Welcome to Medicine with Dr. Moran. Today I'm going to talk about an autopsy-based study from
Germany. It looked at people who died suddenly and unexpectedly within 20 days after receiving
a Covid-19 vaccination. This has just been published in Clinical Research in Cardiology and
as always there's a link below to the study in the description. What did these people die of? First I
want to give you some background. I've reported on numerous studies looking at Myocarditis and
Pericarditis after vaccination on my channel. We know that the incidence of this seems to be
on the order of about 1 in 5,000 in young males after the second vaccination with Moderna but
it's less common with other vaccines and it's also less common in females and other male age groups.
Many countries have not used the Moderna vaccine in people under the age of 30 and a number of
countries have delayed the second shot further away from the first to reduce the chance of
Myocarditis. Now some have said that the risk of Myocarditis for Covid-19 is actually greater than
the risk of Myocarditis from vaccination but this is not true if you look at a large study from the
UK or a large Nordic study which I've reported on. There has been only a single prospective
study that means a study actually looking forward after vaccination which was done in Thailand.
I read this study back in August of 2022 and I must say it's disappointing that we do not
know more about Myocarditis given the concerns regarding this were brought up just over a year
and a half ago. It's important to let people know the risks of an intervention especially
if it's serious even if the risks are very small or uncommon so that people can balance the risk
against the benefit and make an informed decision. The Thailand study has been peer
reviewed and there's a link below to the study in the description. This flow chart shows what
the investigators did. They enrolled 314 people into their study and they did baseline blood work,
cardiac enzymes, and Echo prior to the vaccination which was the original Pfizer vaccine in Thailand
and then they did it again day 3, day 7, and day 14, after the second Pfizer vaccine dose
and they studied participants in the 13 to 18 year old a range and 67% were male. Nobody died
in the study. Nobody required mechanical ventilation or drugs to keep their blood
pressure up. Now the main findings on this slide are that seven individuals developed
Myocarditis which means inflammation of the heart muscle or Pericarditis which means inflammation
around the lining around the heart. The seven males were out of a total of 202 male subjects.
No females developed Myocarditis or Pericarditis in this prospective study. Now the first three
patients on the slide here were people that actually presented to the hospital and were
admitted with one additional patient going to the ICU. These three cases were symptomatic cases.
Patients 4 through 7 were people who developed subclinical myocarditis with abnormalities in
their cardiac enzymes without another obvious explanation without symptoms. So in total 7 cases
out of 202 which is 3.5% or 3 symptomatic cases out of 202 which is 1.5%. Now this is a lot higher
than the number of symptomatic cases found in other studies that I mentioned at the beginning of
the video. One might think that this is the case because the study's perspective going forward so
the young men and their parents knew exactly what the study was about. Thus there may be people who
simply do not attend the doctor or a hospital with symptoms of Myocarditis and so they're not
actually counted in the incidence of Myocarditis which would obviously be much higher. This is
obviously a very small study in Thailand but it's disappointing that the vaccine manufacturers or
other researchers have not evaluated this problem further to get a better sense of the scope of the
disorder. The vaccine manufacturers are making billions on their vaccine and the onus to me is
clear on them that they need to prove safety when safety concerns are raised. The onus of course is
also on governments to require the companies to do this in a timely fashion which has not occurred in
this case. It would not cost Pfizer or Moderna a lot of money to do a much larger study like the
Thailand study given that they're making billions of dollars annually. Now on to the German autopsy
study. At the University of Heidelberg they found 35 cases of people with sudden death at
home occurring within 20 days following SARS Cov2 vaccination. In 10 of those cases the autopsies
revealed other causes of death. They looked at the remaining 25 bodies that were found unexpectedly
dead at home and they found 5 cases of likely or possible vaccine-related Myocarditis with no
other reason for their death. All of these people died within the first week of vaccination with the
average length of time 2.5 days post-vaccination. Now of course there were no blood tests, ECGs,
Imaging, or clinical findings because none of these people sought medical attention before they
suddenly died. In one patient a witness described a rattling breath shortly before discovering an
absent pulse. In another person they complained about nausea and were found dead soon thereafter.
Resuscitation in that case was not successful. The other three people were simply found dead
at home without any information about terminal symptoms. According to the available information
none of the deceased had previous Covid infection and swabs taken for the Covid virus were negative
at autopsy in these people. Four people died after the first vaccination and the remaining
case was after the second one. There were three females and five males in this autopsy study.
The average age was 58 with a range of 46 to 75 years of age which is certainly older than
what I've been talking about in the above studies. On this slide you can see the five
cases and in these five people it's important to note that they found no other cause of death
the Cardiac Pathologists felt that 4 out of the 5 cases were definitive for Myocarditis according to
our standard Dallas Myocarditis criteria. They felt that 3 out of the 5 were likely related
to the vaccine with 2 out of 5 being possibly related. The Pathologists described their findings
in the study and in all five cases the microscopic findings were the same. They did say that during
the last 20 years of their autopsy service at the University Hospital in Heidelberg that they
did not observe comparable microscopic cardiac muscle inflammation or infiltration like these.
This autopsy information in five patients allows Physicians and of course Pathologists to better
understand situations where we may have a patient in the hospital that we choose to biopsy. This way
findings can be interpreted and correlated with what they found in this study. They
summarize by saying that in these five patients no other cause of death except Myocarditis was
identified and hence Myocarditis has to be considered the likely mechanism of death.
They felt that the Myocardial damage they were seeing in the cases were not sufficient to suggest
that poor heart function was the terminal cause of death and so most likely an abnormal heart rhythm
either a cardiac arrest with no electrical impulse or another life-threatening rhythm had to be
assumed as the mechanism, the immediate mechanism leading to the patient's death ultimately.
Now Myocarditis related acute to cardiac arrest due to life-threatening rhythm disorders is
well-established mechanism in other cases or causes of acute Myocarditis. Their summary is
a very small number of patients just five and it's obviously descriptive or observational. It
gives no idea about the frequency of Myocarditis from vaccination and obviously ultimately it does
not provide a direct causal link from vaccination to myocarditis and I can't emphasize that enough.
They finish by stating that considering that this adverse event which is fatal may affect healthy
individuals such as registry and surveillance programs they may improve early diagnosis close
monitoring and treatment. If these deaths at home were secondary to vaccination we of course may be
missing some severe Myocarditis cases in our studies. Not every death at home will have an
autopsy. Please note that this video is clearly not anti-vaccination. It's reviewing research
into Myocarditis and vaccination has been helpful for people particularly at high risk of a severe
outcome to prevent hospitalization and death but with any intervention it's important that
we as physicians select the right people for the intervention balancing the risks and benefits and
the risks of course need to be known. Certainly risks that are serious even if very uncommon
need to be elucidated and understood. This allows physicians to have good risk benefit
discussion with patients so the patients can make an informed decision. As we go down the road and
people receive more vaccines, more boosters, whether it be annually or what is recommended
for people at high risk we need to understand the benefit in that group as well as the risk. We also
need to know what it is for different patient populations because obviously the risk is going
to be different if somebody's young and healthy versus older as well as whether these people in
question that you're talking to whether they've recently had infection or how many infections
that they have that might deliver some immunity to them each time they get reinfected. These are
the sorts of things that we try to balance when we're making decisions on health care for people.
Thanks for joining me today on Medicine with Dr Moran. Get healthy and stay healthy.