06/18/2026
There's a lot of posts flying around social media and a number of news outlets reporting on a relatively recent Jama publication about a particular intervention and a decreased risk for cardiovascular events. I will post the link for the study below, but here's the problems I have with what's being pushed online. ~Dr. S
The absolute benefit is very tiny, but the headline emphasizes relative risk reductions. The paper highlights a 37.7% reduction in COVID-associated cardiovascular events. And this sounds huge. But the actual absolute risk difference was about 2 fewer events per 10,000 people over 8 months. That means:
Vaccinated group: about 3.4 events per 10,000
Unvaccinated group: about 5.4 events per 10,000
Those are very small numbers. Whenever you see a large relative risk reduction paired with a tiny absolute risk reduction, the practical significance becomes much less dramatic than the headline suggests.
Here's a big problem with this headline... The strongest effect only appeared in the oldest and sickest populations. The study found no statistically significant benefit for people under 65! Read that again... There is no benefit for anyone under 65 years of age! Also, no statistically significant benefit for ages 65 to 75. The only significant finding was concentrated in those over 75 years old and those with multiple comorbidities. This is huge and actually an important finding.
A fair and more balanced headline might be: "Possible modest cardiovascular benefit seen primarily in elderly high-risk veterans." Instead, the broader messaging (what's being thrown around here on social media) implies a population-wide cardiovascular benefit. That's not what this shows.
This is probably my biggest criticism. The authors found a modest association with lower all-cause cardiovascular events in this particular population and then proposed that this may reflect a "hidden burden of undetected SARS-CoV-2 infection." What? Huh? They don't actually know that at all. That's what is called a hypothesis. They are essentially saying: "We observed fewer cardiovascular events (in this older and sick population), therefore many of those events were probably caused by unrecognized COVID infections that vaccination prevented." That is not a measured variable. That is an inference layered on top of an association layered on top of an observational dataset. Adorable. Not science.
And a final critique, they never seriously explore alternative explanations to what they observed. If the vaccinated group experiences: slightly lower mortality, slightly fewer hospitalizations, slightly fewer cardiovascular events... there are multiple possible explanations:
healthier behaviors
better medication adherence
greater healthcare engagement
socioeconomic differences
residual confounding
vaccine effect
The discussion section overwhelmingly favors the vaccine explanation while giving relatively little weight to competing explanations. That's where science drifts into narrative and marketing tactics. A strong scientific paper spends as much time challenging its own conclusions as it does supporting them. After everything we've been through... we deserve better and people need to be better informed.
This cohort study evaluates the effectiveness of the 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine against COVID-19–associated major adverse cardiovascular events.
