Dr. Michael Mörz, who works at Hospital Dresden-Friedrichstadt in Germany, published a case report on a 76-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who died three weeks after receiving his third COVID-19 shot.
The report was published in the international, peer-reviewed journal Vaccines on October 1, 2022.
According to the report, the patient received the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vector shot in May 2021, followed by the Pfizer-BioNTech injection in July and December of that same year.
The family of the deceased man requested an autopsy due to “ambiguous clinical signs before death.”
From the case report:
PD was confirmed by post-mortem examinations. Furthermore, signs of aspiration pneumonia and systemic arteriosclerosis were evident. However, histopathological analyses of the brain uncovered previously unsuspected findings, including acute vasculitis (predominantly lymphocytic) as well as multifocal necrotizing encephalitis of unknown etiology with pronounced inflammation including glial and lymphocytic reaction. In the heart, signs of chronic cardiomyopathy as well as mild acute lympho-histiocytic myocarditis and vasculitis were present. Although there was no history of COVID-19 for this patient, immunohistochemistry for SARS-CoV-2 antigens (spike and nucleocapsid proteins) was performed. Surprisingly, only spike protein but no nucleocapsid protein could be detected within the foci of inflammation in both the brain and the heart, particularly in the endothelial cells of small blood vessels. Since no nucleocapsid protein could be detected, the presence of spike protein must be ascribed to vaccination rather than to viral infection. The findings corroborate previous reports of encephalitis and myocarditis caused by gene-based COVID-19 vaccines.
Cont. from the case report:
The clinical history of the current case showed some remarkable events in correlation to his COVID-19 vaccinations.
Already on the day of his first vaccination in May 2021 (ChAdOx1 nCov-19 vector vaccine), he experienced cardiovascular symptoms, which needed medical care and from which he recovered only slowly. After the second vaccination in July 2021 (BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine), the family recognized remarkable behavioral and psychological changes and a sudden onset of marked progression of his PD symptoms, which led to severe motor impairment and recurrent need for wheelchair support.
He never fully recovered from this but still was again vaccinated in December 2021. Two weeks after this third vaccination (second vaccination with BNT162b2), he suddenly collapsed while taking his dinner. Remarkably, he did not show any coughing or other signs of food aspiration but just fell from his chair.
This raises the question of whether this sudden collapse was really due to aspiration pneumonia. After intense resuscitation, he recovered from this more or less, but one week later, he again suddenly collapsed silently while taking his meal. After successful but prolonged resuscitation attempts, he was transferred to the hospital and directly set into an artificial coma but died shortly thereafter. The clinical diagnosis was death due to aspiration pneumonia. Due to his ambiguous symptoms after the COVID-vaccinations the family asked for an autopsy.
Dr. Michael Mörz explained further how the presence of spike protein in in the heart and brain was a result of the shot, rather than viral infection.
Although there was no history of COVID-19 for this patient, immunohistochemistry for SARS-CoV-2 antigens (spike and nucleocapsid proteins) was performed.
Spike protein could be indeed demonstrated in the areas of acute inflammation in the brain (particularly within the capillary endothelium) and the small blood vessels of the heart. Remarkably, however, the nucleocapsid was uniformly absent. During an infection with the virus, both proteins should be expressed and detected together.
On the other hand, the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines encode only the spike protein and therefore, the presence of spike protein only (but no nucleocapsid protein) in the heart and brain of the current case can be attributed to vaccination rather than to infection. This agrees with the patient’s history, which includes three vaccine injections, the third one just 3 weeks before his death, but no positive laboratory or clinical diagnosis of the infection.
The final diagnosis of the patient was abscedating bilateral bronchopneumonia, Parkinson’s disease, necrotic encephalitis, and myocarditis.
“Immunohistochemistry for SARS-CoV-2 antigens (spike protein and nucleocapsid) revealed that the lesions with necrotizing encephalitis as well as the acute inflammatory changes in the small blood vessels (brain and heart) were associated with abundant deposits of the spike protein SARS-CoV-2 subunit 1. Since the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-2 was consistently absent, it must be assumed that the presence of spike protein in affected tissues was not due to an infection with SARS-CoV-2 but rather to the transfection of the tissues by the gene-based COVID-19-vaccines,” Dr. Mörz stated.
“This is strongly suggestive that the spike protein may have played at least a contributing role to the development of the lesions and the course of the disease in this patient,” he added.
The case report’s conclusion stated:
Numerous cases of encephalitis and encephalomyelitis have been reported in connection with the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines, with many being considered causally related to vaccination. However, this is the first report to demonstrate the presence of the spike protein within the encephalitic lesions and to attribute it to vaccination rather than infection. These findings corroborate a causative role of the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines, and this diagnostic approach is relevant to potentially vaccine-induced damage to other organs as well.
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