The Suffering Of Covid-19 Vaccine Injury Syndrome Patients Within Our Current Medical System

If after reading the below, you are left with the desire to help the millions suffering after Covid vaccination, I would start with donations to both of the above organizations (or go for a trifecta and donate to the FLCCC which researches and provides guidance on treatment approaches).

The stories of their immense suffering combined with their reports of a systemic lack of therapies being offered brings me back to the days of system docs telling Covid patients to “stay home until your lips turn blue.” The repeat of these behaviors was motivating to say the least. That motivation was further fueled by the rage I felt when being told of the horrific gaslighting inflicted upon them by “system” physicians.

Further, from a recent excellent article in The Intelligencer on Long Covid:

Some of the doctors had become so flooded with people seeking help that they were having difficulty scheduling and treating their regular patients who came to them for everything else: lung cancer, asthma, heart disease, dementia. “My practice is so overwhelmed,” Spatz told Sanders.

In addition, although I was fulfilled by my efforts as an activist in the Medical Freedom movement and helping run the FLCCC, I missed doctoring after having lost my 3^rd ICU job (ending my academic career) as a result of this activism. Although this post is about the plight of the vaccine injured, some of us providers sacrificed as well. Because of mandates, Scott was forced to leave a sweet six-figure New York State job with a pension and six weeks of paid time off annually.

So, we decided to set up a tele-health practice where we now see patients in all 50 states. Later we recruited India Scott, a phenomenal nurse practitioner. She is someone highly skilled not only at general medicine (her general medicine practice with the Leading Edge Clinic is growing daily with patients fleeing the system), but also hormone evaluation and re-balancing, weight management, gut health analysis, neurotransmitter evaluation, and diabetes prevention. She has an incredible bedside (screenside?) manner, attention to detail, and deep empathy for her patients. We later added Dr. Anthony Fazio, a highly experienced and diversely skilled Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) specialist.

Scott and I have now seen well over 900 patients who are chronically ill after receiving the Covid-19 mRNA injections or suffering with Long Haul Covid (a.k.a. PASC – post-acute sequelae of Covid). I would estimate the breakout of our patient population at this point is approximately 70% Post-vaccine syndrome (“Long Vax”) vs. 30% Long Covid syndrome (the ratio was flipped when we first went into practice).

Given the two syndromes are so similar, this validates that the presence of circulating or tissue embedded spike protein is the main pathogenic cause (pathogenic = originating or producing disease), as evidenced in this masterful comprehensive review paper detailing the innumerable pathophysiologic abnormalities triggered by the spike protein which lead to myriad damages to a number of organ systems.

For simplicity, the following description of these “spike-protein induced disease syndromes” will focus on those who became chronically ill after Covid-19 mRNA injections, although Long Covid is nearly identical. I say nearly because there are two main differences that I see as a clinician: in Long Covid, persistent post-Covid pulmonary lung disease occurs in a minority (i.e. the rare-ish condition called “organizing pneumonia”). Note my paper below from 2020 was the first to identify this condition as the primary manifestation of acute Covid pulmonary disease:

Second, in vaccine injury syndrome the patients are on average sicker than Long Covid given their much higher incidence and severity of neuropathic symptoms and dysautonomia.

Their decline in ability to function due to fatigue and post-exertional malaise is so large that most of them meet the definition of disabled given they can no longer work (or play) and in many cases their spouses, parents, and friends now need to care for them. Again, this is in stark contrast to the roles they used to enjoy as breadwinners, parents, care-takers, leaders at work or in their community etc.

On a daily basis, we see first-hand the reality of the government data showing explosive rises in disability claims since the vaccine roll-out (see Ed Dowd’s phinancetechnologies.com Humanity project analyzing the Bureau of Labor statistics data). Note below the almost unfathomable rise of 6 standard deviations from the norm in disability rates coinciding with the jab rollout followed by their mandating on the American labor force:

There are so many powerful quotes in The Intelligencer article that I cannot help but share them, however I must call sad attention to the fact that the only illness they discuss in the article is Long Covid. This, even though, as I said above, in 70% of our patient population, the vaccine was the inciting trigger rather than Covid infection:

Long-COVID patients, generally speaking, have been very miserable for a very long time, and because the illness attacks their brains, their hearts, their lungs, their guts, their joints — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently, and sometimes in a chain reaction — they bounce from specialist to specialist, none of whom has the bandwidth to hear their whole frustrating ordeal together with the expertise to address all of their complaints: the nonspecific pain, the perpetual exhaustion, the bewildering test results, the one-off treatments. “These are people who have not been able to tell their story to anybody but their spouse and their mom — for years sometimes,” Sanders tells me. “And they are, in some ways, every doctor’s worst nightmare.” (ed.: whoa). From the perspective of a time-pressed physician under ever-more-stringent productivity expectations, who has at most 30 minutes to do a new-patient intake and 15 for a follow-up, “someone who comes in with a very long story — it just sinks your day,” Sanders says.

