Philosophical Vegan Forum

Hello there!
So, recently, a blogger called dr. Moran, who is otherwise an advocate of science-based medicine, has made a video claiming that the Moderna vaccination against COVID causes myocarditis in around 3% of vaccinated adolescents. That’s a rate that’s, according to him, 20 to 50 times higher than the rate COVID-19 itself causes myocarditis. Since, as far as I can tell, nobody else has made a video or a blog post responding to that claim, I have decided to. I mean, I can see how many people think it doesn’t even deserve a response, like Flat-Earth videos don’t, but I think it is important that there is some sane opposition.

So, are you an anti-vaxxer? Well, if it is anti-vax to claim that MMR vaccines cause autism, and that therefore almost everything we know about how brain works is wrong, then I don’t see why claiming that the Moderna vaccine causes myocarditis at a rate far higher than COVID-19 does wouldn’t be anti-vax. If anything, it is even more anti-vax, in the sense that it is less scientifically plausible. What you are essentially claiming is that inserting a piece of a virus RNA into a cell produces some toxins which don’t exist in the virus itself, right? Well, that would require much about what we know about cell biology to be wrong, and cell biology is a harder science than neuroscience is. You claim to be an advocate of science-based medicine, yet what you are talking here is going very much against science-based medicine.

The basic principle of science-based medicine is that those advantages and disadvantages need to be scientifically plausible to be taken into account. We don’t need to know the precise mechanism of action, but the disadvantage of the Moderna vaccine that putting a piece of a RNA of some virus inside a cell produces some toxins that don’t exist in the virus and which cause myocarditis more often than the virus itself does is not scientifically plausible. Sure, it is not as implausible as homeopathy is, but it is still implausible. Of course, scientific plausibility is not the only thing that matters in science-based medicine. Once you have scientific plausibility, you need to have evidence. But you don’t even have the scientific plausibility here.

But that has to be true if you assume basics of molecular biology are true. Once again, the only way it wouldn’t be true is if inserting pieces of virus RNA into the cells produces some toxins which don’t exist in the virus itself, which would require basics of molecular biology to be false. The whole point of RNA vaccines is to make such things, that the vaccine causes some side effect more often than the virus itself does, theoretically impossible.

Well, obviously, you cannot claim both that Moderna vaccination causes myocarditis in 3% of the vaccinated adolescents and that that myocarditis causes death in 27% of the cases like regular myocarditis does. If that were true, people vaccinated with Moderna would be falling like flies. 1% of the adolescents vaccinated with Moderna obviously do not die from myocarditis. Pick one of those claims, as you clearly cannot claim both.

The chance of a non-vaccinated adolescent dying from COVID if he catches it is low, but it is not 1 in three hundred thousand. There are thousands of deaths from COVID in the 20-30 age group in the US. If the chance of an adolescent dying from COVID-19 were 1 in three hundred thousand, there would have to be hundreds of millions of infected adolescents, and there aren’t so many adolescents in the US. To claim that the chances of a non-vaccinated 20-30-year-old dying from COVID is 1 in three hundred thousands, you need to claim that the number of 20-to-30-year-olds dying from COVID has been overestimated by an order of magnitude, which is implausible. If you want to claim that the number of 70+-year-olds who died from COVID has been overestimated by some 50%-or-so, claim that. I also think that. It is indeed hard to tell what a 70-year-old died from. But don’t claim the number of 20-to-30-year-olds who died from COVID has been massively overestimated. It is easy to tell what a 20-year-old died from.

Once again, an obvious question with this claim that Moderna causes subclinical myocarditis in 3% of vaccinated adolescents is how could it. And another obvious question is how come in the clinical trials the side-effect of chest pain was not more common in the group receiving the vaccine than in the group receiving the placebo.
Anyway, that would be all for this video. Thank you for watching.

I don't think that banning a vaccine based on some scientifically implausible speculation is a good idea. It is fueling the anti-vaxxers. Think of how the US banned the Johnson&Johnson vaccine for a short period of time based on unfounded speculation that it was causing blood clots. Now it is a well-known thing in the anti-vaxxer circles that all COVID vaccines cause blood clots.

I am not at all convinced that people striving to stay healthy via exercise and healthy diet would reduce the number of people who died from COVID. Take a look at Sudan, a country where just about everybody has type-2-diabetes, yet it had very few COVID deaths. And, when you think about it, it actually makes sense. In a country where everybody has type-2-diabetes, who would be those people with little or no symptoms who are spreading COVID? Epidemiology is complicated and often counter-intuitive.

So, you want more testing of vaccines? Seriously? The first version of Moderna vaccination was produced in the late 2019, a few weeks after the virus genome was sequenced. For an entire year, that vaccine was going through various tests, first on animals, then many rounds of tests on humans. Meanwhile, millions of people were dying from COVID. And you want more testing? In my opinion, lawmakers requiring all that testing of vaccines, especially the useless and cruel testing on animals, should be held responsible for the pandemic. More testing does not make us safer, more testing kills by delaying life-saving medications from being available to the general public.