Pioneering medical group chief floats 'shared pathophysiology' between vax injury, long COVID

As potential injuries from COVID-19 vaccines get hashed out in scientific research, personal stories of post-inoculation harm are percolating through the conversation worldwide.

The first woman to lead the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and former member of Parliament testified about post-vaccination damage in her immediate family as part of an Australian parliamentary inquiry into long COVID and repeated infections. 

Nearly half of Americans now believe that COVID vaccines have caused "a significant number of unexplained deaths," and more than a quarter say someone "they personally know" may have died from the vaccine, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.

The Dec. 28-30 poll of 1,000 American adults also found unusually narrow partisan differences on the latter question, with 33% of Democrats and 26% each of Republicans and independents saying they knew someone who may have died from the inoculation.

"Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation" by threatening the licenses of doctors whose statements "'might undermine the government's vaccine rollout,'" Kerryn Phelps, professor at Western Sydney University's NICM Health Research Institute, wrote in her submission to the Australian parliamentary inquiry.

The pioneering ex-AMA president cited a "diminishing cohort" of people with documented vaccine injuries but no known natural infection. "These people would be an important subset or control group" for long COVID research because their symptoms, such as fatigue and "brain fog," resemble those reported by sufferers of long COVID.

There may be "at least some shared pathophysiology between vaccine injury and Long COVID" attributable to the spike protein, Phelps' submission says, citing a July paper in Trends in Molecular Medicine by University of Athens medical researchers. Twitter suspended mathematician James Lindsay in May for making the same connection.

Phelps' wife sustained "severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes" while under observation by Phelps, "another doctor and a registered nurse at the time of immunisation," she wrote.

The "devastating effects" for spouse Jackie, who asked Phelps to share the story, have increased for the past year and a half, according to the submission. New adverse events include fatigue, "nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation."

Phelps said specialists confirmed the diagnosis and causation for Jackie and Phelps herself, who suffered "dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations" after Phelps' second Pfizer dose. Specialists told them they have seen "a lot" of similar situations.

The former AMA president criticized Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration, its counterpart to the U.S. FDA, for not following up on her adverse events report or proactively tracking vaccine injuries. 

Using ongoing surveys, Germany's pharmacovigilance body the Paul Ehrlich Institute has found a serious-incident reaction rate of 0.3 per 1,000 shots, suggesting heavily boosted Australia's per-person rate could be above 1 in 1,000, Phelps said.

"Without acknowledgment and recognition of post-vaccination syndrome or vaccine injury, there can be no progress in developing protocols for diagnosis and treatment," she wrote.

Former U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker wondered how "pharma allies" will try to discredit Phelps in his newsletter Tuesday, adding source links and context to her testimony. 

Thacker noted that NBC News tried to dismiss a vaccine-tinnitus connection as purely anecdotal after Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group Director Gregory Poland publicly shared his "life-altering" adverse event.

A week later, the network reported the World Health Organization was formally studying post-vaccination tinnitus reports globally.