Letter from a pathologist
Re: long covid and vaccine-related health issues
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
For anyone wondering about long covid and vaccine-related health issues, I thought it worth sharing an exceptional letter from pathologist Dr Clare Craig who featured in this post back in April:
What she writes is far better than anything I have seen from any official public health body or mainstream media journalist.
Her letter comes in the context of a recent post from Julia Lawton, a professor of Health and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. Given that its content is both fairly long and written from a pathologist to a professor, I have taken the liberty of providing a somewhat abridged version for readers of this Substack, with some of the more technical parts removed, and occasional [explanatory comments] and visual material added.
If you know people who are scientists or medics, they should be able to understand the full version, and may well be able answer any questions you may have. Though some of them — perhaps including Prof Lawton — may be encountering much of this information for the first time themselves.
The letter is thoroughly referenced and cites only peer-reviewed literature — for what that is worth.1
1. Asymptomatic covid (as opposed to presymptomatic covid) cannot cause pathology
Diseases are based on symptoms. Some diseases have an asymptomatic period before symptoms. No diseases are asymptomatic. It would be a contradiction. Asymptomatic infection, as opposed to presymptomatic infection, means a positive test in someone who never develops symptoms… Finding such contamination on a swab in someone who never develops symptoms means either: the sample was contaminated in the hospital air or laboratory, there was virus in the airway but it never entered a cell or there was virus in the airway but the immune system killed it when it entered a cell. In none of these circumstances would there be a possibility of serious pathology resulting.
2. The vaccines contain the whole spike sequence
Many professionals have assumed that the vaccines contain only peptide sequences as that would be the right approach to make them safe. That is not what happened. The AstraZeneca vaccine contained the whole unadulterated 1273 amino acid sequence for [SARS-CoV-2] spike.2 Pfizer and Moderna switched out [just two of the amino acids in the mRNA spike] in an attempt to reduce the shape change… that allows cell entry… Even without any… ways of entering and interacting with cells the spike was made inside cells in the first place thanks to the vaccine delivery systems.
The pathology that [some are] so concerned about regarding the spike on the virus can [also] result from these vaccines (and more besides).
3. These “vaccines” used novel technology
“Vaccine” is a very powerful word. We are told [that vaccines] are “modern medical miracles” and they are almost synonymous with “safe and effective” [but] they… should be treated on merit not as sacred cows.
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna
a) Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs)
The mRNA [products] used lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) which were first designed as a drug delivery system in the 1990s. The first gene therapy to use RNA delivered in lipid nanoparticles was approved by the FDA in 2018. LNPs were specifically designed… to reach every part of the body and to enter the nucleus of a cell… However, the pharmaceutical companies found that repeated dosing led to problems with toxicity. Because of this Novartis, Merck and Roche abandoned the platform… Moderna and BioNTech decided to focus their technology on vaccines instead — because, they claimed, with vaccines repeated dosing is not necessary and the toxicity issues can be avoided. The irony of this is not difficult to see.
The first approved vaccines using this system were the covid vaccines. The CEO of Pfizer commented that “mRNA was a technology that had never delivered a single product until that day.” Before the covid vaccine trial there were 285 people who had been administered mRNA vaccines, all in the last few years and all in a clinical trial setting. Severe adverse events, which are reactions that cause hospitalisation, disability or are life threatening occurred in between 1% and 12% in these small trials… The covid vaccine trials did not include a group given only LNPs so the extent of toxicity remains poorly measured.
The damage inside the cell from LNPs is of little importance if it is destined to die. However, not all LNPs contain mRNA and so not all affected cells will die...
b) Modified RNA
The mRNA products were gene therapies. The official definition is broad and includes treatments that use genetic messaging i.e. [messenger] RNA… BioNTech, the company that partnered with Pfizer to make the Pfizer product, published a paragraph about mRNA technology classification in… 2019 [saying] “mRNA therapies have been classified as gene therapy medicinal products.”
Moderna… said, “mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA”.3
Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson
The FDA’s definition includes both transferred genetic material including RNA or products that act by “specifically altering host (human) genetic sequences.”
The mRNA products fit the first of those two alternative definitions. By the FDA definition the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson products are also gene therapy as they use a genetically modified virus vector to insert DNA into the cell nucleus to make the cell machinery produce spike protein. The Australian gene technology regulator granted AstraZeneca a licence for “Commercial supply of a genetically modified COVID-19 vaccine” in February 2021.
4. Spike in blood from virus compared to vaccine
Spike from virus
One way or another the end result of any viral infection is cell sacrifice. The pessimists like to forget that in the vast majority of cases, the immune system handles exposure to the virus. Where symptoms do develop the immune system efficiently confines the virus to the airways. For SARS-CoV-2 the vast majority of cells sacrificed are mucosal cells lining the respiratory tract. These have a high turnover and will be rapidly replaced as with all cells with a role as a protective barrier. Positive PCR from blood is often a result of circulating viral RNA rather than circulating intact virus capable of infecting other cells… Except in the very sick, viruses remain restricted to the respiratory lining during an infection.
Spike from vaccine
In contrast the vaccine spike is systemic from the outset. Although people were told it would remain in the arm that could never have been true...
