Science News: The largest global vaccine safety study to date found links between Covid vaccines and small increases in neurological, blood, and heart-related conditions. Guillain-Barre syndrome, myocarditis, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis were among the conditions identified. Learn more about...
Expected rates were obtained by participating sites using pre-COVID-19 vaccination healthcare data stratified by age and sex (Faksova et al.).
The original paper seems to be far too ineffective a methodology.
That is not an effective control; at least take the same health data analysis from the unvaccinated population. Given that even folks with the vaccine can catch less severe cases, you really need to root out COVID-19 as the cause of those complications.
They're talking about myocarditis, not pericarditis. I don't know how bad the latter is, but I've heard that the former is a health emergency. It can apparently cause arrhythmia, tachycardia or even cardiac arrest in worst cases.
Having said that, the news headline does sound a bit alarmist. Nobody ever claimed that vaccines are absolutely safe. It's always a tradeoff between the risks associated with the vaccines vs risks associated with the diseases it's trying to prevent. Side effects like myocarditis are handled on a case by case basis.
I took the vaccines and never contracted covid-19. I didn't suffer any side effects either (apart from the expected fever) - likely the same for the huge majority of vaccine takers. Had I known about these risks then, I would have still opted for the vaccine. The effects of long-covid are that horrifying. Unfortunately, articles like these are giving ammunition to antivaxxers.
It's also worth noting that there's a higher chance of getting myocarditis from covid than from its vaccine. In fact, we lost a friend to myocarditis and septicemia caused by covid. His blood had shown signs of a bacteria that's normally found in the lungs. We later learned that this was due to the severe lung tissue damage caused by covid.