Joe Rogan on myocarditis: what the evidence says · JRE #1718
SUBJECT: MYOCARDITIS
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in the hospital with COVID. then ending up in the hospital with COVID.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Rogan's figure traces to a 2021 medRxiv preprint by Høeg, Krug, Stevenson, and Mandrola ("SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17"), which was never peer-reviewed and compared the rate of myocarditis diagnoses following vaccination to the rate of hospitalization for COVID-19 for any cause in the same age group. Public health researchers, including those behind CDC/ACIP risk-benefit analyses, criticized this comparison as an apples-to-oranges framing because it pits a vaccine harm against overall COVID hospitalization risk rather than against the risk of myocarditis or other cardiac injury caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection itself, which multiple studies (including a 23-million-person Nordic cohort study) and CDC data found to be several times higher than vaccine-associated myocarditis risk. Peer-reviewed data, including the Nordic cohort study, consistently show that myocarditis risk after SARS-CoV-2 infection exceeds myocarditis risk after vaccination, particularly in young males, and that the large majority of vaccine-associated myocarditis cases are mild and self-resolving. The specific "4 to 6 times more likely" statistic cited on air did not come from a peer-reviewed, published study and reflects a comparison method considered misleading by public health researchers because it does not compare like-for-like cardiac outcomes.