The three icebergs of vaccine injury

Heart, blood and neurological / autoimmune conditions

It is a general rule of thumb that the first indications of a drug safety problem will underestimate the size of the problem. This is due to poor measuring of the extent of illness. The opposite is true for infectious disease epidemics. The early indicators will always overestimate the risk of death per infection because of underestimating how many were infected in the first place. 

Within the first year the tips of three icebergs had been recognised and acknowledged by authorities. These tips were the risk of myocarditis, the risk of unusual brain clots and the risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome (where the immune system attacks the nervous system leading to life threatening or disabling weakness or paralysis). However, these are only the tips of icebergs the full extent of which are yet to be measured.

It is easy to notice a higher rate of a rare condition. However, when there is a rise in a condition that is already common, like strokes or heart attacks, the extra diagnoses can be lost in the noise. It takes more work to identify the problem e.g. by looking only at younger age groups where the underlying risk is much lower. Such work has barely begun. 

Heart 

There were claims that the myocarditis issue was limited to mRNA vaccines and to young men but neither of these claims have been sustainable over time. In fact, attempts to measure the extent of heart damage showed 17-29% had cardiac symptoms and around 3% had evidence of dying heart cells after a dose. These are indicators that the numbers who might have had heart muscle damage from myocarditis might be far higher than the numbers who presented to hospital with clear symptoms and achieved a diagnosis of myocarditis. It has also been hypothesised that the underlying pathology may not be inflammation but abnormal protein deposition causing a condition called amyloidosis.

Heart cells which have died are replaced with scar tissue. The heart’s electrical circuitry is a delicate system and even a tiny amount of scarring will increase the risk of a potentially fatal cardiac rhythm disorder. 

Added to this issue there is the evidence of the massive rise in cardiac arrests that followed the vaccine rollout. A proportion of these could have been due to such scarring and electrical conduction problems. However, there remains a question about whether there is also inflammation caused by vaccination which increases the risk of cardiac vessel narrowing that leads to the most common cause of a heart attack, a myocardial infarction. Vaccinated people had a rise in cardiovascular risk factors that would predict a significantly increased risk of heart disease (from 11% to 25% risk of a heart attack in 5 years). Dr Aseem Malhotra has reported on a separate team of cardiology researchers who had found the covid vaccine had caused inflammation around the coronary arteries but did not want to publish in case they lost funding from the pharmaceutical industry. An Israeli paper showed a 25% increase in acute coronary syndrome and cardiac arrest calls in 16-39 year olds in Israel associated with the first and second doses of vaccine but not with covid infection.

There has been a notable rise in deaths since vaccine rollout (with an interlude for a quiet winter for respiratory viral deaths in 2021/2022). These deaths have predominantly been attributed to cardiac causes, particularly ischaemic heart disease and heart failure. One post mortem demonstrated death due to vaccine injury in the vessels of the heart a full 4 months after the last dose. 

Blood

The first admission of any vaccine injury was the occurrence of potentially fatal rare brain clots. These were caused by vaccine induced antibodies against ‘platelet factor 4’ which results in the activation of clotting. The brain clots were attributed to AstraZeneca which is based on DNA rather than synthetic mRNA. 

Many clinicians raised concerns about what they were seeing in their practice. In particular, post operative clotting disorders, odd clotting conditions like portal vein thrombosis and clotting of the artery of the gut, both of which are normally incredibly rare, seemed to become more common after vaccine rollout, including in those given mRNA products. Because these are so rare it should be possible to measure any increase but such studies have not yet been published.

Regulators have since acknowledged a risk of abnormal menstruation. An FDA paper showed an increased risk of pulmonary embolism but this finding was denied because of how the data was analysed. Other conditions show a markedly low incidence immediately after vaccination because “the healthy vaccinee effect” means that people self-select to be vaccinated such that new diagnoses are rare afterwards. That means that the baseline for comparison should be the lower rate seen for other conditions after vaccination, not the overall higher rates seen in the whole population. However, the regulators invariably choose a higher threshold and then claim there is no signal present.

Neurological/autoimmune

The third iceberg is the least well defined. Although the government recognised a problem in 2021, they continued to advise that people who had had post vaccination Guillain Barre syndrome should receive further doses. 

Many patients complained of new conditions. These included tremors, POTS, postural tachycardia syndrome (a disabling condition where standing or sitting-up leads to a racing heart beat as blood flow to the heart and brain fails to be maintained) and various autoimmune conditions.

The medical establishment dismissed all these issues as coincidental. People do develop new onset symptoms and conditions randomly and the assumption was that the attribution of these problems to the vaccine was just a case of unfortunate timing and ignorant attribution on the part of those suffering.

However, an important study spanning six neurological departments in the USA demonstrated that these patients have got an underlying mechanisms for their neurological symptoms. The study only described the presentation of 23 patients, 92% female, all of whom developed symptoms within days of vaccination (half within minutes or hours of their dose). Those with prior conditions or risk factors for neurological problems or other causes for small nerve damage were excluded. None had had symptomatic covid. They all had abnormal sensations (esp burning) in face or limbs and 60% had blood pressure drops on standing, heat intolerance and palpitations. Half of those tested had damage to the autonomic nervous system preventing normal sweating or leading to POTs syndrome. 

These doctors thoroughly investigated these patients and found skin biopsies demonstrated nerve abnormalities. When there has been an immune reaction, where antibodies have bound a target leading to the triggering of immune cascades, a marker is left behind at the site called “C4d”. This marker was identified at a higher rate in the blood vessel walls of the patients than controls. Some of those with normal skin biopsies had demonstrable abnormalities of the nerves elsewhere e.g. those that control blood pressure and heart rates. Two out of the five tested showed protein within the cerebrospinal fluid in keeping with raised antibody levels and indicating inflammation.

These doctors successfully treated their patients with corticosteroids or immunoglobulins which indicates an underlying autoimmune pathology. (An immune modulation model of disease has also been described for other causes of myocarditis, Guillain Barre Syndrome and the clotting disorder Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura).

What was the underlying mechanism? The authors postulate the cause of the injuries seen could be due to:

a) ACE2 bindning

b) a general reaction as seen after other infections or vaccinations

c) damage to the small vessels supplying blood to the nerves

In mice, small fibre neurons that have ACE2 receptors which spike proteins bind to. The authors postulate that long covid and vaccine injury have overlaps because of this binding. Foreign proteins stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies that fit their shape - like a plaster cast. Anti-spike antibodies are like a plaster cast of spike. These new antibodies can look "foreign" themselves and other antibodies can then form to them - a plaster cast of the plaster cast i.e. you can get spike shaped antibodies that are anti-anti-spike. This has happened with covid infection where people when sick or recovering from covid have antibodies that, like spike protein, can bind to the ACE2 receptors. Injury could be caused directly by spike or these antibodies directly binding ACE2.

There may yet be further studies that attempt to measure the extent of the injuries but they will be faced with a problem. Patients with symptoms that don’t neatly fit into categories that doctors commonly see, like new onset tremor, sensory changes or palpitations are often categorised as having psychosomatic problems or anxiety. For those with palpitations there may even be some truth in that as anxiety is a natural consequence of experiencing a racing heart beat. This misclassification of vaccine injury means that those trying to quantify the extent of these icebergs may never be able to see into the depths to get a clear measure.

The known adverse effects of these novel covid “vaccines”, like myocarditis, brain clots, and Guillain-Barre syndrome, as well as the rise in common conditions post-vaccination, mandate serious attention. We must improve monitoring and understanding of these risks, without discounting patient experiences as mere coincidences.