Another statement about the dangers of vaccination against coronavirus infection is spreading on the Internet - supposedly vaccinated people are 800% more likely to suffer from myocardial inflammation. We decided to check whether this fear is supported by scientific data.

This information appeared on the website "So let's win!», their group on the social network Facebook* (19,000 subscribers) and Telegram channel (more than 10,000 subscribers), as well as in blog a certain Veniamin Zaitsev on the LiveJournal website and on his page on Facebook (more than 17,000 subscribers). Each of the posts has dozens of reposts, while it is difficult to assess the overall prevalence due to the fact that users probably want to bypass Facebook algorithms, which, under posts containing certain keywords, offers reliable information regarding coronavirus infection. share not by the text itself, but screenshot messages from attached link to third party resources (LiveJournal and Telegram). Also, to bypass algorithms in the text, instead of the word “vaccination”, the notation “in” is used, in such same stylistics decorated and other posts groups “So we will win! With V. Zaitsev." Information about the connection between the COVID-19 vaccine and myocarditis was actively disseminated in the form of a newsletter in the WhatsApp messenger.

Myocarditis is inflammation myocardium (cardiac-type muscle tissue that forms the thickness of the walls of the ventricles and atria), which is often accompanied by necrosis of the muscle cells of the heart (cardiomyocytes). The causes of myocarditis are varied - infectious diseases (including coronavirus infection), ingestion of cardiotoxins (combat or natural poisons), taking certain medications, systemic diseases, etc. However, most often myocarditis is idiopathic, that is, the cause of its occurrence remains unknown. Treatment may include medications, a temporary pacemaker, and (in some cases) surgery. At the same time, according to data A 2022 guideline published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ; a peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing medical articles since 1840) found that a significant number of cases of myocarditis are asymptomatic and the patient recovers on their own. All-cause mortality among patients admitted to hospital for acute myocarditis in the UK amounted to only 4%. For comparison: mortality from diagnosed heart attack in 2022 in the UK was assessed approximately 30%.

The newsletter is based on three sources: a study by the French scientific group Epi-Phare, a report “Myocardial inflammation/myocarditis after COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccination” presented by cardiologist Christian Eugen Müller to the European Society of Cardiology, and data from the American VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System). Let’s take a closer look at each of the sources of information and the information contained in them.

The French scientific group Epi-Phare in July 2022 will indeed published study on the connection between coronavirus vaccination and myocarditis, but the authors of the mailing list incorrectly interpreted its results. For example, the newsletter states that “the risk of myocarditis increases after the second injection of the vaccine and more significantly after the booster dose,” while the study talks about the opposite situation: “this (after the first booster (third) dose. - Ed.) risk is lower than after the second dose, and decreases with the lengthening of the time between successive doses.” Moreover, scientists note that the risk of myocarditis after a booster dose of the Spikevax vaccine (developed by Moderna) is 0.00025%, and for Comirnaty (developed by BioNTech and Pfizer) - 0.00114%. At the same time, according to the American College of Cardiology, the risk of myocarditis arising against the background of coronavirus infection is amounts to 0.045%, which is 180 times higher than the risk with a booster dose of Spikevax and 39 times higher than with a third dose of Comirnaty. However, the mailing warning about the dangers of vaccination does not contain such a comparison, which misleads the reader about the real risks.

Further, the authors of the mailing list refer to data obtained during a prospective study (which evaluates the effect of an intervention or factor and in which, before the outcomes are available, study participants are divided into groups exposed or not exposed to the intervention or factor under study) research, conducted at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland. The criterion for determining myocarditis was an analysis for a special substance - troponin, a protein that is normally found in the heart muscle and does not enter the bloodstream in detectable quantities. If troponin is found in significant quantities in the patient's venous blood, this condition is called troponinemia and indicates the presence of some kind of myocardial damage. Troponin rises not only for myocarditis, but also for other heart diseases, for example, a heart attack. Of the 777 people who received a third, booster dose of the mRNA vaccine, 40 had elevated troponin levels as part of routine blood testing. In 18 cases, there were reasons for this increase other than vaccination; in another 22 cases, the increase could not be explained by other factors. Based on the results obtained, the scientists concluded that the risk of troponemia in those who received a booster vaccine is 2.8%. At the same time, the study authors accepted a figure of 0.0035% for the general population risk of encountering this pathology (myocarditis arising from all causes is taken into account) and concluded that after the third dose the risk increases by 800%. By the way, in the newsletter the wording “800 times” appears twice and once the wording “by 800%”, although times are not converted into percentages in this way, because “800 times” corresponds to an increase of “79,900%”, while an increase of “800%” is a change of nine times.

