Being vaccinated against Covid sharply increased the risk heart attack patients would die or suffer heart failure after heart attacks, a new Spanish study shows.
Over a six-month period after their heart attacks, Covid vaccinated patients had nearly double the risk of unjabbed ones. The risk appeared concentrated in patients who were both vaccinated and had had Covid before their heart attacks.
The researchers examined outcomes from almost 1,000 heart attack patients from March 2020 through March 2023 in a Madrid hospital. They found vaccinated and previously infected patients had an over 50 percent higher risk of death or heart failure than unvaccinated people who had also been previously infected - and a 90 percent higher risk than those who were unvaccinated and previously uninfected.
The gap remained even after researchers adjusted for risk factors such as smoking, blood pressure and age.1 "The combination of vaccination and natural immunization against SARS-CoV2 may predispose to the development of severe heart failure," they wrote. Most patients had received the mRNA jabs from Pfizer and Moderna.
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(Nope, I haven't forgotten. I hope you haven't either.)
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The paper may help explain why post-Covid death rates remain persistently high in heavily vaccinated countries, belying the predictions of epidemiologists who expected death rates to fall below normal after the epidemic ended.
Heart attacks remain the top cause of death in most wealthy countries. Even a small increase in their long-term lethality would be enough to push overall mortality up notably.
The paper does not prove the Covid vaccines caused the extra deaths or cases of heart failure. But the researchers found that heart attack patients who were vaccinated and had recovered from Covid had about 31 times more anti-spike protein antibodies than unvaccinated patients who had been infected and recovered.
That vaccine-driven increase - or as, the researchers called it, an "enhanced serologic immune response" - could produce more inflammation and damage to the cardiovascular system, the researchers wrote.
They noted the vaccinated and immunized patients tended to present with more heart severe attacks on admission, and the link between severity and vaccination status was particularly notable in patients under 65.
Almost 85 percent of the vaccinated patients they followed had received the mRNA jabs from Pfizer and Moderna, with the rest getting the DNA/AAV vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which were not widely used in the United States.
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(Spoiler alert: yes, there's an association):
© Ana Blasco, Ana Royuel, et al.New study in Vaccine, Volume 42, Issue 26, 2 December 2024
In 2021 and 2022, studies on the mRNA Covid jabs and their safety and effectiveness were common. But as the picture on both sides has darkened, and Covid has receded as a threat, American interest in researching the jabs has also faded.
Despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control is still recommending Covid jabs and boosters for everyone over six months old, American scientists have largely stopped researching the potential side effects of the mRNA shots. The few studies being published these days come mostly from Europe and East Asia.
Comment: Guess the funding has dried up, eh? Plus, who wants a lot of inconvenient conclusions floating around?
If public health were not completely politicized, evidence that a massively widely used medical treatment might be causing post-heart attack deaths would produce national-level concern and research responses.
But if the last four years are any indication, this study will be ignored.
Notes:
1. The researchers found roughly a 90 percent increased risk for both all "Type 1" heart attacks and a subgroup called STEMI heart attacks. However, their statistical analysis showed that there was about a 5.5 percent chance that the risk in the all-heart-attacks group was due to chance, compared to a 4.5 percent chance that the risk in the STEMI subgroups was due to chance.
Researchers generally say a study has failed to demonstrate an association if the chances are higher than 5 percent that the association is due to chance, so the paper - in an abundance of caution - characterizes the association as proven for the STEMI group and unproven for the overall group. Because the excess risk is almost exactly the same in both groups - again, about a 90 percent higher risk in vaccinated/previously infected people - I decided not to get into this distinction in the body of the article.
Maybe add in Cause Unknown, that may force out an inkling of fact.