Heart Inflammation From mRNA Vaccine: Probable Causes and Precautions
More questions on the proper injection technique and risk-benefit analysis of mRNA vaccines.
It’s rather uncomfortable to admit that vaccines have health risks, however safe they are in the vast majority. For influenza vaccines, febrile seizures (convulsions), Guillain–Barré syndrome (autoimmune nerve disorder), and anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction) can happen. For Covid-19, anaphylaxis can occur from many vaccines, severe and fatal blood clots plus low platelets from AstraZeneca and J&J DNA vaccines, and mild-to-severe heart inflammation from Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
Thankfully, the risks of these vaccine adverse events are very low and don't outweigh the benefits that vaccines provide in most situations. Still, it doesn’t hurt to understand them further to see if there’s anything else we can do about it. As I’ve written about the blood clots elsewhere, this article will focus on mRNA vaccine-related heart inflammation.
Risk of heart inflammation from mRNA vaccines
First, heart inflammation has three main types: myocarditis (inflamed heart muscles), pericarditis (inflamed outer linings of the heart), and endocarditis (inflamed inner linings of the heart). But only myocarditis and pericarditis have been associated with mRNA vaccine.
Common clinical signs of mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis are elevated troponin (a blood biomarker of heart muscle damage) levels, abnormal cardiac imaging, and chest pain. Other rarer symptoms include headache, breathlessness, fatigue, and body ache.
Previously in “mRNA Vaccine Safety and Risks: A One-Year Update From the U.S., U.K., and Israel,” I covered two new high-quality population-based studies that shed light on the risks of heart inflammation from mRNA vaccines. I’ll just describe their findings in brief here.
In one of them, researchers from Israel found that individuals vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine had a 3.24-times increased risk of myocarditis within 21 days of either the first or second dose compared to unvaccinated individuals. This equated to an excess of 2.7 events per 100,000…
