Antivaxxers will testify before a Senate committee…again

As I said yesterday, I’m in a place where I think I can try to resurrect this blog again. Truth be told, I’ve missed commenting on areas that I normally like to apply Insolence to, be it Respectful or Not-So-Respectful. More importantly, since Donald Trump was elected President again last November and longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became Secretary of Health and Human Services and his sycophants, toadies, and lackeys were installed to run the Food and Drug Administration (Dr. Marty Makary), the National Institutes of Health (Dr. Jay Bhattacharya), and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid services (America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz), there’s just so much to comment on where I think I can make a tiny difference that it’s been frustrating these last few months to be limited to once a week over at my not-so-super-secret other blog. (Or maybe I have way too inflated an opinion of myself and my own importance, conflating my need to blog with your need to read my blogs. I don’t know.) But where to start?

If there’s one thing that I’ve seen since Republicans became the antivaccine party (a process that began well before the pandemic), it’s that, whenever the GOP is in charge of one or both Houses of Congress, they weaponize their control of committees in order to “investigate” vaccines, COVID-19 origins, or whatever antiscience conspiracy theory that the right wing has embraced. Generally, the way they do this is to hold committee hearings in which they invite cranks to testify or legitimate scientists from government agencies (e.g., the CDC) to be harangued about their about non-existent perfidy, the idea being to cast doubt on whatever science they currently detest. This is not a new tactic either, given that, for example, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) routinely used to use his power as the Chair of the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform to haul CDC scientists and directors before his committee to demand of them what they are doing to investigate the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism. (Burton was a true believer that vaccines caused autism, blaming them for his grandchild’s autism.)

Of course, there’s been a long line of Republicans continuing Rep. Burton’s “legacy,” particularly during the pandemic, which is why I thought as good a topic to use to try to jump start my blogging again as any is this hearing scheduled for tomorrow at 3 PM in front of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is under the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, entitled Voices of the Vaccine Injured.

Now, you might ask: Why write about this subcommittee hearing now? It hasn’t happened yet. The answer is simple. This is some really old school antivax shit, as you will see, and I bet that most reporters are unfamiliar with the stories of the “vaccine injured” called to testify, as are, likely, most Democratic staffers and Senators who might want to question these people more carefully. Of course, this is a very tricky task, because one of these people called to testify has a daughter whose death she blames on Gardasil. (More on that later.) It’s also always difficult to be the science-based questioner or skeptic in situations like this, as the people chosen to testify on the side of incorrectly and without evidence blaming vaccines for whatever medical condition or consequence that they or their children have suffered are chosen for maximum sympathetic value such that any questioning of their stories or antivax activities as a result of their stories can easily come across as bullying a parent who has lost a child.

In any case, I thought that it might be a public service to write about some of those called on to testify, as they might not be that well known to reporters. (A couple aren’t that well-known to me, but I was more than happy to investigate.) Then, after the hearing occurs tomorrow, I can potentially do a postmortem on it Wednesday or Thursday, depending on how long the hearing goes and when I get a chance to listen to it. Before I get into the people called upon to testify, I can first easily tell who’s behind this hearing just by looking at the subcommittee’s membership roster, where I see that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is the chair of the subcommittee. Sen. Johnson, of course, is very much pro-quackery and antivax, having been featured on this blog a number of times before, in particular for his championing the Right-To-Try bill that eventually became law during the first Trump Administration, and for calling cranks like Dr. Jane Orient to testify against COVID-19 vaccines.

Let’s dig in. The first five witnesses scheduled to testify are described as:

1. Robert Sullivan, MD. Anesthesiologist, vaccine injured.
2. Brian Hooker, PhD. Father of Steven Hooker. Witness’ son is vaccine-injured. (Hooker has been featured on this blog enough times to have his own tag.)
3. Polley Tommey. Mother of Billy Tommey. Witness’ son is vaccine-injured. (Polley Tommey is closely associated with Andrew Wakefield and has been featured enough times on this blog to have her own tag too.)
4. Emily Tarsell. Mother of Christina Tarsell. Witness’ Daughter Died Following Gardasil Vaccination. I’ve written about her before.
5. Krystle Cordingley. Mother of Corbyn Cordingley. Witness’ Son Died Following Quadrivalent Flu Vaccination.