At the same time, the newsletter misses an important fact: in their article, the scientists note that the statistics on the basis of which the general population risk is derived include only cases that required medical care, and their study is aimed at identifying through blood tests even those that were asymptomatic, that is, those that did not cause discomfort to the patient and did not lead to referral to specialists. Separately, the authors noted that although 40 cases of myocarditis were identified among vaccinated people, none of them were accompanied by major adverse cardiovascular events (an umbrella term that includes hospitalization for heart failure, ventricular arrhythmia, myocardial infarction and death from cardiovascular pathologies). That is, if these people had not been participants in the study, they would not have even realized that they had suffered some kind of complication. It turns out that we don't know the true risk of myocarditis in a population diagnosed only by blood tests (no one regularly gets tested for troponin, and many may not even realize that they have had the condition at some point). Thus, the article compares parameters that are not entirely correctly selected: the risk of symptomatic myocarditis, which requires seeking help and therefore ends up in statistics, and the risk of increased troponin in tests, which is not felt by the patient and is detected only within the framework of the study. Moreover, scientists write about this, but the newsletter is silent.

Finally, the third source of information in the newsletter is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). It is being jointly run by the CDC and FDA to collect data on adverse events once the vaccine becomes available. Data from this system has more than once become basis for manipulative judgments that sorted it out How "Verified", and so our Colleagues-fact checkers. The fact is that this system assumes self-reporting of adverse events, that is, the data is entered into it by the patient himself, and not by the doctor. Accordingly, it is impossible to correctly assess which consequences occurred due to vaccination and which simply happened after the administration of the drug. Very precisely the disadvantages of VAERS describes Director of the Johns Hopkins Vaccine Safety Institute Daniel Salmon: “If I received the COVID-19 vaccine and then my dog was hit by a car, I could report that fact on an adverse event report and it would show up in the database. However, this will not mean that the car hit my dog because I was vaccinated.”

It is also worth paying attention to the resource that distributes this newsletter. She appeared on the blog on LiveJournal a certain Veniamin Zaitsev, who calls himself a biochemist by training. His blog is one of the top 500 most popular on LiveJournal. In addition to LiveJournal, Zaitsev actively maintains a personal page And group on Facebook and also website entitled “So Let’s Win!” at invermec.space. The domain name of the site, the hashtag “IVE” that is constantly found on Zaitsev’s blog and social networks and the site’s categories (for example, “Where to buy ivermectin”, “FAQ on ivermectin” and “ivermectin calculator”) lead us to believe that this is actually a project to popularize the treatment of coronavirus ivermectin - a veterinary antiparasitic drug that does not have proven antiviral activity and is not intended for use in humans. WHO, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Cochrane Library (one of the largest resources on evidence-based medicine) does not recommend the use of ivermectin to treat a new coronavirus infection.

In their work, fact checkers regularly encounter manipulative and false claims regarding ivermectin:

— in 2020, Kazakhstani resource Factcheck.kz checked, is it true that ivermectin cures COVID-19 in two days, and came to the conclusion that this is manipulation;

— in 2021, the Ukrainian resource “Vox Ukraine” examined the statement “Donald Trump recovered from COVID-19 thanks to Vladimir Zelenko's method"(including precisely the use of ivermectin) and designated it as an unsubstantiated judgment;

— in 2021, fact-checking department of Reuters sorted it out publications stating that veterinary ivermectin was acceptable for use in humans, and came to the conclusion that this was not the case;

— in 2022, American FactCheck.org found out, is it true that clinical trials have shown the benefits of ivermectin in the treatment of coronavirus infection - it turned out that this statement is not true;

- in 2022, British resource Full Fact published material about the US National Institutes of Health allegedly adding ivermectin to the list of COVID treatments; fact checkers found that this was not the case.

All fact checks about ivermectin can be found on a special Google section - fact check search. Unfortunately, the functionality of the site does not imply displaying the number of results, however, according to coronavirus alliance (association of fact checkers led by the Poynter Institute), about ivermectin prepared 182 fact checks. It is worth remembering that these are only analyzes published on resources that are part of the IFCN (International Fact Checkers Network), while there are many projects in the world that are not yet included in it (for example, “Verified”).

Thus, although the newsletter refers to real scientific publications, the data from them is presented incorrectly, with errors, inaccuracies and distortions. Moreover, when talking about the risk of post-vaccination myocarditis, the authors of the newsletter lose sight of the fact that this risk is 180 times (for the Spikevax vaccine) and 39 times (for Comirnaty) lower than the risk of getting the same complication, but not from the vaccine, but from the coronavirus infection itself. In addition, the primary source of the mailing list in Russian is a website popularizing treatment with a veterinary antiparasitic drug that has not demonstrated effectiveness in clinical trials and is not included in the standards for treating Covid.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover image: Nebraska medicine