Tag: vaccine injury

When Vaccine Injury Research Becomes Political, Patients Disappear

For years, people experiencing serious health problems due to Covid vaccination have asked for something fundamental: rigorous scientific investigation into what happened to them, why it happened, and what might help.

Many have spent years seeking answers through a fragmented healthcare system, encountering clinicians unfamiliar with their symptoms, struggling to access appropriate evaluation, and trying to find researchers willing to investigate their conditions.

Now, the National Institutes of Health has announced a dedicated research effort intended to investigate health problems following vaccination and infection. The October 5 opening of the new Vaccinology and Immunology Center represents a meaningful development in a process that patients have long urged federal institutions to undertake.

Yet once again, much of the public conversation risks becoming about politics rather than the people who need this research.

On October 19, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIAID Acting Director John H. Powers III publicly outlined the center’s objectives. These include examining symptoms and potential biological mechanisms, identifying risk factors, exploring treatment options, and using research findings to inform vaccine safety. NIH anticipates enrolling several hundred participants initially and expects to launch the study before the end of 2026, once the protocol is finalized, IRB approved, etc.

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FDA, NYT Downplayed Evidence Showing Covid Shots May Have Killed Kids

Last fall, FDA safety officers began compiling a list of children possibly killed by Covid vaccines. Digging through thousands of reports of adverse effects and autopsy records of those who had died after receiving the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer, the team eventually determined that several adolescents had apparently died from the Covid vaccines.

On Dec. 5, the team’s leader, Dr. Meghna Alimchandani, sent an email recommending changing the labels on all mRNA Covid-19 vaccines to notify patients of the risk for cardiac death (fatal myocarditis), adding that her safety team planned to present those results at an upcoming FDA meeting. Such warnings, even regarding rare outcomes, are standard procedure — as is well-known by everyone who has watched drug TV ads that run through long lists of known harms.

Ten months later, the FDA has still taken no action to warn parents.

A RealClearInvestigations inquiry found that a strange-bedfellows convergence of political interests appears to have blocked the dissemination of this scientific information. President Trump, whose Operation Warp Speed helped fast-track development of the vaccines in 2020, believes his efforts saved millions of lives, and several current and former health officials told RCI they are loath to complicate that narrative for him. RCI also found evidence that the Biden administration, a strong supporter of vaccine mandates, showed little interest in examining or publicizing mortality data that might undermine its policies. For its part, the pharmaceutical industry was intent on protecting its profits, and influential media outlets, especially the New York Times, have downplayed evidence of Covid vaccine deaths and attack those who’ve tried to bring them to light.

“In the end that’s the big story,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, who has sustained a years-long investigation into Covid vaccine safety, releasing hundreds of pages of internal FDA records that call into question the agency’s forthrightness and that the legacy media have largely ignored or dismissed. “Advertising allowed Big Pharma to not only capture our medical colleges, medical journals, and Congress, but now the media,” Johnson added. “They’ve run the table,” he said. “That’s why this isn’t covered.”

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Pharma PR Executive Leaked Insider Criticism of NIH Vaccine Injury Center to New York Times — Paper Neglected to Mention His Industry Ties

A pharmaceutical industry public relations (PR) executive who serves on an influential National Institutes of Health (NIH) board and is an academic colleague of Dr. Anthony Fauci leaked criticism of the agency’s new vaccine injury clinic to The New York Times — which reported the criticism without disclosing the PR executive’s industry ties, according to The Disinformation Chronicle.

Jack Leslie, a senior adviser and former chairman of Weber Shandwick, the world’s second-largest public relations firm, chairs the NIH Clinical Center Research Hospital Board. Weber Shandwick represents several major pharmaceutical companies.

The hospital board oversees the NIH Clinical Center in Maryland, which will house the agency’s new Vaccinology and Immunology Center (VIC). The center will focus on researching and treating vaccine injuries. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced its launch earlier this month.

