steampunk heart
Op-Ed

Iceland & Finland Join Sweden & Denmark & Pause Moderna Vaccine Due To Heart Risks

Sweden, Denmark, Iceland & Finland have temporarily halted the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for people under the age of 30 due to the risk of heart complications posed by the vaccine.

All four countries based their decision on data from a preprint study. Sweden’s Public Health Agency says that it signals “an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium.”

The temporary pause is set to go until December 1st, 2021 while decisions will be reassessed.

The countries have not paused their recommendation for the Pfizer vaccine, and are still encouraging this age group to go get vaccinated.

They’ve also emphasized that the risk of this type of adverse reaction is rare, but it begs the question, how rare? Can we truly say that we are accurately tracking reports of injury and doing a proper cost/benefit analysis?

Reports of heart complications as a result of COVID vaccines have been popping up all over the globe. For example, as of August 7th, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontario, Canada in people under the age of 25.

Although in many cases this type of heart inflammation experienced by this age group usually subsides on its own, there have also been multiple reports of death from myocarditis following COVID vaccination, including a 13-year-old Michigan boy who died June 16th, three days after he received his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

More than 1000 cases of myocarditis have been reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).

Although VAERS has been criticized, these types of reports do raise red flags within the consciousness of people seeking to understand how they wish to weigh the risk of vaccination with the risk of their child dying from COVID.

What is not often reported is the fact that the risk of heart inflammation for younger people due to COVID vaccines may be greater than the risk of being hospitalized for COVID.

For example, a study out of the University of California concluded there is a higher risk for teenage boys to develop myocarditis after two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine than there is for them to be hospitalized from COVID-19.

According to a recent study by Stanford academics, if a child is infected with COVID, they have a near 100 percent survival rate. If infected with COVID-19, children ages 0-9 have on average a 0.1% or 1/1000 chance of being hospitalized. For ages 11-19 there is a 0.2% or 1/500 chance of being hospitalized.

The American Academy of Pediatrics also confirmed that while the Delta variant is infecting more children, it is not causing increased disease severity.

They also found that 0.1 – 1.9% of their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalizations, and 0.00 – 0.03% of all child covid-19 cases resulted in death.

I recently published an article providing three science-based reasons why many parents don’t want to vaccinate their children. The purpose of this piece is not to encourage people not to vaccinate, but to create unity amongst a divided society who is struggling to understand why some are making the decisions they are about vaccination.

This is not a black and white issue, but media efforts and government rhetoric is suggesting there is no discussion to be had around making informed and intelligent decisions.

Source: The Pulse