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As Covid vaccine injuries started mounting up, and the topic became somewhat less taboo in the media — albeit always accompanied by boilerplate text about how the benefits outweigh the risks — some of us expressed hope that injured people would ‘wake up’¹ to the risks of the shots, creating a wave of awareness and action.

Some vaccine-injured people recognised what happened to them, accepted it, and joined the campaign for better research and vaccine safety. Yet, this has not uniformly been the case. A good many others remain in the dark, despite dealing with sudden and ongoing mystery illnesses.

These people grope for answers, pinning their symptoms on catch-all explanations like stress or long Covid (a more politically favourable diagnosis than post-vaccine syndrome), or awkwardly straddling the cognitive dissonance arising from the clash between medically recognised post-vaccine side effects, and deeply held faith in the Saviour Vaccines.

Why do some vaccine-injured people accept what happened to them, but others don’t? Brendan and Michelle’s stories offer insight.

Brendan Foster, post-vaccine myo- and pericarditis. Status: deep denial.

Brendan Foster. Image: Supplied to The Sydney Morning Herald.

In an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald last week, we meet Brendan Foster, a communications professional and former journalist from Fremantle. Brendan had a heart attack after his Covid vaccine and has been going downhill ever since. His anecdotal is equal parts description of his injuries and social signalling that he belongs to the correct tribe.

From, “I kept getting sicker. But you won’t catch me reaching for a tin foil hat“:

I had a suspected mild heart attack just over two years ago.

“Probably just a reaction to the COVID vaccine,” a series of medicos cheerfully informed me, as some nurse grimaced while shaving away swathes of my matted chest hair to attach “stickers” for an ECG.

Brendan had no prior health conditions. After several days in hospital, a cardiologist tells him he has myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart muscle.

The medical condition was of unknown origin, but it might’ve been triggered by a recent COVID jab.

Whatever caused that coronary blip, I had no regrets about getting vaccinated. I haven’t wavered. There have been no urges since to look up flat earth theory.

Despite the possibility of permanent heart damage, Brendan would do it all again. Regretting getting a shot that ruined your heart would be like believing the earth is flat. The poor man has since been back to the Emergency Department (ED) five times with heart issues, thinking he’s going to die.

After getting zipped and zapped in the hospital, the diagnosis is always the same: pericarditis. I’ll spare you the medical mumbo jumbo, but it’s swelling of the tissue surrounding the heart.

Both myocarditis and pericarditis have been linked to the COVID vaccine and the virus itself.

For the record, I’ve had COVID once and am fully vaccinated.

Now, Brendan has myocarditis and pericarditis. You know what’s worse than the cardiac risk of Covid or the vaccines? Increasing your risk by having both. If I were the editor, I would have insisted that Brendan detail whether the Covid infection was before or after the first heart attack. However, it is unlikely that “a series of medicos” would have attributed his heart attack to the vaccine if, a) he hadn’t just had the vaccine, and b) they could reasonably pin it on a Covid infection instead.

Again, Brendan emphasises that he’s definitely not a conspiracy theorist:

To make the bold claim that cardiovascular conditions could be caused by one or more of the potions to prevent the virus isn’t some crazed, anti-vax conspiracy theory – as the Albanese government has a website dedicated to exactly that.

Maybe both have caused my cardiovascular complaints. However, no one in the medical fraternity can confidently say which one…

… I was more than OK being one of the walking “vaccine injured,” convincing myself I was part of that glum utilitarian idiom: the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Brendan’s hedging — his illness might not really have been caused by the vaccine. But if it was, he’d be fine with it, because that would make him a human sacrifice, part of a prehistoric ritual that has recently come back in vogue.

Unfortunately for Brendan, he’s getting sicker by the day. He was recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called hemolytic anemia, a potentially fatal disorder in which red blood cells are destroyed faster than they can be made. Apparently, there is evidence to suggest that both Covid infection and the vaccines can cause hemolytic anemia.

He has terrible brain fog, and also has relentless hiccups which he thinks might be due to the jabs. But:

Just to be abundantly clear: I am pro-vax. I didn’t have one nanosecond of doubt about the importance of getting the jab, not only for myself but for my loved ones.

History is littered with illogical moments, but folk refusing to get inoculated against COVID would be one of humanity’s dumber choices.

‘I might die, my quality of life is severely degraded, and I suspect it is due to the Covid vaccines. But please do not think I am anti-vax or that I regret my situation. Volunteering as tribute is the only logical thing to do when faced with the unnecessary risk of life-threatening injuries from medical intervention that doesn’t prevent infection or transmission.’

A megatrillion people would have died:

Without the vaccine, it’s estimated another 20 million people would’ve died. More than 7 million have already perished because of the virus.

