US military published on Covid vaccine-associated myocarditis cases, online June 29, 2021 in JAMA

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2781601

Brief Report

June 29, 2021

Myocarditis Following Immunization With mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Members of the US Military

Jay Montgomery, MD^1,2; Margaret Ryan, MD, MPH^1,3; Renata Engler, MD⁴; et al

A tale of 3 studies

This is a very interesting addition to my last blog post.  What this paper says is that 23 male US soldiers were found to develop myocarditis within 4 days of their second Covid shot.  And while 436,000 second doses of Covid vaccines were administered to males in the military, for a fairly low rate of myocarditis of 1 in 19,000 second doses, the rate of myocarditis was still somewhat higher than expected in the unvaccinated.

This number sounds reassuring.  But...

The cases were picked up a) through referrals to specialists and b) review of VAERS reports.  That is strange.  Why didn't the authors use a military electronic health database to find the cases, based on diagnosis codes?  That would be the obvious way to identify cases.

Perhaps they avoided using the military database (DMSS) created for just such purpose by Congress, because the federal government is actively hiding the existence of that database and its use to assess Covid vaccine injuries?  The method the authors used seems to minimize case finding.

Who are the authors?  Four of them have been prominent in the study of smallpox and anthrax vaccine injuries.  Three were US Army officers who worked in the military vaccine healthcare centers, established by Congress to deal with vaccine injuries 20 years ago. These are Allergy-Immunology specialists Renata Engler, Limone Collins and David Hrncr.  All good, caring clinicians.  Dr. Margaret Ryan was a Naval officer in San Diego who did epidemiology studies; it seems she is a civilian working there still.  

Long ago I wrote a criticism of a paper she penned, because I believe she minimized anthrax vaccine injuries in pregnant women.  Maybe it still exists somewhere on the net.  It was on a former website of mine that the hosting company took down about 15 years ago.  

Renata Engler, who was in charge of the Military Vaccine Healthcare Centers Network and headed Allergy-Immunology at Walter Reed, is the only current author who also coauthored the 2015 study cited in the previous post.  In that study, one in 218 (clinical cases) or 1 in 30 (clinical plus subclinical cases) of the soldiers developed myocarditis after smallpox vaccine.  They were discovered because each of the 1081 subjects in the trial had blood tests performed before and after vaccination.  It was a very carefully done study, with the intent to miss no cases.

So Renata knows how to do a study of myocarditis following vaccination using methods to identify every case.  In fact, she may have designed that 2015 study.  I wonder how much she had to do with the design of last week's publication, apparently designed to miss cases.

In 2003, other military and civilian doctors studied myocarditis following smallpox vaccination with the intent to find only the most obvious cases, and their rate was about 1 in 13,000.

Looking at the 2003 and 2015 smallpox vaccine myocarditis studies, one had a rate of myocarditis in US soldiers 427 times greater than the other.

What is the take home message?  You can't just "follow the science" because the people doing the science know how to create a study that will yield the answers they are looking for.  You have to dig dig dig into the science to separate the wheat from the chaff.  To understand what was done.  

We still lack careful studies on the adverse events from Covid vaccines. They would be so easy to do.  

1. Simply draw blood before a vaccination and then about 4 days after a Covid vaccination. 
2. Adding an EKG before and after would be icing on the cake.
3. Checking a D-dimer and platelet count (for blood clots and thrombocytopenia) would be the cherry on top.

These are all basic tests that can be done in any US lab or clinic. Who will step up to the plate and start to carefully evaluate the patients whom they are vaccinating?