select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
before the headlines
Fiona fox's blog
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released* a statistical bulletin estimating the risk of all-cause and cardiac death in the 12 weeks after vaccination or positive SARS-CoV-2 test compared with subsequent weeks for people aged 12 to 29 years in England.
Prof Stephen Evans, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:
“This is a useful analysis using accepted methods to address a difficult problem in observational data. The method avoids a number of biases, but the authors are careful in drawing attention to limitations. However the overall message is that there is no evidence from this large study that either cardiac or all-cause deaths in relatively young people are increased following mRNA vaccination. There is good evidence that these are increased following infection with SARs-CoV-2.
“The non-mRNA vaccines stopped being used in young people in the UK. The male-female difference is not understood.
“This study does not estimate vaccine effectiveness and it is difficult to assess the exact balance of benefit and harm in this age group for the time when Omicron was (is) prevalent, but it is clear that infection with this virus can, rarely lead to death in this age group, and death following vaccination is even rarer.”
Prof Adam Finn, Professor of Paediatrics, University of Bristol, said:
“These are interesting data which generate as many questions as answers. The findings are somewhat unexpected, as concerns about rare cardiac side-effects – specifically myocarditis and pericarditis – have hitherto been particularly associated with mRNA vaccine second doses in males especially when the dose interval was short, whereas the signal reported here is primarily in non-mRNA first doses in females.
“The absence of a signal in the first 12 weeks post-dose as compared to subsequent periods is reassuring as it provides context to a number of anecdotal reports which have previously raised concerns.
“The presence of a signal in association with a positive SARS CoV2 infection test raises the question whether the Spike protein – which is expressed both during infection and following vaccination – is the cause.
“The next and most pressing issue that needs to be addressed is to gather more detailed information on what the nature of the reported cardiac events actually was, as this would help us begin to understand what is really being seen in these figures and might help guide future policy and vaccine design.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36494-0
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
Prof Stephen Evans: “No CofI except that I have been at LSHTM where authors have links, but not with me.”
Prof Adam Finn: “AF is a JCVI member and also a member of the WHO SAGE Working group on COVID19 vaccines. He was chief investigator on the UK clinical trials programmes for Valneva and Sanofi/GSK vaccines and investigator on several other COVID19 vaccine trials and studies including Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-Biontech vaccines and is currently involved in the planning of trials of vaccines being developed by Moderna. Policy work is unremunerated and funding related to trials and studies is paid to his employer, the University of Bristol.”