There is no denying the COVID-19 vaccine is one of the greatest achievements in medical science that substantially altered the course of the pandemic.

But I think we need to acknowledge that it’s just possible that thousands of us are still battling serious health issues because of the jab.

I can assure you that I wear no tin foil hat.

I want to place my hand on Brendan’s shoulder, look him in the eye and whisper, ‘You got the vaccine. You’re a credible professional. You believe in Science. People respect you. You are not a cooker.’

The Australian government has paid more than $32 million in compensation to people who had adverse reactions to COVID vaccines. However, they stopped accepting new claims in September.

There have been calls from academics and medical professionals for Australia to develop a permanent vaccine compensation scheme.

Given no one seems to understand the long-term impacts of subjecting our bodies to a quick succession of jabs, it might not be a bad idea.

But I guess like me, we may never know what is making us sick.

Brendan just spent his entire opinion piece telling us that both he and medical professionals suspect he is badly injured by the Covid vaccine with conditions that are also recognised by the Australian Government.

At the same time, he says he doesn’t know what made him sick, and he’s desperately afraid that people might think that he is a conspiracy theorist for talking about his injuries.

I posted this story on Instagram and received many comments about how stupid Brendan is. Unlikely. I reckon he’s probably quite smart — smart enough to engage in some gymnastic-motivated reasoning.

As beautifully explained by Substacker Gurwinder in an article titled ‘Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things’, motivated reasoning is the deployment of one’s intellect in service of one’s base instincts (e.g.: social belonging) and ideological biases (e.g.: religious adherence to The Science™️).

Evidence suggests that intelligent people are more prone to motivated reasoning than those less intelligent, and that this is the case on both sides of the political divide, says Gurwinder. While less intelligent people are more easily misled by others, more intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.

There are plenty of reasons why someone like Brendan might be so motivated to build a fortress of denial. Fear of being out-grouped. Attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance that clangs through his opinion piece, and presumably his head on a daily basis. Avoidance of painful feelings (like betrayal and grief). And lack of courage to examine his own beliefs and change them if needs be. There are potentially others.

This is the kind of person who gets a glimpse of the Matrix and chooses to stay plugged in anyway, even though he can’t shake the feeling that things aren’t adding up.

Michelle Hunder, post-vaccine pericarditis. Status: Acceptance.

Michelle Hunder. Image: Supplied.

“I understand that mindset because I used to be him. I read it, and I go, ‘I get it,’” Michelle Hunder told me over the phone.

But Michelle, a successful Melbourne-based music photographer, had a very different response to her Covid vaccine injury.

Michelle got her Pfizer shots at the height of Melbourne’s world-famous lockdowns, in September 2021. It was a starkly different life from her day-to-day before the pandemic, travelling the globe with music artists. Getting vaccinated, we were told, was the only way to go back to normal.

“I would have done anything to get my life back,” she explains. “Everything I’d been working towards for 15 years I hit in 2019. It’s not a job. This is everything to me. The thing that feeds my soul. I love what I do so much.”

Michelle’s cardiac symptoms started with the first shot and escalated after the second. Unlike Brendan, the vaccine link wasn’t recognised at first by the medical professionals she went to for help. Michelle presented at ED five times with severe chest pain, but was told she had anxiety and to seek therapy.

However, “I knew straight away from the first night that I ever presented to hospital that something was very wrong, and it was related to the vaccine, which I had had four days before,” says Michelle, adding that she has never tested positive for Covid to this day.

It turns out Michelle was right. In 2022, she was finally diagnosed by a cardiologist with pericarditis caused by her Pfizer Covid vaccinations.

How did Michelle call it correctly so early in spite of medical gaslighting, while Brendan is still tying himself in knots despite acknowledgment from medicos, scientific papers, and the Australian Government that there is a high probability that his conditions are vaccine-related?

Michelle reckons curiosity, education, and readiness have a lot to do with it.

“I have a very curious mind. I was always extremely left-leaning until probably 2017, 2018,” she says. “I just started to listen to alternative views, and I found it really, really great for balance. And I really started questioning a lot of stuff that my friends and a lot of people had thought as gospel, just to open up my own worldview.”

Incidentally, research shows that curiosity is the strongest countermeasure against ideological bias.

Due to being “weirdly obsessed” with evolutionary biology, one of the people Michelle tuned into before the pandemic was Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist with a deep knowledge of bat viruses. Weinstein happened to become one of the most famous sceptics of the Covid wet market origin theory because of his uncannily specific expertise.

As Michelle had already followed Weinstein for some time, she trusted his ability to parse scientific information. So when Weinstein started questioning elements of the Covid dogma, including vaccine safety, Michelle’s curious mind tugged on those threads, and she sought more information.