Last week, the Times reported that the NIH hospital board unanimously approved a statement criticizing the new center and Kennedy, accusing him of undermining public trust in the hospital’s work.

According to The Disinformation Chronicle, Leslie leaked the statement to Times health policy correspondent, Sheryl Gay Stolberg. The newspaper published her story within hours but did not disclose Leslie’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Paul D. Thacker, investigative reporter and author of The Disinformation Chronicle, told The Defender that he believes the Times published the story to discredit Kennedy and people who say vaccines have injured them.

“Everyone knows the pharma industry hates RFK Jr. So, it’s beyond perplexing that a New York Times reporter saw ‘news’ when PR man Jack Leslie said something denigrating about him, and spit on people harmed by their products. That’s what Big Pharma pays Weber Shandwick to do,” Thacker said.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, defended the new center in a statement to The Defender.

The VIC “reflects the Trump Administration’s commitment to restoring gold-standard science, transparency, and accountability to our public health institutions,” the spokesperson said.

“This work will help ensure that people who experience health problems following vaccination are taken seriously and studied with the same scientific rigor applied to other medical conditions,” the spokesperson added.

Pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, who attended the center’s launch event earlier this month, called the VIC “long overdue.” She accused Leslie of using his “PR skills” and “background doing public relations for multiple vaccine manufacturers” to undermine an initiative intended to study and help people who have been injured by vaccines.

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Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty for Mom Accused of Murdering Twins Who Died 8 Days After Vaccines

Idaho prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Andrea Shaw, a young mother charged with murdering her twin toddlers, dramatically raising the stakes in a criminal case that has drawn national attention.

In a notice filed late last week in Idaho’s Third Judicial District Court, Payette County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ryon Sirucek identified four statutory aggravating factors that prosecutors intend to use to justify capital punishment if Shaw is convicted of first-degree murder.

Under a law that took effect in July 2026, firing squads are Idaho’s primary method of execution. The legislation followed a botched 2024 attempt to execute a 73-year-old man by lethal injection.

Prosecutors must prove at least one statutory aggravating circumstance before Shaw can be considered eligible for the death penalty. If Shaw is convicted, a jury would determine whether those circumstances exist.

According to the filing, prosecutors identified four aggravating circumstances: that Shaw allegedly committed two murders at the same time; that the murders were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity”; that she exhibited “utter disregard for human life”; and that her conduct demonstrates a propensity to commit murder that would make her a continuing threat to society.

Shaw was indicted by a grand jury and arrested on June 30 for allegedly deliberately suffocating her twins, who died on May 1, 2025. Prosecutors allege Shaw killed the children while they were sharing a bed. Her trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 11, 2027.

Shaw, who pleaded not guilty, has consistently denied the allegations. She suggested that her twins’ deaths may have been caused by the vaccines they received at a routine doctor’s appointment just over a week before they died.

According to court documents filed by her defense, Shaw took the twins to the emergency room on April 24, 2025, the day after they received routine vaccinations, because they were lethargic and their lips had turned blue.

The treating emergency room physician diagnosed both children with a “post-immunization reaction,” the filing states.

The children remained ill in the days leading up to their deaths, and Shaw repeatedly sought medical advice.

Neither the police nor the prosecution have publicly outlined the evidence they believe supports their claim that Shaw deliberately killed her toddlers. The grand jury indictment is sealed and not publicly available, and the coroner reports have not been released.

Shaw’s bail was initially set at $2 million. A district judge in Payette County, Idaho, later revoked the bail, which is discretionary in capital cases.

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Retraction of SIDS Paper Based on VAERS Analysis Five Years after Publication

Few individuals can relate as personally as I do to the experience of having peer-reviewed research retracted after it revealed potential safety signals in the VAERS database.

Neil Miller recently had his peer-reviewed published work “removed” from the journal Toxicology Reports. It has been published for 5 years: since June 2021.

