Premise

Throughout the pandemic, there have been a small collection of strange cases or phenomenon that I have been taking notes on, but do not really exist in the literature. Some with an academic or questioning personality may approach such a blog post with a lot of skepticism. To try and alleviate this, I’ll provide some details about myself that should help with the legitimacy of my hearsay.

I’m a mid-career scientist at a large research organization on the Eastern half of the United States. I previously worked in neuroscience, but I now work on clinical trials related to HIV and COVID19. We currently work on four clinical trials on COVID19, and two of them involve us reaching out to local hospitals in our region for current cases of COVID19. Our other two studies involve people who have recently recovered from COVID19 as we follow them over time. In other words, just trust me, bru.

Tale 1: COVID-19 Vaccines and Surgery

One of the nurses that I work with has been moonlighting at other hospitals from our own since June 2020. Around February-March 2021, she told me that there was a group of surgeons about 30 miles north of us that they were having unusually high rates of death in the OR for routine procedures. She mentioned that her surgeon and nurse friends in this locality have only found that having a COVID19 vaccine was the only factor that the sudden death patients had in common. To my knowledge, at the time, research related autopsies on COVID-19 related patients was severely restricted due to uncertainties of catching the virus from corpses. This was confirmed by one of our research physicians who had tried to get a clinical study of deceased persons started but was not approved to do so on more than one occasion. According to her, the surgeons have no idea why this was happening, and to this day, we’re still not exactly sure whether this was a bad batch of vaccines, some strange interaction between anesthesia and the vaccines, or something else related to the surgeons. To my knowledge, no other reports have been written on this observation.

Tale 2: Long COVID and the Vaccines

As I mentioned before, two of our studies involve watching people who recovered from COVID19 for a time after infection. One of them is a small study, and the other is much larger. On the larger study, the study team has noticed that there is a substantial amount of people who were infected in the past with COVID19 and still had lingering symptoms to some degree. The most common of the lingering symptoms are things such as headaches, brain fog, and shortness of breath. Since we began this study in August of 2020, we have a number of patients who were on the study before the vaccines arrived to the market. Of the patients who reported having some long-term symptoms after infection, many of them reported that their long-term symptoms went away after vaccination. What’s more interesting about this phenomenon is that people felt that the symptoms that had didn’t go away until after the second dose of the vaccinations if the vaccine was mRNA-based. In fact, this exact same phenomenon happened to my best friend. Myself and the team that runs this study have no good ideas as to why this happens, but it seems like it's almost a lock-and-key type of scenario.

Tale 3: Boooooster Neurotica

As the boosters have been rolling out, many of my co-workers have been in some debate, but general agreement on the necessity of getting boosted. Since we work in the research itself, we’re aware of two facts that in theory should make us a bit more skeptical about getting the booster compared to the average person.

• The boosters were never modified to account for the delta variant. [1]
• The study used to approve the boosters was incomplete and never included data for Pfizer. [2]

So, our first set of people have begun to get boosted, many of these “mavericks” made the decision to get boosted before starting their shifts. As we’ve been learning first hand, the booster is giving same day and day after reactions that are in many cases worse than the first and second shot of the original mRNA vaccines. It’s gotten to the point that even if someone didn’t let anyone know that they were getting boosted and then came to work, we can tell by their glazed look and exhausted expressions that they got their booster that day. In the worst case of reactions to the booster we’ve seen so far, a young woman in her early 20’s had a reaction so bad that she didn’t feel well enough to come back to work until four days post-booster. Regardless, the rest of my co-workers didn’t get dissuaded from getting the booster. Soon, they’ll find out that they’re going to be asked to get a fourth. Would they be willing to go through yet another round of bad reactions, or will they simply forget this last round of them? We’ll see in a few months I suppose…

References
[1] Neergarrd L. Why COVID-19 booster shots weren’t tweaked to better match Delta variant [Internet]. Los Angeles Times. 2021 [cited 2021 Dec 20]. Available from: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-10-18/why-covid-boosters-werent-tweaked-to-better-match-variants.
[2] Atmar RL, Lyke KE, Deming ME, et al. Heterologous SARS-CoV-2 Booster Vaccinations – Preliminary Report [Internet]. 2021 [cited 2021 Dec 20]. p. 2021.10.10.21264827. Available from: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.10.21264827v2.