There are two witnesses who appear to have been called to testify on the pro-vaccine side:

1. Serese Marotta. Mother of Joseph Marotta. Witness’ Son Died Following Flu Illness.
2. Eric Stein. Brother of Jessica Stein. Witness’ Sister Died of Influenza.

I’m not going to discuss these last two, as they appear to be witnesses intended to argue for the safety and efficacy of flu vaccines. I will, however, discuss the first five. Let’s start with the two people with whom I’m most familiar.

Brian Hooker, VAXXED, and the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory

There are two things you need to recall about Brian Hooker. First, he was an integral part in the creation of the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory in 2014, having basically given the godfather of the 21st century antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, the inspiration for his antivax conspiracy-fest of a film disguised as a “documentary,” VAXXED. Not coincidentally, Hooker plays is a major character featured in the documentary, including his story of how vaccines supposedly made his son autistic. (More on that in a moment.) In any event, the CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory was the second conspiracy theory that I watched being born before my eyes, the first variety of conspiracy theories being 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories. More importantly from the perspective of more than two decades countering antivaccine misinformation, it was the first one that I wrote about and deconstructed right from the beginning as it was being born, starting right when Andrew Wakefield’s video featuring Brian Hooker first showed up on YouTube in August 2014.

The claims put forward in the video were that earlier MMR vaccination is associated with an increased risk of autism in African-American boys and that the CDC had spent the last 13 years covering this linkage up. These charges are based the result of a “reanalysis” by Brian Hooker published in 2014 in Translational Neurodegeneration entitled Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young African American boys: a reanalysis of CDC data. The study that Hooker had “reanalyzed” was from a study by DeStefano et al (and of which the “CDC whistleblower” William W. Thomas was a co-author) published in Pediatrics in 2004 entitled Age at first measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in children with autism and school-matched control subjects: a population-based study in metropolitan Atlanta. Note that Hooker’s paper was retracted in October 2014, for these reasons:

The Editor and Publisher regretfully retract the article [1] as there were undeclared competing interests on the part of the author which compromised the peer review process. Furthermore, post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis, therefore the Editors no longer have confidence in the soundness of the findings. We apologise to all affected parties for the inconvenience caused.

From my perspective, this paper was such a stinking, drippy turd of a paper that it never should have been accepted in any reputable journal, which is why it was originally accepted by Translational Neurodegeneration and why it was absolutely hilarious that such a journal ultimately retracted it.

To go into a bit more detail, DeStefano et al was a case control study of children in metropolitan Atlanta conducted to “compare ages at first measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination between children with autism and children who did not have autism in the total population and in selected subgroups, including children with regression in development.” Basically, it found no association between MMR vaccination and the risk of autism or, to put it more precisely in a case-control study:

Similar proportions of case and control children were vaccinated by the recommended age or shortly after (ie, before 18 months) and before the age by which atypical development is usually recognized in children with autism (ie, 24 months).

Basically, it was yet another of a whole slew of negative studies failing to find a correlation between vaccines, in this case the MMR vaccine, and the risk of subsequently developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One of the first things I noticed was that Hooker took data collected for a case-control study, in which one looks at cases (in this case children with autism) and controls (without autism) and compare exposures (in this case vaccines) and did what looked like a cohort study, in which researchers look at groups of people who vary in exposure to a given putative risk factor (for instance, vaccines), each controlled for every other potential risk factor that the authors can control for, and then determine if the condition for which that putative risk factor is suspected to be a risk factor for. Think of it this way: Case control = comparing risk factor frequency in people with a condition compared to controls, while cohort = examining risk of condition in people with different exposures to a putative risk factor.

In brief, Hooker analyzed case-control data as a cohort study and found a 3.36-fold increased risk for autism in Black males who received MMR vaccination before the age of 36 months in this dataset. Hooker also did multiple subset analyses, which, of course, are prone to false positives. As we also say, if you slice and dice the evidence more and more finely, eventually you will find apparent correlations that might or might not be real. In this case, I highly doubted Hooker’s correlation was real, and the ultimate retraction of the paper bore that suspicion out. Unsurprisingly, Hooker did manage to republish his “re-analysis” in that dumping ground for right wing pseudoscience and antivax conspiracy theories, the Journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

The conspiracy theory comes in, because Hooker got the data to “reanalyze” from a CDC scientist whom antivax conspiracy theorists quickly dubbed the “CDC whistleblower.” In this conspiracy theory, the “whistleblower” was a senior scientist in the Immunization Branch named William W. Thompson, who, for reasons that still remain unclear, had reached out to Brian Hooker sometime in November 2013. 

