On Wednesday, the Cleveland Clinic released frightening news:
“History of COVID-19 Doubles Long-term Risk of Heart Attack, Stroke and Death”
The renowned medical center was publicizing new research led by Dr. Stanley Hazen, one of its top physicians. He and other scientists examined the medical records of people infected with Covid in 2020 and found they had twice the risk of serious cardiovascular problems as uninfected people through 2024.
The National Institutes of Health, which funded the work, also put out a release warning Covid-19 “increased risk of heart attack [and] stroke up to three years later.” CNN and other media outlets also reported on the research with similar language.
In the Cleveland Clinic press release, Dr. Hazen did not sugarcoat the dangers. “The findings reported are not a small effect in a small subgroup,” he said. “[They] point to a finding of global healthcare importance that promises to translate into a rise in cardiovascular disease globally.”
Except they don’t. Hazen’s promise isn’t true.
The study’s real findings are very different than the frightening headlines.
For the vast majority of people who have had Covid, the research offered reassuring results. It showed essentially no increase in risk in heart attacks, strokes, or deaths for them.
Yet Hazen and his co-authors are not outright lying about what they found in their paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology.
To run the study, they looked for Covid infections among British adults in 2020 a large database called UK Biobank. They came up with about 10,000 adults who had had Covid, and compared them to a group of about 220,000 adults who had not.
They found that over the next three years1, the 10,000 infected people were more likely than the uninfected control group to have heart attacks, strokes or die — an endpoint called MACE, or major adverse cardiovascular events.
As the paper reported, “the risk of MACE was elevated in COVID-19 cases at all levels of severity (HR, 2.09).” [emphasis added, keep that phrase in mind]
But. Hazen and the study’s other authors published and discussed the results in a way that hide a crucial fact.
Hellbound and Down 