Five years! What’s that now? The smell of a Pubpeer rat? Could be.

The title of the paper is Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature, and you can find the abstract on PubMed.

The reason for the “removal” was that there were claimed “serious methodological flaws” according to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. What were these methodological flaws, you ask? Well according to the excuse written on the journal’s site where the paper was once readable, these “flaws” revolved around the inability to “infer correlation” – NOT CAUSATION – between vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

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Nurse Deemed ‘Not Disabled Enough’ For Payout After COVID Jab Paralysis

An NHS nurse in the UK has been denied compensation despite being permanently damaged by a COVID vaccine during a trial.

Marie-Claire Hoyle, who volunteered for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial in 2020 developed transverse myelitis two weeks after her second dose, temporarily shutting down the global trial.

The qualified advanced nurse practitioner and NHS England’s network manager for high-consequence infectious diseases, lost the use of her hands, became numb from collarbone to thigh, and still carries permanent spinal cord damage visible on MRI. The Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme acknowledged the vaccine caused her condition yet refused the £120,000 one-off payment because her disability improved below the rigid 60% lifelong threshold.

Hoyle that’s related how she was on shift when pain hit her neck and spine, spreading within an hour into her shoulders and hands. “I lost the ability to use my hands, I couldn’t hold a pen, I couldn’t hold a toothbrush. I was completely numb from my collarbone down to my thigh level because the signals from my spine and brain had been damaged.”

An MRI confirmed transverse myelitis. The trial paused worldwide while her case was assessed; she survived and recovered enough for it to resume. Permanent damage remains. “I’ve had an MRI since and there is still damage in my spinal cord, which will never heal. I have really poor grip in my fingertips, so I constantly drop things. I still have nerve pain down the left side of my arm and numbness across my central chest and that will never resolve,” she further stated.

She received a high five-figure out-of-court settlement from Oxford University. The VDPS, however, ruled she no longer qualified. “They acknowledged that the vaccine caused my transverse myelitis, based on the evidence I supplied with all my medical records, and at the time I was seriously harmed on a value of up to 60%. However, they said: ‘You aren’t now, so you don’t need the payment.'”

Hoyle, a mother of three who later had her youngest vaccinated and says she continues to support vaccines in principle, wants a scalable system matching actual ongoing harm rather than an all-or-nothing cutoff.

AstraZeneca later withdrew its Vaxzevria vaccine worldwide in 2024, officially citing commercial reasons and the shift to updated formulations. The company had already admitted in court documents that the shot can cause thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome. Kate Scott, whose husband was left with permanent brain injury, said the decision looked less commercial and more like recognition that the product no longer sat “within the acceptable safety parameters,” given 445 confirmed VITT cases and 81 deaths in the UK alone. The company maintained the vaccine had saved over 6.5 million lives in its first year.

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Former Conservative MP breaks silence on her own vaccine injury: ‘It’s just so cruel’

It has been five years since Canadians were told to trust the experts and that the science was settled. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, still live with the aftermath of that sloganeering — including a former Member of Parliament who is now using what’s left of her platform to say the quiet part out loud.

Former Conservative MP Nelly Shin represented Port Moody–Coquitlam in British Columbia through the peak of the pandemic. She took the shots so she could keep showing up for her constituents in Ottawa, then later stepped away from public life because of debilitating symptoms she describes as long COVID.

Shin attended the Allison Inquiry hearings on Parliament Hill from September 8–11, where Canadians reporting vaccine-related injuries testified about lost careers, crushed finances and doctors who would not put the words “vaccine injury” in a chart.

After listening, she went home and wrote a Substack piece titled A Call for Canada to Support the Vaccine Injured and Move Together Toward Closure from a Pandemic We All Want to Forget. In it, she argues the same government that enforced lockdowns and mandates “in the name of saving lives” has turned a blind eye to the people still suffering as a result of their unprecedented measures.