The apparent reason that Thompson first contacted Hooker, besides his being disgruntled with DeStefano and CDC leadership, was that in the original DeStefano et al study there was an anomalous result in one subgroup suggesting a correlation between MMR and autism that was almost certainly spurious. Thompson, however, thought that the result had been inappropriately deemphasized. Over the next several months, the two engaged in a series of rather long telephone calls. Unfortunately for Thompson, he was far too trusting, as Hooker recorded every call in which Thompson vented his complaints about DeStefano and multiple other CDC scientists and employees. Hooker in turn was also far too trusting in that he apparently sent electronic files containing some of the recorded phone calls to Andrew Wakefield, who then wasted little time taking snippets of Thompson’s accusations and publicizing them with an inflammatory video that compared the supposedly “covered up result” in the paper to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. (The subgroup in question was Black boys.) Based on Thompson’s telling Hooker how to access the data set used for DeStefano et al, Hooker did his own incredibly incompetent “reanalysis” of the data, as I described above.

A carefully cherry-picked sample of four of of these calls between Hooker and Thompson were transcribed and ultimately served as the basis of a book by an antivax lawyer named Kevin Barry, Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Autism Research Fraud at the CDC, which I read and reviewed, as did other science advocates, including an epidemiologist and a law professor, both of whom have commented on this blog extensively before. Personally, I like the part where the epidemiologist remarks on Hooker’s statement that “I am not an epidemiologist by training” with a pithy, “And it shows.” Personally, I also like to quote another bon mot by Hooker in which he touts “simplicity” above all in epidemiological analyses, specifically in reference to his “reanalysis” of the Atlanta data regarding MMR safety that claimed to find a large increase in the risk of autism associated with MMR vaccination in African-American boys:

I think that in statistics simplicity is elegance. And I’m not really that smart; so I like to do simple, easy things rather than much more intellectually challenging things. So I did the simplest, most straightforward analysis, which is a Chi Squared analysis…

As I’ve said many times, in statistics and epidemiology, the simplest, most straightforward analysis is often—if not usually—not the correct analysis. That’s why epidemiologists and statisticians spend so many years learning how to control for confounders!

I could go on and on and on about Brian Hooker—and have!—but I need to move on. However, before I do so, it’s worth mentioning that Brian Hooker is tight with a man who is arguably the second most famous antivaxxer in the world (after RFK Jr.), Andrew Wakefield, and featured heavily in the antivax conspiracy-fest of a movie VAXXED, which Wakefield directed and antivax activist Del Bigtree produced.

In the movie, Hooker’s story is dramatic and very similar to many stories of regression into autism after vaccination. It is also, as Matt Carey explains, a story that’s full of holes. I don’t mean to imply by this that Hooker is lying. Rather, human memory is malleable and parental recollection, when compared to objective records, is often shown to be incorrect. In this case, we have the records of Hooker’s case before the Vaccine Court, for which a claim of vaccine injury was denied, to compare to what Hooker says in the film. I urge you to read Carey’s post and Dorit Reiss’ analysis of Hooker’s case. Hooker states in VAXXED:

Two weeks after his 15 month vaccines, then he lost all language. He lost all eye contact. You would pick him up and he would just hang limp.

Yet according to court records, his son was seen by his pediatrician 19 days after his vaccination, and no such symptoms were noted, just fever, irritability, and decreased appetite. Moreover, other court records note that the Hookers had reported decreased eye contact as early as 12 months. Of course, there’s no way for a viewer of VAXXED to know this or to be familiar with just how unreliable human memory can be and how easily memories over time come to conform themselves with preexisting beliefs. It is a human trait to which we are all prone. There’s also no easy way for reporters or Democratic staffers preparing members of the subcommittee for this hearing to know this stuff without a lot of investigation.

In any event, the best way to approach Hooker, I think, is to hammer home that there is no good evidence that vaccines cause autism, harp on his position as the Chief Scientific Officer of RFK Jr.’s antivax organization Children’s Health Defense, as well as his frequent promotion of very bad science.

