The notion that vaccinated people are at higher risk of “dying suddenly” has become an anti-vaccine dog-whistle. News reports of prominent people who die of heart attack or stroke are frequently followed by social media accounts raising the question of their vaccination status.
But it is becoming more clear that it is COVID itself that raises one’s risk of heart attack or stroke. That’s according to a series of recent studies.
Late last year, the Medical Journal of Australia published a review of 20,000 lab-confirmed cases of COVID in Victoria between January 2020 and May 2021. Focusing on the 90 days following infection, they found raised incidence of a number of cardiovascular conditions.
This included myocarditis and pericarditis, inflammation of the heart and heart-muscle lining, respectively. Anti-vaccine campaigners have focused on incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination.
Researchers found that those infected with COVID were twice as likely to suffer a heart attack and almost four times more likely to suffer a stroke. There were 51 heart attacks requiring hospitalisation among the 21,000 positive cases tracked in the study.
This is in contrast to an increase of just 40 cases per million of any myocardial condition following the vaccine, and that only in the most affected group for vaccine-related adverse events (males aged 18 to 35).
The finding corroborates earlier research published in Nature that followed the health status of over 150,000 veterans in the US. Their conditions and treatment are tracked by the Department of Veteran Affairs.
In this group, COVID infection raises the risk of a major cardiovascular event by around 25 cases per 1,000 people. This is in comparison with the department’s 2017 data, that is, before COVID.
Anti-vaxxers claim that cardiovascular conditions are triggered by the spike protein created by the vaccine’s mRNA. The new studies show that, unsurprisingly, it is when the spike protein is attached to an invasive, live and rapidly reproducing virus that one’s risk of suffering these conditions increases significantly.
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