Myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle – is a “serious condition” and a frequent cause of sudden death in young, apparently healthy people, with a 50–60% mortality rate “after five years.” The statement by Prof. Jan Erik Nordrehaug is somewhat outdated, but later research by Mi-Jeong Kim and colleagues shows the same trend with a mortality rate of approximately 40% after 10 years (see the article’s Figure 3 below).
As early as April 2021, the European Medicines Agency suspected that the COVID-19 vaccine could cause myocarditis, but Pfizer/BioNTech still decided to approve it for children as young as 12 years old. This is despite the fact that the vaccine had not even been tested for transmission and that practically no children die from COVID-19 infection. Later research has strengthened the Agency’s suspicions of an increased incidence of myocarditis among COVID-19 vaccine recipients, especially young men.
Dramatic numbers from Norway
A recently published Norwegian study by Bendik Skinningsrud Hagen and colleagues also shows that COVID-19 vaccination is particularly associated with myocarditis in young men (see figure 2 below in the article, which shows the incidence in men and women). What is most surprising, however, is that the vaccine causes 74% of cases (the article’s figure 1 shows 177 cases compared to 108 others, of which 42 are excluded because myocarditis occurred before vaccination and 4 are due to misdiagnosis). The authors claim that most were “mild” – let’s hope so – but Nordrehaug’s statement that the mortality rate is 50-60% “after five years”, and the figure from Mi-Jeong Kim and colleagues showing low mortality in the first years that then increases, tells us that we do not yet have the full picture.