Polley Tommey: Andrew Wakefield’s bud

Next up is Polly Tommey. She, too, believes that her son’s autism was caused by vaccines, and she, too, was featured in VAXXED. Polly Tommey is the editor of the magazine The Autism File, which peddles antivaccine pseudoscience and quack “autism biomed” treatments, and the founder of The Autism Trust, which exists to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism. Better known in England than the US, she has also worked closely with Wakefield on the Autism Media Channel (e.g., the deceptively told story of the murder of autistic boy Alex Spourdalakis, whose mother was heavily into “autism biomed” quackery). She and her husband have an autistic son whose autism they blame on the MMR, and that is what drove her into the antivaccine camp. In brief, her son Tommy was diagnosed at age 2 with severe autism but has since grown up and is high-functioning now.

In reality, she is as antivaccine as Wakefield. Some of the most exploitative footage of autistics used in VAXXED are of her son. Unsurprisingly, Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, and Polly Tommey used VAXXED as a tool in a publicity campaign to try to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about vaccines using the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory(about which a primer can be found here). When the film was in theaters, Tommey traveled around, appearing at these screenings and regaling audiences with red meat antivax takes like:

 At a screening of the film in the summer, Ms Tommey told the audience that all vaccines were unsafe.

“Stay away from these paediatricians, they are dangerous. Sorry paediatricians, but you are,” she said. “There clearly is no safe vaccine. I can tell you we will never trust again, we will never stick in another needle. You can say it’s a safe vaccine — we will never believe you.”

And:

British anti-vaccination campaigner, Polly Tommey, who believes the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused her son’s autism, sparked outrage when she told audiences around Australia that ‘doctors were murderers’.

You get the idea. She also supports a lot of antivax autism quackery, and her husband runs an “autism biomed” clinic:

Tommey is controversial in other ways, too. Her desire for residential centres for people with autism is not universally supported, with many other charities advocating that care should be brought into the wider community. Her magazine’s focus on nutritional remedies has raised questions: her husband, a nutritionist, runs the Autism Clinic, a private practice offering treatment through dietary modifications. Some, such as the GP and author Michael Fitzpatrick, have voiced concern that her success at grabbing the attention of political leaders has detracted focus away from the efforts of the more mainstream National Autistic Society.

Again, there is no evidence that the MMR vaccine is associated with an increased risk of autism, Tommey’s story and longtime activism with Wakefield and Bigtree (among others) notwithstanding. She is an antivax activist.

Emily Tarsell: “Death by Gardasil”?

I’ve actually written about the case of Christina Tarsell on a number of occasions dating back to 2013, where the case was first publicized in a news report by Katie Couric, leading me to characterize her report as “antivaccine or irresponsible journalism, you be the judge.” The report featured Christina Tarsell’s mother Emily basically blaming Christina’s sudden and unexpected death on the HPV vaccine (specifically Gardasil). In brief, Christina Tarsell died unexpectedly at the age of 21, and Tarsell has been telling the world that she thinks Gardasil killed her daughter ever since, telling the Institute of Medicine, having her story featured on website of the the antivaccine group National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), and, of course, being featured by Katie Couric in a report in which antivax misinformation was presented side-by-side with scientists in a highly annoying example of journalistic “false balance.”

In her report, Couric began, as was appropriate, by expressing sympathy for Tarsell’s loss. As I always point out, it’s horrible when a parent loses a child. Even recognizing that, at the time I found the interview pretty pointless, because it consisted mainly of Emily Tarsell going on and on about how awesome Christina was and how awful it was that she died while not presenting a single shred of evidence that Gardasil had anything to do with her daughter’s death. Indeed, when Couric asked Tarsell what her daughter’s symptoms had been, she demurred, refusing to answer, adding, “Because we have a case pending, I cannot go into detail what happened each time,” referring to each dose of Gardasil. All I learned from the interview was that Emily died suddenly 18 days after receiving her third dose of Gardasil, and that the autopsy failed to find a cause of death.

