"Long Vax" Finally Enters The Lexicon

I have been trying for 2 years to make the public aware that "Long Vax" is far more common than Long Covid. We finally landed an Op-Ed in a major center-left publication which exposes this reality.

The FLCCC, led by Professor Paul Marik’s efforts, first put together a “treatment guide” (I am trying to avoid the word “protocol”) for Long Covid as far back as May 2021. Approximately 6 months later, as many of my readers know, I opened a private tele-health practice specializing in all facets of Covid disease, particularly Long Covid.

Long Covid, although a new name, is not a new disease. It meets the diagnostic criteria for a decades-old condition called myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The three symptom “pillars” which lead to the diagnosis are fatigue, post-exertional malaise (PEM), and “brain fog” (i.e. cognitive deficits ranging from word finding difficulties, short term memory loss, inability to focus/comprehend, and more rarely confusion or disorientation).

Although this triad is present in nearly every patient I see (rarely brain fog is missing), the patients also present with a “side menu” of problems which can include sensory neuropathies, dysautonomia/POTS, motor neuropathies, abdominal issues, musculoskeletal complaints, and cranial symptoms (i..e tinnitus, vertigo, headaches, vision, hearing loss, smell loss, taste loss). Many of my patients are debilitated and meet criteria for disability, despite the majority reporting being in the peak of health and functioning prior to the pandemic.

In my opinion, this is the main reason why Ed Dowd and his team at phinancetechnologies.com have reported an explosion of disability claims coincident with the mRNA vaccination campaign. Know their data is taken from the U.S governments own databases like FRED:

They also emphasize that that the explosion in disability claims were largely among in employed, working age Americans between 16-64 than it was among the general U.S population.

Anyway, in the first months after opening our clinic, we noted that the majority of incoming patients we were evaluating were reporting that their symptom clusters began within minutes, hours, days or several weeks after a Covid mRNA vaccination. Although many also had a history of Covid, only a minority related the development of their chronic symptoms to that event.

Initially we called it Post-Covid Vaccine Injury Syndrome however I soon changed my diagnosis to “Long Vax” given it was nearly identical to Long Covid (in my experience the only differences are in severity - on average my Long Vax patients are sicker than my Long Covid’s (due to much higher spike protein counts) and tend to have more frequent small fiber neuropathy and dysautonomia.

Differentiating the two is straightforward in most as it is simply based on temporal association with the inciting event. To date, our treatment approach to the two conditions has been nearly (but not completely) identical so differentiating between the two different conditions has not proven significantly important in our care. However, I now believe it is important to differentiate (more on that below).

The medical system could see that SARS-CoV2 was causing ME/CFS at much higher rates than traditionally implicated infectious diseases like Epstein Barr Virus, Coxiella burnetti, giardia, or SARS. One early review estimated that the number of cases of ME/CFS could double as the result of the pandemic (based on data since then, I think it will create much more than a doubling).

In response, nearly every major academic medical center or large hospital began opening “Long Covid” clinics. Besides being worthless due to the fact they typically offer zero treatments (i.e. they are waiting for the RCT on Paxlovid), they also perform extensive, largely unrevealing testing followed by referrals to specialists like psychiatry and physical therapy. Note almost none of the physicians or specialists are trained in the disease as they; 1) do not recognize the spike protein as the pathogen and 2) do not read the FLCCC scientific reviews and/or treatment guides nor have they attended the three FLCCC medical conferences on the disease to date.

Worse is that, for most of 2022 into 2023, those centers consistently gas-lit the Long Vax patients who presented to those clinics. Gaslighting of medical injuries is the well-described inability for physicians to recognize or accept when their own treatments (i..e the mRNA vaccines) cause harm, a topic written about extensively by my colleague A Midwestern Doctor.

The stories my patients would tell me of the care they received included what I would describe as abuse or insults from the treating physicians when the patients tried to convince them that the vaccines were the cause. These stories still make my blood boil and have estranged many of my patients from “the system.” I believe the gaslighting responses have lessened somewhat but I don’t really know how much,

What angered me even further is that the health agencies only directed funding at Long Covid and the medical literature and media only referred to sufferers as having Long Covid. The contribution of the gene therapy vaccines are consistently ignored.

Problem: 70% of our practice are Long Vax, not Long Covid. I strongly feel that society must be aware of both syndromes given that I now believe there may be important differences in approaches to treatment based on the factors unique to mRNA gene therapy (no shut off on spike protein production, widespread dissemination of mRNA and spike to tissue, inflammatory impacts of the lipid nanoparticles, and the short and long term impacts of the DNA plasmid contaminants.

So I think it is important to the millions chronically ill after mRNA vaccination that this syndrome be recognized and appropriately researched along with Long Covid. After more than 2 years, me and Paul Marik finally got an Op-Ed highlighting this issue into a major media outlet. It’s a start.

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BY PIERRE KORY AND PAUL MARIK, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 03/06/24 1:30 PM ET

Millions of Americans are still suffering months or even years after they were infected with COVID. Long COVID as it’s commonly known is a serious and poorly understood problem. But there is also growing evidence that the COVID vaccine could cause a similar disease. 

We need our government health agencies to take a serious look at this condition and stop stigmatizing doctors and patients who report these findings so we can get people the help they need. 

We are critical care physicians with the FLCCC Alliance (the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance) who have treated COVID patients throughout the pandemic. One of us recently opened a private practice focused on patients with long COVID.

In two years, the practice has evaluated and treated over 1,000 individuals. Approximately 70 percent of these patients said their reported symptoms occurred in the minutes, hours, days and weeks after COVID vaccination, as opposed to after COVID infection. This could be tied to a new condition that’s flown under the radar until recently.

This syndrome, dubbed “long vax,” is just starting to make its way into the medical literature. Dr. Harlan Krumholz at the Yale School of Medicine published a survey of 241 patients who described post-COVID vaccination symptoms of exercise intolerance, excessive fatigue, numbness, brain fog and neuropathy, a nervous system disorder that can cause pain, tingling sensations, numbness or weakness. Long COVID patients were excluded from the study, which is now undergoing peer review. 

The concern is that our findings, Krumholz’s study, and any reports of adverse events from COVID-19 vaccination, will be subject to the same institutional censorship we saw throughout the pandemic. Suppressing this information risks creating an even bigger disaster.

There is widespread alarm about autoimmune diseases reaching “epidemic levels.” Much of this is attributable to COVID, and there is mounting evidence that COVID vaccinations may have contributed to this trend as well. Similarly, autoimmune diseases, particularly autoimmune rheumatic diseases, can increase a person’s chance of developing long COVID. This means we could see an explosion of long COVID — and long vax — in the months and years ahead.

Rest of The Op-ED can be read here.

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*If you value the time and effort I put into researching and writing my posts, support in the form of paid subscriptions would be appreciated (know that I never put any posts behind paywalls).