Despite its methodological shortcomings, the CDC/Lancet study strongly challenges the notion that mRNA vaccine myocarditis is short-lived: a very small minority - between 9 to 25 of 228 young patients - from 4% to 11% - who sustain mRNA vaccine myocarditis recover fully in terms of symptoms and test results between 3 and 6 months post-onset.
The vast majority were not back to normal.