What wasn’t mentioned is that Emily Tarsell was on the board of directors of the antivaccine political group known as the Canary Party, which was behind an effort to have a Congressional hearing in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Darrell Issa. Fortunately, it failed. It should also be noted that Tarsell is also one of the founders of SaneVax, a group known for peddling a manual for blaming the death of one’s child on vaccines and peddling pseudoscientific antivaccine fear mongering. More recently, SaneVax published a guide entitled Gardasil HPV: What to Do If You or Your Daughter Suspect Premature Ovarian Failure. It doesn’t matter that convincing evidence supporting a link between premature ovarian failure and Gardasil is basically nonexistent. Yes, Emily Tarsell is another longtime antivax activist.

Moreover, before her appeance with Katie Couric, Tarsell had not been shy at all about telling her daughter’s story in detail. For example:

This video is remarkable—well, maybe not so much anymore—for taking reports of death after Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database at face value. Also, in this video, we learn that Tarsell didn’t think about Gardasil as the cause of her daughter’s death until weeks later, when a family member mentioned reports of Gardasil and Tarsell remembered that her daughter had complained of not feeling well after the shot. What was wrong? She said she was tired and felt dizzy when she stood up. Elsewhere, I learned that a few days after the third Gardasil vaccine, Emily felt dizzy and complained of fatigue. These are very vague symptoms, and could be due to many things. As tragic as it is and as much sympathy as we all feel for Tarsell, her story is a perfect example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because Christina Tarsell received Gardasil before she died unexpectedly does not mean Gardasil caused her death. It doesn’t even mean that it caused her vague symptoms of fatigue. In fact, given the literature out there, it almost certainly didn’t.

In any event, Tarsell took her daughter’s case to the Vaccine Court. It’s not difficult to find this particular document: EMILY TARSELL, As the Executrix of the Estate of CHRISTINA TARSELL…. FINDING OF FACTS. Yes, it’s the finding of fact from the Special Master:

On November 20, 2007, Christina saw a doctor for chronic sinus congestion. The doctor detected an irregular pulse rate. Exhibit 4 at 136. An EKG was abnormal, indicating premature atrial contractions and that Christina ’s heart was beating in pairs. Id. at 142.

Approximately one month later, the EKG was repeated. It appears unchanged from the previous one. Id . at 135 and 141. In February 2008, Christina had a transthoracic echocardiogram. It produced normal results. Exhibit 4 at 139.

There are also notations that Christina complained about feeling dizzy and faint. One has to wonder, given this history, whether Christina had an electrical conduction abnormality in her heart. Such abnormalities often have no accompanying detectable abnormality on the echocardiogram, and, although uncommon, can be a cause of sudden cardiac death in young adults. One also notes that these symptoms occurred several months before the third dose of Gardasil that Mrs. Tarsell blamed for her daughter’s death. Interestingly, antivax “scientist” Yehuda Shoenfeld was called in to consult on this case.

Dorit Reiss wrote in detail about Tarsell’s case in front of the Vaccine Court, noting that the court’s awarding the family compensation was not proof of HPV vaccine-related mortality – just legal errors. Although the story behind the decision is very complicated, it is worth noting that, in particular, the petitioners had not demonstrated that the arrhythmia had occurred only after Christina had received Gardasil. My take on the case is that most likely Christina Tarsell had a preexisting arrhythmia that led to sudden cardiac death unrelated to the vaccine. I’d read Dorit’s post for the details on why the Vaccine Court decision was not good evidence that Gardasil had been responsible for Christina Tarsell’s death.

Corbyn Cordingly: Death after influenza vaccination?

Here, we get to the first case with which I’m not that familiar, meaning that I had to research it a bit. That’s why this case, probably above others, is one where I will be very interested in seeing the testimony before the subcommittee, so that I can judge it for myself. It’s not difficult, however, to find on a Google search, articles in which Corbyn’s mother Krystle proclaims that her son was “murdered.” Details, however, are sketchy:

She recalls October 18, 2013, the last day of her 13 month-old son’s life, in perfect detail.

From the uncomprehending, tearful look he gave her after the flu shot, to the meal she prepared for him before her evening shift at the hospital – which she still keeps in her freezer, unable to throw it away – to how his dad peeked into his room, thought that his son was sleeping peacefully on his stomach and didn’t come closer.

Then, how when she returned home, and was preparing to nurse him, she noticed his chest was not moving, turned over his face, and screamed, aware straight away it was too late. Then, the vainly desperate attempts to revive him.