Long COVID has been pushing the limits of hospital systems everywhere, not just at Yale.

…primary-care physicians started to say, “‘I’m not interested in long COVID,’ or ‘I don’t treat long COVID. Let me refer you to a specialist,’” said David Putrino, who runs the new chronic-illness recovery clinic at Mount Sinai. For their part, Putrino added, the specialists were saying, “This is not what my practice is. This is not an emergency anymore.” Patients all over the country reported months-long waiting times for appointments at long-COVID clinics. All the while, scientists and pundits heaped skepticism on the very notion of long COVID, arguing that infection made people stronger, that new variants posed no threats, that the danger of long COVID was overblown — implying that what patients were suffering from was all in their heads.

Forgotten in this debate are the 65 million people worldwide for whom the pandemic remains a torturous everyday reality.

Spatz and her colleagues were proposing an alternative model: a clinic led by an internal-medicine doctor with a full hour to listen to each patient. [Scott and I knew this before starting our practice – we routinely plan for and spend well over an hour with each patient in our initial consultations.]

How Vaccine Injury Syndrome Mirrors Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

ME/CFS is the disease that the post-vaccine injury syndrome most closely resembles. Although the diversity and severity of the symptom burden following spike protein exposure sets it apart from traditional ME/CFS, the two are much more alike than different. For decades now, ME/CFS has been thought to be triggered by:

..various types of infectious illnesses such as infectious mononucleosis, Coxiella burnetii infection, giardiasis, or severe acute respiratory syndrome but often, no attempt is made to diagnose the infectious agent.

Put differently from The Intelligencer article: Among people who survive many common viral infections (Ebola, dengue, polio, influenza, and Epstein-Barr, for instance), a small percentage suffer for years with symptoms that are very similar to those of long COVID: extreme fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, inflammation, dizziness, sleep disruption, mood disorders. The same goes for people who get giardia, a parasite.

From the Mayo Clinic paper cited above, the most tragic part of the experience of an ME/CFS patient is that:

• Despite its high prevalence and disabling nature, medical education programs rarely cover ME/CFS and guidance for practicing clinicians is often outdated and inappropriate

This is even more tragically accurate for those with Covid vaccine injury syndrome (“Long Vax”) as this condition does not even exist in the published literature that I am aware of, nor are any system physicians taught about the immense diversity in pathologic destruction wrought by circulating spike protein, a.k.a. “spikeopathy.”

I have long maintained that the complexity and severity of spikeopathy requires its own specialty, training, and research focus. A recently published manuscript by Dr. Peter Parry et al is, to me, an absolute masterpiece of a review of all that we know currently about the pathophysiology of spikeopathy. Scientifically dense, highly referenced, and well-organized, I consider it on a par with my partner Professor Paul Marik’s landmark and comprehensive, evolving review of the disease published on the FLCCC website (with one exception – Paul and I and a close network of FLCCC supporting clinicians organized a comprehensive set of proposed therapies to address the complex pathophysiology described). Also, Paul’s is written for both physicians and the general public whereas Parry et al’s paper is scientifically complex and does not go into treatments.

[Side note: I am proud to know Peter Parry as a long time correspondent of mine and who I had the pleasure of meeting in person on an Australian lecture tour earlier this year. His earlier career was made famous (not in a pleasant way) for calling attention to the brazen corruptions in Pharma’s manipulation of the science propping up the SSRI industry.]

Anyway, Parry et al’s paper has 253 mostly basic science manuscript citations. Read their conclusion:

But again, vaccine injury syndrome does not yet exist as all the suffering patients are instead labeled as “Long Covid.” This is politics and not science. As Dr. Peter McCullough has often pointed out, there is no dedicated funding or research or centers of excellence focused on those chronically ill after the Covid vaccine. As Parry et al describe, I think that it is almost certain there are important differences between the two syndromes (i.e. severity) such that effective treatments will likely need to vary to some degree because, as this paper recently reported, half of the vaccinated keep producing spike whereas in Long Covid, chronic viral replication, in my opinion (but not others), occurs in only a tiny minority if at all.

• Standard tests typically return normal results, and some clinicians are wholly unaware of or question the legitimacy of ME/CFS. Consequently, up to 91% of affected people are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with other conditions, such as depression.

I cannot over-emphasize how damaging the frequent lack of positive findings on standard tests is to the plight of the vaccine injured. I ask my readers to contemplate for a moment what the situation described above is like for a Covid vaccine-injured patient. Imagine seeking care from a physician, relating all of your suffering from a myriad of symptoms (a suffering which is often immense – and that is coming from yours truly, a critical care specialist) yet they can “find nothing actionably wrong with you” in terms of bloodwork, EKG, chest-x-ray, CT, MRI etc. As a result of the willful or benign ignorance of the syndrome, they then refer you to psychiatry or label you with the insane diagnosis of “functional neurologic disorder,” the definition of which, to me, is essentially that “it is all in your head.”

