On Monday, Celine Gounder, CBS News’ medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at Kaiser Health News, made the claim that the unprecedented spike in lethal heart attacks during the first two years of the pandemic was due to young people with healthy immune systems not getting vaccinated or wearing masks.
The claim flies in the face of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the agencies among other experts that have acknowledged a link between the COVID-19 vaccines and heart issues.
Gounder spoke to CBS News about a recent national study conducted by doctors at Cedars-Sinai Hospital that showed a spike in heart attacks during the pandemic across all age groups but in the 25- to 44-year-old age group in particular — a demographic previously not regarded to be at high risk of cardiac arrest.
Dr. Yee Hui Yeo, the first author on the study, said, “The dramatic rise in heart attacks during the pandemic has reversed what was a prior decadelong steady improvement in cardiac deaths.”
The researchers recognized that “infections such as the flu can increase risk for heart disease and heart attack” but noted that “the sharp rise in heart attack deaths is like nothing seen before.”
The study showed that there were 143,787 heart attack deaths in 2019, the year prior to the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020, this number increased by 14% to 164,096.
According to Cedars-Sinai, the “excess in acute myocardial infarction-associated mortality has persisted throughout the pandemic, even during the most recent period marked by a surge of the presumed less-virulent Omicron variant.”
However, perhaps the most telling was the rise in heart attack deaths that was most pronounced in the youngest group. By 2021, “the ‘observed’ compared to ‘predicted’ rates of heart attack death had increased by 29.9% for adults ages 25-44, by 19.6% for adults ages 45-64, and by 13.7% for adults age 65 and older.”
Cedars-Sinai attributed the spike in heart attacks to multiple factors, some which long predated the pandemic, but did not mention the vaccines.
Among the possible reasons given were that COVID-19 may have accelerated preexisting coronary artery disease or that chronic stress resulting from job loss and other financial pressures set them off.
Yeo noted, “There are several potential explanations for the rapid rise in cardiac deaths in patients with COVID-19, yet still many unanswered questions.”
On Monday, Gounder spoke to CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil and Lilia Luciano to discuss the study’s findings.
https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/status/1625607440958980096?s=20“So the 25- to 44-year-olds — you saw this 30% increase in the risk of death from heart attack. And that really is quite striking,” said Gounder. “That’s not a group, an age group, in which you normally see heart attacks, much less dying from a heart attack.”
Dokoupil said, “You look at the years prior to the pandemic and the typical rate of heart attack death in that age group, and then you see it increase and you wonder, what’s the new variable? And so the pandemic is that the new variable?”
“That’s right,” answered Gounder, commenting on the researchers’ point that in the years leading up to the pandemic, heart attack deaths were trending down.
When answering why younger people in particular suffered a spike in fatal heart attacks, Gounder said there was no confirmation that many of the deceased had COVID-19 to begin with.
“We don’t know for sure,” she said. “And in fact, these death certificates are probably not even capturing the fact that [the victims] had COVID. They’re really just saying that you died from a heart attack or not.”
“What we do know, however, is that younger people were less likely to protect themselves against COVID than older people, less likely to mask, less likely to take other mitigation measures, and they were also further back in line to get vaccinated. … Those might have been a factor here,” claimed Gounder.
Gounder later took to twitter to double down on the claims, saying that the best way to “reduce your risk of heart attack from COVID” was “getting vaccinated, wearing a mask, especially in indoor public spaces during COVID surges,” and “ventilation & air filtration.”
While Gounder may believe that COVID itself may be a root cause behind the unexpected spike, several recent studies call her recommendations into question.
“Interestingly, 12 trials in the review, ten in the community and two among healthcare workers, found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or COVID-19-like illness transmission,” British epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, co-author of the Cochrane Library’s report on masking trials, noted in the Spectator. “Equally, the review found that masks had no effect on laboratory-confirmed influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes. Five other trials showed no difference between one type of mask over another.”
The Telegraph reported on another study that found young men were “six times more likely to suffer from heart problems after being jabbed than be hospitalised from coronavirus.”
Yet another study, first reported on by The Epoch Times, revealed that several toxic elements were found in COVID-19 vaccines “without exception,” including potassium, cesium, iron and sulfur.
These elements “are visible under the dark-field microscope as distinctive and complex structures of different sizes, can only partially be explained as a result of crystallization or decomposition processes, [and] cannot be explained as contamination from the manufacturing process,” the group of German researchers found.
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