MINNEAPOLIS — After more than 13 billion COVID vaccines given around the world, the largest studies to date point to the general safety of the mRNA vaccines, but questions from a small group of Minnesotans claiming vaccine injury remain unanswered.
That includes people like Craig Norkus. He's been shooting stories as a photojournalist at KARE 11 for 22 years, but in November of 2022, he became ill with something he cannot fully explain to this day.
“I felt like I was dying,” said Norkus. “I was lost, looking for answers, and no one had any.”
Two days following a booster dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, Norkus says he started suffering head and body aches, severe exhaustion, and confusion, along with cool and hot tingling in his fingers and legs.
Blood tests revealed his immune system was under attack, but five separate specialty doctors could not explain the source of his symptoms.
In April last year, an osteopathic doctor diagnosed Norkus with immunosuppression and small fiber neuropathy. The doctor believes the conditions were triggered by the vaccine
Craig's diagnosis remains controversial—in science and politics—with others claiming similar situations. More on that below. But first, no study to date has been able to prove the mRNA vaccines can cause these neurological complications.
The latest research
This study from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine came out last week. After reviewing all available studies related to 19 potential harms of the COVID-19 vaccines, researchers found only one adverse event with a proven link to the Pfizer and Moderna shots, and that’s myocarditis—inflammation of the heart. The experts in the study determined the two mRNA vaccines do not cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, Bell’s palsy, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) or heart attack. Researchers determined there's not enough evidence to accept or deny a link to any other neurological issues studied.
Another study published by the Global COVID Vaccine Safety Project in February is the largest study on COVID vaccines to date. Researchers looked for the rates of serious side effects through health care codes after 242 million COVID shots in eight countries. The results showed “statistically significant” increases in myocarditis and pericarditis after most Pfizer and Moderna doses. The only other safety signal came after the first dose of Moderna, where researchers found seven cases out of 36 million shots. They expected to see two cases.
“If you are looking at side effects of the various COVID vaccines, it's exactly what we expected them to be at about the rate we thought it would be,” said Dr. Tim Schacker, infectious disease specialist and vice dean for research at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
He says all vaccines come with an inherent risk of rare side effects, but he emphasizes the risks of COVID have been proven far worse than the risks after taking the vaccine.
A study out of New York University found the chances of having neurological problems after a COVID infection to be 617 times higher than after a COVID vaccine.
Another commonly cited study published in Nature Medicine showed the risk of myocarditis to be at least four times higher, on average, after a COVID infection versus vaccination.
“We estimated extra myocarditis events to be between 1 and 10 per million persons in the month following vaccination, which was substantially lower than the 40 extra events per million persons observed following SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the study’s authors claim.
Despite the vaccine safety data and the well-defined threat of COVID, Pew Research found only 28 percent of U.S. adults are up to date on their COVID shots, down from 69 percent in August of 2021.
“I hear a lot from people who say, ‘Well, I had COVID. I didn't go to the hospital. I was fine,’” I asked Dr. Schacker. “Why take the risk of being vaccinated when there is risk associated with it?”
Schacker replied, “You can make that argument with measles, you can make that argument with flu, with any vaccine there is, tetanus. The other issue is just public health. We have a lot of people who will die of COVID. In this country, it was one million people. Had we had the vaccine sooner, or a better uptake of it, that number would have been significantly smaller.”
Questions unanswered
But, as stated earlier, there are still questions no study has been able to answer.
A study from the online journal Vaccines identifies 191 people who developed a combination of chronic neurological symptoms shortly after vaccination. None had prior COVID infections nor a history of these symptoms.
“We can't turn our backs on them,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who co-created the LISTEN Study.
LISTEN stands for Listen to Immune, Symptoms and Treatment Experiences Now, and it’s described as a “knowledge-sharing network of people experiencing symptoms of long COVID, post-vaccine syndrome, and associated conditions.”
The study identified 241 people reporting an overlap of symptoms like excessive fatigue, numbness, brain fog and neuropathy following mRNA vaccination. About one-third of the participants say they had COVID at least once.
“The polarization of this issue, the politics that surround it, I think are an impediment to people coming in and doing this kind of research. There are really few options for them. We don't know very much about how to help them. We don't know how to even clearly diagnose them,” said Krumholz.
People like Ashley Moe and Suzanna Newell, both from the Twin Cities, are both participants in the Yale study.
“That first day I thought this was normal, everybody has this sort of reaction,” said Moe, who says heart palpitations accompanied some 30 other neurological symptoms days after her third COVID shot.
She says many of those symptoms persisted throughout her pregnancy and continue today.
Medical records show Newell has been diagnosed with more than a dozen disorders after her second COVID shot, including POTS, small fiber neuropathy and cryoglobulinemia. Her symptoms have lasted more than two years.
“This took me down in less than two days,” said Newell. “I ended up in the hospital at the Mayo [Clinic], and they kept saying they thought I had COVID long-haul, but I kept saying I never had COVID.”
Today, people like Norkus, Moe and Sewell cannot prove the source of their suffering, but they find some comfort in sharing their stories with one another, hoping for relief as the science moves forward.
“There's no vaccine in history that has been in a position where it hasn't caused some harm. It's about net benefit. Millions of lives were saved with these vaccines. There's no question that it was a huge net benefit. And it is incumbent upon us to listen carefully and pay attention to what they are experiencing and to work hard to try and help them,” said Krumholz.
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