Dr Keith Berkowitz is a founding member, with Dr Pierre Kory, of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). He is treating a lot of vaccine-injured patients at his practice in midtown Manhattan. Dr Berkowitz was kind enough to answer a few questions on the COVID-19 vaccine and the vaccine injured. 

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Who is most at risk for vaccine injury?

One thought is that if someone had Covid first, and then got the vaccine after being sick, the rates of vaccine injury were higher because they already had an antibody response, their immune system was already revved up, and then they got an injection of another antigen. Another group I see is people with autoimmune disease, they seem to be more triggered. I have several cases of people who had dormant autoimmune diseases, such as ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis, and post-vaccine it got retriggered. What people forget about vaccines is that they have an immunosuppressive effect. So in that two- to three-week period, the immune system takes a hit, which makes the body vulnerable to other illnesses. The third group I see that is most at risk of vaccine injury are people with high histamine levels.

What are the most common symptoms of vaccine injury?

The mildest is probably loss of taste and smell, mild digestive issues, or a cough. More severe are the autoimmune responses, the neurological symptoms, like brain fog, and tinnitus (which is one of the toughest to treat), myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart), and cancer, which I would call the most severe.

Is that new cancers, or cancers that have returned?

I’m seeing both.

Which autoimmune diseases are you seeing?

First, autoimmune disease is what I’m seeing most in vaccine injury. Specifically thyroid disease, more than anything else. What’s interesting is that I’m seeing normal thyroid function and positive thyroid antibodies. So typically we wouldn’t check for thyroid antibodies if thyroid function was normal. So that group is often missed for that reason.

Would you say any vaccine was worse than the others?

It seems to be batch-related. That’s the question. There’s a theory that 10 percent of the batches, roughly, caused 90 percent of the issues. If you look at the original technology, the mRNA was created at 70 percent purity. There’s speculation that, because of manufacturing issues, they weren’t able to create that level of purity, and achieved only 50-55 percent purity. So does one really know if that level of purity works? Especially being that it was never tested.

Why is there so much denial around vaccine injury?

I think there was a blind trust in the government and the pharmaceutical companies, coupled with a fear aspect of Covid (remember people thought that 50 percent of hospitalised Covid patients died when it was more like less than 1 percent). Fear made people not think anymore, and now they’re in denial about the choice they made. Another thing I can’t figure out: If you’re vaccinated, how does an unvaccinated person put you at risk? Also, why did doctors not do their own research? It was blind faith. Medications all have side effects – why was this one different?

How do you respond to the proponents of the vaccine who say, regarding vaccine injury, correlation is not causation?  

That’s true, but why are they not even looking into it? If they are so confident, then just study it. What do they have to lose? Why not disprove it? Why is disproving it a major issue for them? If you don’t agree with me, prove me wrong.

Traditionally, vaccines take 10-15 years to get approval, because all that time they are studying long-term effects. The Covid vaccine, which was administered as soon as it was created, is still only about three years old. Therefore, have we yet to see the potential damage it can cause? 

Absolutely. Do you know what percentage of drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration are withdrawn within five years? 31 percent. One out of three drugs are taken off the market within five years. That’s incredibly high. That tells me we’re not checking properly. Now with this vaccine, one of my biggest questions is why we decided to use new technology. Is a pandemic the right time to test new technology? I would argue probably not. And why did some countries around the world, like China and Russia, not use this technology? And at the end of the day, we have to ask, was the treatment worse than the problem? And should medical products be tied to financial incentives? That creates a huge conflict. There were incentives to use the vaccine. If a drug or a treatment was really that good, would you need to push it like that?

Any final comments?

This is going to take years to figure out. It isn’t going away anytime soon. I feel bad for the people who took something that they thought they were doing for the right reason, and now they are suffering. And they’re not being helped. Why does the government create a long Covid initiative, but not a vaccine-injured initiative? Why are we ignoring these patients? And why are we [in the US] approving a product for over months when other countries are saying over 65 years? Another thing that doesn’t make sense is a study on teenagers showed that we have to vaccinate a million young men to prevent one hospitalisation. And the potential in a million doses is 1,000 with side effects. So the hospital-to-side effect rate is one to a thousand. It doesn’t make any sense! My worry is that trust in the medical system may never come back. And I’m not sure that it’s not deserved.