“No injury, no sickness or illness is a controversial issue, but circumstances right now have made it a controversial issue and people don’t want to touch it,” Shin told me. “What we’re dealing with is people who are sick, who need treatment, but there’s so little out there that the government and the health officials in Canada are willing to discuss.”

Shin was candid about her own case — four trips to the ER after a severe bout of pneumonia, breathing problems, brain fog and exhaustion triggered by any level of exertion. “Nothing shows up [on the labs],” she said. “So that’s the frustrating part.”

She was an MP when the shots rolled out under emergency authorization, and she had doubts about taking the novel injection. “I wasn’t sure how much time and robust research had gone in in terms of the after effects, the long-term effects,” she said. Her decision came in what she calls a “panic of survival,” with death counts broadcast daily which kept the public fearful and submissive. “To keep saying that this is a perfect, infallible vaccine and keep promoting it to the degree that the government did, I think it was a huge risk.”

That risk is one Ottawa still refuses to revisit. The federal Vaccine Injury Support Program — now rebranded — has become a case study in lost files, high rejection rates and administrative costs that dwarf the help actually delivered. Shin doesn’t see a one-off glitch, but a pattern: “There’s just a lack of will or interest. Nobody wants to talk about COVID now.”

Her first demand is simple acknowledgement, so the professional chill on doctors can lift and physicians can openly discuss treatments — including the alternative protocols that get mocked. “You can’t just tell someone to go to the corner and figure it out on their own and just wilt,” she said. “What are they left with? It’s just so cruel.”

Asked what single commitment she’d put to sitting MPs and Health Canada, Shin didn’t hesitate: “Be careful not to over control or over manage a situation… You can’t so confidently, with such grandiosity, force people to take something that hasn’t been properly tested.”

Canadians who are still sick don’t need another communications exercise. They need the chill lifted, the files found, and doctors free to treat the patient in front of them instead of protecting the narrative.

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They Got the COVID Vaccine. When They Were Injured, Doctors, Military and Health Agencies Blew Them Off

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a recognized expert in cardiac health, is known for his public advocacy around medical and pharmaceutical ethics. He began questioning the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines after his father died of a vaccine-induced heart attack in 2022, and later went public with his concerns.

But what most people don’t know is that before his father died, Malhotra himself was injured after receiving two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 and 2021.

“Within a few weeks of being vaccinated, I suffered inexplicable, significant clinical depression that was diagnosed by a psychiatrist and that lasted several months,” Malhotra told The Defender. “I needed psychotherapy to help me get better — and was 80% there when my father suffered a sudden cardiac arrest.”

Malhotra isn’t alone. Studies and V-safe data link COVID-19 vaccines to a host of mental health issues.

In some cases, victims and their family members attributed mental health issues directly to COVID-19 vaccines.

In others, people report that physical vaccine injuries led to mental health issues — in chronic pain with no access to treatment, they report struggling with daily life, professional obligations and strained relationships with loved ones.

Some people — including the family of a person who committed suicide — told The Defender their mental health suffered when federal health agencies refused to acknowledge the injuries they reported to V-safe and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

An analysis by The Defender of data reported to V-safe during the COVID-19 pandemic identified over 300 reports of severe psychiatric disorders, including reports of suicide and attempted suicide, triggered by the COVID-19 vaccine.

Those interviewed said the V-safe data reflect their own experiences or those of their injured family members. Some described being gaslit by their doctors.

Psychotherapist Joseph Sansone, Ph.D., author of “Psychopathic Authoritarianism: A Disease of the Soul,” said it’s not uncommon for physicians to dismiss the vaccine-injured and their struggles.

“Medical doctors, in many cases, told them to get the injections,” Sansone said. “Now, when the victims are suffering from chronic disease and illness, these same doctors gaslight the victims and not admitting the injuries and diseases are from the shots.” This often leads to feelings of “betrayal and violation” among the injured.