If interested in punching a wall, please read my initial consultation note here from one of my most severely ill patients saddled with an FND diagnosis by three of the most “reputable” (note the quotes) institutions in the country (Mayo Clinic, Columbia University and Univ. of Pennsylvania). His story was also prominently featured in the NTD/Epoch Times documentary “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told” and he has given me permission to publish my consultation note on my Substack.

Now add to the above situation one of a patient who claims to a system physician that their suffering was caused by.. wait for it.. the Covid vaccine. Then imagine doing this smack dab in the middle of a global psy-ops military counter-measure driven propaganda campaign supporting the vaccine as “safe and effective.”

That campaign was highly successfully directed at system physicians via peer-reviewed literature published in high-impact medical journals concluding over and over that the vaccines were “safe and effective” (even for pregnant women who were never studied). This is a perfect storm for what a doctor would describe later as a “particularly difficult encounter with a patient.”

But the patient experience is far worse and much more damaging given the propagandized doctor subjects them to the most severe forms of “medical gaslighting” I have ever heard. To learn more about the history and extent of the medical gaslighting of patients with pharmaceutical injuries, read this article called A Primer on Medical Gaslighting by my friend and colleague, A Midwestern Doctor.

When I have time, I will compile a more comprehensive list of doctor’s statements related to me by my patients. They are some of the most deplorable, dismissive, and insulting I have ever heard uttered from a physician to a patient. One relatively mild example is when one of my patients told me that at the end of such a “difficult encounter,” she was signing out of the clinic when the doc came out to the waiting room and whispered to her, “You don’t need to schedule a follow-up.” Honest (and accurate) at the very least. The most terrifyingly sad are the countless anecdotes of system doctors, who, at the end of the visit, encouraged my patients… to get a booster. No wonder Americans are fleeing the system in droves.

To obtain a diagnosis, patients frequently have had to see multiple clinicians over a number of years. Even after diagnosis, patients struggle to obtain appropriate care and have often been prescribed treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET), that could worsen their condition.

• Each and every one of our patients, prior to coming to our Leading Edge Clinic, has endured a long journey through the medical system, seeing multiple specialists and even super-specialists, none of whom have a clue what to do. Due to the severity and complexity of their condition, at best most system docs will proudly refer the patient to some of the most respected institutions in the country, a respect least deserved in all phases of Covid illness, but even less deserved (if possible) in the evaluation and treatment of vaccine injury. Again, my patient whose consultation note I referenced above visited Mayo (FND), Columbia (FND) , and Upenn (FND). Interestingly, he was then referred to the NIH for evaluation of a study into treatments for FND where, after a 6 hour evaluation, they concluded he did not in fact have FND. Did they offer him an alternative diagnosis? No.
• One recent and somewhat encouragingly honest quote by a doctor was told to me by a patient who visited a neurologist at Scripps in California. After she told the doctor that her incessant and refractory facial spasms were caused by the vaccine, the doc replied “Our whole practice is full of vaccine injuries but we are not allowed to talk about it.”

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A COVID VACCINE INJURY (I.E. COMPLICATION) AND A COVID VACCINE INJURY SYNDROME?

Wait, why stop there? The list also includes dementia and other progressive, deteriorating neurologic diseases, rare and typical cancers, turbo cancers, auto-immune conditions, immunodeficiencies etc.

Currently there are over 3,500 peer-reviewed and published reports of a wicked variety of diseases befalling young and old. The vast majority get published due to either the unprecedented young age of the patient who develops a disease that rarely strikes the young or based on the rarity of the disease or the tight temporal association of the disease with the vaccine or, most often, its atypical features of severity, rapidity, or sudden onset.

Here is Paul’s ever-expanding list of published post-Covid complications from Page 7 of the FLCCC’s “An Approach to Managing Post-Vaccine Syndrome”

News media are also teeming with daily reports of young and old, famous, semi-famous, and not-so-famous young people suffering cardiac arrests or sudden cancer diagnoses leading to death in shockingly short time periods (recall that dying from cancer typically takes a long time, well, at least it used to).

Hell, we have almost a dozen U.S congress members and politicians with clearly devastating vaccine injuries. I list and describe them in a dedicated separate post here. It goes without saying at this point that in every such newspaper report the vaccine is NEVER mentioned as a possible cause. The families stay silent, or, even if they tried to call out the jab as the proximate cause, this is never included in the published article.

My point is that that patients with single organ complications or clear diagnoses rarely seek out our Leading Edge clinic for care because those conditions have long-established diagnostic criteria and treatment approaches that the system docs are able to apply. At least that is my guess/hope although I wouldn’t know because I no longer work in “the system.”

What our practice specializes in are patients with Covid vaccine injury syndrome, which I define as “a constellation of symptoms that develop in temporal association to the vaccine.” The constellation of symptoms is strikingly similar to ME/CFS however there are a number of novel and unique aspects that I will describe in the next post in this series.