New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science
Sick and Tired: Casting a Long Shadow is the April 2023 report of the Australian government’s Inquiry into Long COVID and Repeated COVID Infections. Despite providing a thorough, 239-page overview of the condition generally referred to as Long COVID, and the phenomenon of repeated COVID infections, there is a single, glaringly obvious error in the report which needs to be confronted – the vaccination status of those affected.
Dr Melissa McCann is a rural GP based in Queensland Australia who also has a Bachelor of Pharmacology, giving her a unique combination of clinical and pharmaceutical insight. We introduced her in this recent article. She is leading a recently announced class action lawsuit involving vaccine-injured litigants against the Australian government, claiming that improper regulation of the COVID-19 vaccines resulted in considerable harm.
Dr McCann made a well-referenced, comprehensive nine-page submission to the Inquiry, articulating the science of Long COVID and how the disease process overlaps with Vaccine Associated Enhanced Disease (VAED) and adverse events following immunisation (AEFI). She describes the reasons that these three conditions can be mistaken for one another.
Long COVID remains a poorly understood condition, and Dr McCann quotes from the medical literature, hypotheses relating to tissue damage in the nervous and other body systems following COVID infection which result in the multitude of symptoms experienced. These symptoms are accompanied by immunological markers specific to the S1 fragment of the spike protein which verify prior infection rather than ongoing viral replication.
The change in laboratory markers including absence of SARS-CoV-2 sequences seen since the rollout of COVID-19 vaccination, as well as the lack of documented covid infection in some people, support the argument that Long COVID symptoms in at least some patients could occur as a consequence of COVID-19 vaccination. This could be either due to AEFIs (eg thrombosis or myocarditis), or VAED.
In May 2021 the Brighton Collaboration VAED Working Group published Vaccine-associated enhanced disease: Case definition and guidelines for data collection, analysis, and presentation of immunization safety data which Dr McCann references extensively in her submission. The definition of VAED in this review includes clinical parameters identical to those seen in Long COVID.
Given the obvious overlaps between Long COVID, AEFI and VAED, it is a betrayal to the Australian people, to citizens everywhere, and to the scientific process, that their government are instead recommending COVID-19 vaccination as a preventative for Long COVID.