“Of all my years of emergency response training I never thought the first child I would use my emergency training on would be my own,” says Cordingley. “I still have flashbacks of the medical personnel cracking my child’s sternum to continue a more productive CPR, compressing his chest like he was a rag doll.”

Assured only that her son did not suffocate, Cordingley, who lives in Ogden, Utah, wanted to know more, and would not let it go. She says that a third-party neuropathologist identified severe damage to Corbyn’s brain stem and hippocampus, and told the mother, that “she sees that much damage from younger SIDS [Sudden Infant Death Syndrome] babies all the time, but never in older children and she is surprised he lived as long as he did.” 

Cordingley believes that it is not unrelated that as well as the flu shot, Corbyn received five different vaccines, including MMR, 43 days before his death.

There is a video that Cordingley made five years ago:

It’s a heart-wrenching story, but did the flu vaccine have anything to do with this toddler’s death? It’s really hard to say, but it isn’t difficult to feel sorry for Cordingley and understand why she might think her child had been “murdered in his bed.” It would be interesting to know who the “third party neuropathologist” was who claimed to have “severe damage to Corbyn’s brain stem and hippocampus” and to see “much damage from younger SIDS [Sudden Infant Death Syndrome] babies all the time.” Just from that quote, I had my suspicions about who it might be, the first one being Douglas Miller, a neuropathologist known for having testified in favor of the false idea that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome. In the video, Cordingley claims that this neuropathologist had found that Corbyn’s brainstem was so “scarred over” that she couldn’t understand how Corbyn had been alive as long as he had. Cordingley further claims that the pathologist—referred to as “she,” so not Miller, I guess—had described the brainstem as having been “eaten away.”

My sympathy for Corbyn and his family aside—and, make no mistake, it is impossible to watch that video without tearing up—scarring like that simply does not happen in 13 hours. If the flu vaccine had indeed caused major injury to the brainstem, what one would expect to find at 13 hours would be acute inflammation and maybe necrosis (cell death). One would also expect to have observed symptoms if there had been so much damage to the brainstem, because brainstem function is utterly essential to life. Indeed, any competent pathologist could have and would have told her that, which is why I strongly suspect that the pathologist is feeding the Tarsells a line of BS. What I would hope for in Tarsell’s testimony is is for her to identify the neuropathologist and show actual histologic slides demonstrating this “scarring” and “eaten away” brainstem. Unfortunately, what I expect from her testimony is that she will likely simply repeat what she has said above, without identifying the pathologist. In any event, it might be tricky, but perhaps one Senator could ask her to identify the neuropathologist and if that pathologist wrote up a report.

Dr. Robert Sullivan: COVID-19 vaccine and pulmonary hypertension?

The case of Dr. Robert Sullivan is also one that I was not familiar with either, although maybe I should have been, given that his was the first anecdote used in a truly awful piece of “investigative journalism” published in 2023 in The BMJ and authored by Jennifer Block that proclaimed that VAERS is “broken? I wrote about the story in detail soon after it was published, but I’ll quote the anecdote used again here:

Three weeks after receiving a second dose of a covid vaccine, Robert Sullivan collapsed at home on his treadmill. An anaesthesiologist in Maryland, USA, he was a particularly fit 49 year old: the week before falling ill, he’d been happily skiing at altitude in Colorado.

Sullivan was given a diagnosis of sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, which is generally progressive, can be fatal, and in most cases can’t be cured. The condition is rare, especially in middle aged men. Sullivan decided to file a report in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals.

But the submission process was a glitchy race against the clock. “The format is cumbersome and it times you out,” he tells The BMJ. For his troubles, Sullivan received a confirmation by email and a temporary “e-report” number. He learnt from his doctor’s office that a VAERS representative had requested medical records. Then he didn’t hear back for a year.

As one of my commenters drily noted:

I’ve got to say something: Three weeks after the vaccination, but one week after a trip from sea level Maryland to high altitude 11,000 ft skier central Colorado? Couldn’t possibly have been the altitude change, huh?