None of this convinced Michelle not to get the shots – her desire to get her “dream life” back was by far the greater motivator. But when she was injured, there was already enough mental scaffolding in place for her to be open to assessing the facts of her situation on their merits. She was ready.

It wasn’t easy, though.

“I see what happened to me as such a destabilising event, because it literally flipped everything that I had believed for 40+ years on its head,” Michelle recalls.

Not only was Michelle “very pro-vax”, having taken every shot she’d ever been offered in her life, but she says, “I just had never had any reason to distrust the government, which sounds crazy to a lot of people, I’m sure.”

“It’s like an entire worldview. Until something really shakes you to your core, it’s really hard to see the other side.”

Michelle says it was socially and emotionally challenging to speak up about her vaccine injury, but as a music industry professional with a profile, she felt a responsibility.

“I felt like I’m not one of those people that if you see, you’re gonna think, oh, they’re a kooky f*cking anti-vaxxer,” she says. “I’m like, no, look at me, I’m one of you. You lefties, I was pro-vax, I was one of you, I was compliant, I’m in the music industry, I’m in the arts industry, and this happened to me.”

Online, Michelle was attacked from both sides. Pro-vaxxers called her an anti-vaxxer — an argument that she says is “intellectually dishonest.”

“The truth is I went and lined up and got two vaccines. I got a second one even after I was injured. So how the f*ck do you call me an anti-vaxxer?”

But vaccine sceptics also came at her. “Some people called us ‘sheep’, or said it was our fault for what happened because, you know, people were trying to warn us. But like, you’re just being bombarded with, ‘This is safe. This is fine. You’re gonna be fine.’”

It’s understandable that being ostracised from all angles would be an experience people like Brendan might want to avoid. Michelle doesn’t give herself credit for this, but I will — it requires a degree of courage to take that risk.

Going through this experience has been a growth opportunity for Michelle in this regard.

“I have so much admiration for people that were able to stand their ground and go, [Covid vaccination] doesn’t feel right for me,” she says. “Like, that’s strength of character. I think I am that person now, but I wasn’t that person then.”

Most of all, Michelle says that what got her through was the unconditional love and support of her husband, and close friends who were able to listen to her experience without judgment — even if it didn’t align with their own beliefs.

Faced with a dead end from the medical establishment in terms of treating her symptoms, Michelle sought help from a naturopath and began to heal. Three and a half years on, she says she’s pretty much fully recovered.

During that time, she has done a tonne of media interviews and continues to raise awareness about the difficulties that Covid vaccine-injured Australians face in seeking diagnosis, treatment, recognition, and compensation.

Creating the conditions for vaccine-injured people to wake up

Contrary to the simplistic adage that the vaccine rollout was just an IQ test, the reasons people got the shots were complex and multi-layered. So are the reasons for some injured people resisting the awful realisation that they were collateral damage in the rollout.

As someone who’s been through the process and come out the other side, Michelle says it’s important for injured people to be heard, understood, and recognised.

Pejorative labels like ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘sheep’ trigger “immediate shutdown of a conversation”. What injured people need when they come forward is “empathy and understanding”, not abuse.

Media reporting still undermines the lived experience of the vaccine-injured, with excessive emphasis on the rarity of their conditions, and editorial choices like putting “vaccine-injured” in quotation marks. “You’re like, what? I literally have a piece of paper that says that I’ve got pericarditis [from the vaccine],” says Michelle.

There also needs to be “large-scale government acknowledgment of us because that’s the thing that has not happened; that’s what we have not had,” she says.

The need for acknowledgment from the officials who promised that the vaccines were safe and mandated them on the public is a common theme expressed in testimonials like those found on Jab Injuries Australia, or featured on last year’s 7NEWS Spotlight TV special.

“The lack of acknowledgment is actually retraumatising over and over, and the lack of compensation is another retraumatising event,” says Michelle.

Although there’s no question that Michelle’s pericarditis was caused by the vaccine, she was not able to qualify for the federal compensation scheme because she did not spend a night in hospital. Ironically, she went to hospital multiple times, but was turned away by dismissive medical professionals.

The compensation scheme closed in September last year, having paid out only $38.6 million (AUD) for 418 approved claims of 4,941 received. At the time, there were 1,057 claims still being processed — the remainder had been rejected or withdrawn.

Michelle has now joined a Covid vaccine injury class action, along with more than 2,000 other Australians.

“I want there to be some type of historical record about what happened to us,” she says. “That’s the only thing that’s important to me now. It’s the principle, you know?”

It’s possible that official acknowledgment on this scale could even give people like Brendan the cover they need to finally accept what happened to them, too.

Read Michelle’s full story via ABC, or listen via ABC’s Background Briefing:

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Republished with thanks to Dystopian Down Under.