Horrifying Thai study finds evidence of heart damage in 2.33% of vaccinated school-aged participants, authors conclude: "mRNA vaccination ... should be recommended for all adolescents"

I’m late to this disturbing study of 301 Thai adolescents aged 13 to 18, who were monitored for cardiac symptoms following Dose 2 of Pfizer. Nearly a third reported effects of some kind, and 2.33% of the participants (3.5% of the males) exhibited biomarkers indicating damaged heart muscle. The rates are substantially higher than those found in prior studies, probably because “the study protocol … required determining baseline troponin-T, CK-MB, ECG and echocardiography before vaccination” (p. 11). In other words, the authors established individual baselines for each patient to better detect subtler anomalies.

Those are terrible, terrible numbers – orders of magnitude above what we’d expect in this demographic, which faces essentially no risk from Corona infection. It’s probably for this reason that the authors are especially eager to lard their analysis with the familiar excuses:

[T]he incidence of COVID-19-associated cardiac injury or myocarditis is … estimated to be 100 times higher than mRNA COVID-19-related myocarditis. Moreover, mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis is characterized by overall mild presentation and favorable outcomes … Overall, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination has an extremely favorable outcome and should be recommended for all adolescents. (p. 12)

I doubt that anyone (still less the authors) could believe this facile nonsense. Given the vastly higher rate of cardiac side-effects from vaccination their study detected, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that rates of “COVID-19-related myocarditis” merely appear higher due to reporting bias? Is it in any sense appropriate to characterise myocarditis, with the potentially permanent damage to the heart that it entails, as “mild” and likely to end in “favourable outcome”? And how can anyone compare the risk from vaccination and from infection as if the two were alternatives? Finally, given that SARS-2 poses statistically zero risk to healthy adolescents aged 13 to 18, what could it mean to write of the vaccines having an “extremely favourable outcome” in this group?

It is all so tiresome.