Following last week’s announcement that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching a new clinic to study and treat vaccine injuries, people interviewed by The Defender called for more — and better — treatment of vaccine injuries and a stronger focus on the mental health struggles that often accompany these injuries.

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Vaccine Injury: A Glimpse of the Scale

I have heard these stories a thousand times. I am a board‑certified pediatrician with 46 years of clinical experience. I’ve practiced in group and solo settings, served as Director of Pediatric Education for a residency program, and received numerous awards for child‑health initiatives. My solo practice had 3,500 general pediatric patients. I spent five years as Medical Director of the Autism Research Institute.

By caring for and consulting on more than 600 children with autism from 5 countries and 20 states, and hundreds of children with complex chronic illnesses, I have a unique clinical perspective to share, which mirrors what these families shared today.

My concerns about vaccine safety began in 1999 after my patient experienced a severe and irreversible reaction following a vaccine I gave. Despite exhaustive efforts to identify another cause, I could not. The trajectory of my career changed. I left a secure academic position I loved and opened a solo practice dedicated to children whose medical needs were not being met.

During my career I learned an extraordinary amount from parents who are usually perceptive observers of their children’s health. At ARI we partnered with families to identify medical problems that were overlooked. Their insights guided our research and these actions should guide our actions today. Families directed us to treat gastrointestinal dysfunction, immune dysregulation, and impairments in detoxification pathways. Collaborations with international scientists helped identify mitochondrial dysfunction, methylation abnormalities, cerebral folate deficiency, and prolonged cell danger responses.

Most pediatricians do not know about these issues. Addressing these problems often resulted in measurable improvements in autism symptoms. Some children initially diagnosed with moderate to severe autism entered kindergarten no longer meeting criteria for autism because their medical problems were treated. Other severely affected children treated as toddlers have gone on to college without knowing they once carried an autism diagnosis. 

My concerns about vaccine safety extend far beyond the narrow question of whether vaccines cause autism. Autism and complex chronic illnesses are profoundly heterogeneous. In my experience, antecedents, mediators, and triggers vary widely among children. Vaccines contribute to oxidative or mitochondrial stress in all children. In some kids; they amplify pre‑existing vulnerabilities. For others, early-life factors—such as C‑section birth, antibiotics, or prematurity — create antecedent conditions that interact with later vaccines and precede neurodevelopmental regression.

In 2005, I gave grand rounds at the university where I had been chief resident. Simply raising the possibility that the accelerated vaccine schedule might contribute to rising autism prevalence resulted in my adjunct faculty appointment not being renewed. At the time, I used a modified schedule that reduced aluminum exposure while remaining fully compliant with Virginia’s school requirements. 

 In 2006, I met with AAP leadership to discuss vaccine safety concerns – which were dismissed. Despite no research funding from government or pharma, I published a dozen studies in my spare time. One 17‑year project examined whether autism risk could be reduced by applying insights learned from families. After seven years, my autism prevalence was 1 in 297—at a time when the national rate was worse than 1 in 50. I submitted the findings to the AAP in 2013, expecting interest in a six‑fold reduction in such a serious public health problem. I received no response. 

My clinical observations—confirmed by independent data mining—was that children who got more vaccines were more likely to develop chronic illnesses. In my practice, under‑vaccinated children had lower rates of chronic diseases. 

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Parent poll shows nearly 80% of kids who became suddenly autistic had their last normal day on the day they got vaccinated

I found a large Facebook group of parents of autistic kids that was willing to allow me to do a survey.

So I asked one question: “If your child became suddenly autistic within 90 days after a vaccination, how many normal days did you observe between vaccination and the sudden onset” where “normal” means you observed behavior similar to the period before vaccination. 79% of parents answered 0 or 1 day.

That statistic is inconsistent with the claim that “vaccines don’t cause autism.”

What it shows is that the vaccine is the start of a cascade; if there is a sudden regression, 80% of the time, the day of vaccination is the last normal day of a child’s life.

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