HOW many of us had heard of myocarditis before the pandemic? Not me. I was familiar only with terms such as heart attack, cardiac arrest and coronary heart disease. Perhaps I was not so ignorant: on checking, the term does not even feature in a typical list of cardiovascular disorders.

The reason why the condition is on so many lips now was starkly underlined by Dr Peter McCullough in an interview with the doughty Dr John Campbell. Basically it is no longer a rare disease:

‘Prior to the pandemic myocarditis occurred at a rate of somewhere around four cases per million per year. In the United States that means about 1,200 cases in the entire country in a year. Prior to the pandemic I had only seen two in my entire practice, one sadly passed away. So we rarely encountered it. Let me tell you something else. Prior to the pandemic we had guidelines written in cardiology that exercise or the surge of adrenaline could be the trigger for cardiac arrest. We immediately took people with myocarditis out of sports or out of athletic competitions. That was in all the guidance. So we know that myocarditis, if it existed, could be fatal largely due to two things – one during exercise and the other in the waking hours, 3am to 6am, in sleep, because again there is a surge of adrenaline during the normal waking process.’