CDC plans "emergency meeting" on rare heart inflammation following COVID-19 vaccines

CBS news ^

[MNDude]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that it will convene an "emergency meeting" of its advisers on June 18th to discuss rare but higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of the mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.

[DoodleBob]

1.79% is the all-in CFR. A point-in-time CFR isn't terribly useful in the broad context because of the seasonality, in addition to the accumulated knowledge of how to fight this virus. The early (and summer 2020) stage data also suffer from the uneven attack across the states of the virus - first it hit the northeast and upper Midwest chiefly, then over the summer it hit CA, AZ, FL, and TX.

Finally, the data I showed was at the age-bracket level where the time-series impact wasn't the focus, and so far only one state (MA) produces this data with any level of frequency. Broadly, the national CFR by age pattern is seen across time as well (i.e. The virus is more deadly as you get older, though this could also reflect poorer health/more comorbidities with age).

There may also be a temporal point-in-time impact of vaccinations in the 2021 data, though given that the EUA means most of the planet is part of the 2-3 year testing phase of a normal vaccine, we need more time to declare victory. A really good study that evaluates the CFR (from the virus and vaccinations) over time at the county level while taking vaccination rates into account would be great.

[palmer]

I agree about the CFR by age. The biggest factor in high rates of death early on was that people didn't realize that age was such a serious risk or didn't implement age-protection policies.

I agree that we need more granular data to get a handle on effectiveness. It will be interesting to see the age data for effectiveness. As of June 1, 77% of the hospitalized breakthrough cases were 65 or older: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html They need to give us all the data.