I tend to doubt that’s the cause either, but, yes, amazing how, three weeks after vaccination—and the second dose at that!—it just had to be the vaccine. Dr. Sullivan even co-authored a case report on himself and one other person who developed pulmonary hypertension after receiving COVID vaccine, in a predatory journal, of course:

Case #1 is a previously healthy 49-year-old male physician athlete, body mass index (BMI) 23, non-smoker with a history of mild exercise-induced asthma treated with albuterol. The patient completed the primary series of Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2), Dose 1 in December 2020 and Dose 2 in January 2021. Approximately three weeks after the second dose, the patient suddenly developed severe fatigue, flu-like symptoms, tachycardia, palpitations, orthostasis, right-sided chest pressure and dyspnea on exertion. SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing was negative at the time of the onset of these symptoms. Transthoracic echocardiogram revealed normal left ventricular function with an ejection fraction (EF) of 65%, normal right ventricular size and function and a maximal tricuspid regurgitation velocity (TRV_max) of 3.09 m/s. The estimated right ventricular systolic pressure (RVSP) of 42 mmHg was interpreted as mild/moderate pulmonary hypertension (Table 1). Laboratory studies including measurement of brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) (22 pg/mL; reference range < 900 pg/mL) were unremarkable except for elevated low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and a hematocrit of 50%. Pulmonary computer tomography (CT) angiogram with 3D reconstruction of the PA tree was normal without evidence of pulmonary clots (Figure 1). The patient subsequently developed 15 lbs of fluid gain and generalized swelling, neck pressure, headaches and a feeling of “being hung upside down” consistent with jugular vein distention (JVD) and cerebral venous congestion. The resting oxygen saturation (SpO₂) was 92% and there was new onset systolic and diastolic arterial hypertension. Symptoms and chest pressure occurred at rest and were exacerbated by exertion. Exercise and functional limitations were consistent with New York Heart Association (NYHA) Class 3–4. Serial echocardiograms showed no worsening of RVSP and continued normal RV function (Table 1). Symptoms and exercise tolerance improved to NYHA class 1–2 over one year. Fluid weight gain, swelling, tachycardia and arterial hypertension resolved and the resting SpO2 increased to 98–100%. Flu-like symptoms and fatigue diminished but did not disappear. RVSP remained elevated and essentially unchanged by follow up echocardiography (Table 1). This case was reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS ID 1039123).

You don’t need to know all the medical jargon, but from this I gather that the pulmonary hypertension is real. However, one thing I also know is that pulmonary hypertension can be difficult to diagnose in its early stages, as cardiologist Dr. Ronald Zolty has described:

“Pulmonary hypertension in its earliest stages is difficult to diagnose and often gets overlooked because it doesn’t show up in standard cardiac diagnostic tests,” says Dr. Zolty.

In its earliest stages, patients often complain of shortness of breath, especially with exertion. If an echocardiogram is ordered, it too will typically come out normal unless the right side of the heart is evaluated. Even then, the test may still appear normal if the patient is in his or her earliest stages.

In other words, it’s quite possible that Dr. Sullivan had had early stage pulmonary hypertension for a long time before he became symptomatic, especially if he was, as he bills himself, very healthy and active, as he would have had a lot more cardiac reserve to fall back on before he developed symptoms.

I did a brief perusal of the literature and found little other than scattered case reports that might link COVID-19 vaccination to pulmonary hypertension, and then those case reports tended to report microthrombi (microscopic clots) as the mechanism. Dr. Sullivan denies having evidence of microthrombi, and, indeed, his publication with two case reports is the only one I could find linking COVID-19 vaccination to pulmonary hypertension without evidence of microthrombi. In any event, even authors who acknowledge the possible link conclude that the benefits of vaccination widely outweigh the risks, and I also can’t help but note that Dr. Sullivan has appeared on at least one antivax YouTube vlog, that of John Campbell.

This will be antivax propaganda

Even before RFK Jr. became HHS Secretary and started using his post to undermine confidence in vaccines and chip away at the federal vaccination program, his endgame clearly being to eliminate as many vaccines as he can before he has to leave office, various Republican antivax legislators liked to put on these sorts of “hearings” in order to harass the CDC and FDA, as well as to undermine public confidence in vaccines. The difference now is that the entire nonmilitary federal health infrastructure is being run by an antivax activist, who has appointed sycophants, toadies, and lackeys who are either antivax, antivax-adjacent, or useful idiots. That means that spectacles like this one being put on by Senator Johnson will be even more dangerous than they were in the past, if only because RFK Jr. might pay attention and use them for ideas on how further to degrade public health in this country.