[Consider] EpiPens [which] are given into muscle to quickly get adrenaline throughout the body to treat anaphylaxis. This shows just how ridiculous the claim [is] that an injection into muscle will stay in the muscle… Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trial documents revealed that LNPs travelled to many organs in rat biodistribution studies [that show where in the (rat’s) body the LNPs end up]. Measurement stopped after 48 hours despite signs of an increasing rate of accumulation in the ovaries, liver, adrenal gland and spleen.
5. How much spike is produced?
No one knows how much spike protein is produced [by the vaccines] or how it varies based on sex and age etc. Even now, despite the WHO calling for animal studies to answer those questions in December 2020.
Even if each lipid nanoparticle contained only 10 strands of mRNA and even if each of those were only made into 100 spike proteins by the cells they entered, then there would still be 30 trillion spike proteins made as a result of the injection. This is of the same order as the upper end estimate for the number of spikes produced at peak infection with about 40 on each virus particle. In an infection the spike is largely confined to the lining of the airways from where it is expelled from the body. No-one can tell you how many cells end up producing spike after vaccination and how many are therefore sacrificed because no-one has tried to measure it. No-one can tell you which organs they are in either. In December 2021, the MHRA admitted it did not know how many lipid nanoparticles were in a dose, a crucial first question in order to calculate the number of cells sacrificed…
The amount of spike present in the blood in the first two days was of the same order as in an infection. Two weeks after injection there were still 150 billion spike proteins circulating in the blood of 3 out of 13 participants. That’s 1.5 million for each drop of blood.
People have claimed [that] pseudouridine which makes up only 0.2-0.6% of human RNA was used for the mRNA. It was not. A related component4 which is not natural [was used instead]. Studies on this type of RNA only began in 2015. Having deliberately set out to make the RNA last as long as possible, understanding how long was critical. No-one knows how long it lasts in the body. How is it removed? It is the most fundamental of drug safety questions. What happens to it afterwards? Would it be recycled by cells, extending the time other normal RNA lasted? Are the answers different for younger people where protein production might be more efficient? The regulators have still not secured an answer to these questions in 2024.
After one month mRNA was detectable in the blood. In one patient mRNA was found in the muscle of the opposite arm after one month. One study showed mRNA and protein in lymph nodes at the last point they measured 2 months after vaccination. A 64 year old man had spike protein from vaccination demonstrated in his shingles skin biopsy (inside endothelial cells), 3 months after their last dose. Spike was found circulating in exosomes [products from cells] after 4 months in eight out of eight adults.
6. Does vaccine spike cause micro-clots?
Spike protein [causes] inflammation [of the cells lining the interior surface of e.g. blood vessels] and scientists have demonstrated how [such damage] “may be induced by the spike protein alone”… It is easiest to see small vessel damage by looking at the retina. A study in Taiwan showed an increased risk for all age groups of retinal vessel occlusion which can cause blindness. The risk after 12 weeks was three times as high as background rates. After two years the risk was double with an additional case for every 300 vaccinated over 65 year olds and 1000 18-64 year olds.
The covid spike protein has been shown to activate platelets. The receptor binding domain of the spike protein included in the vaccine “could bind platelets, cause platelet activation, and potentiate platelet aggregation” in mice. Another mouse study also showed spike receptor binding domain activated platelets through direct binding. Plasma from a 25 year old woman injected with the Moderna product showed dose dependent platelet activation. The more spike protein present the more platelet activation occurred. She did not have anti-platelet factor 4 antibodies. Four people given Moderna showed low circulating platelet levels at day 3 (arguably due to thrombus formation) which recovered by day 7. They went on to show that platelets themselves were producing spike proteins up to 40 days after vaccination.
Formation [of micro-clots] after mRNA vaccination was serious enough to lead to pulmonary hypertension that was treatable with anticoagulation. It has been proposed that the increased inflammatory state after mRNA vaccination is responsible for an enhanced [likelihood of clot formation]… Three patients presented at days 2-3 after Moderna with clots, despite no predisposition to clotting. Fibrinogen [a protein in the blood] forms clots in the laboratory when spike protein is added to plasma even in the absence of platelets. The clots formed were protein-rich and could not be degraded like usual clots…
7. Other mechanisms of vaccine harm
I have focused above on the spike protein but that is a very narrow view of the causes of harm. The other causes are likely to [result in] a wide breadth of presentations. It is this breadth of presentations that has caused many doctors and the regulators to dismiss the issues as coincidences…
For example, FOIs from FDA show there were 770 conditions where reporting was higher than would be expected compared to unrelated conditions. Of these, 500 had a higher signal than myocarditis [inflammation of the heart muscle, where a link to covid vaccination is now well-established].
[i] Cell damage
The expression of foreign protein [i.e. the spike protein] leads to… cell death. This occurred in organs across the body…
[ii] Vascular damage
Damage to small vessels will affect every organ. A study spanning six neurological departments in the USA demonstrated abnormalities were shown in the small vessels supplying the nerves…
[iii] Unknown proteins
Multiple proteins of unknown function would be produced because of:
Fragmented RNA in the vaccines
…the production of unintended proteins… what was really produced remains a massive unknown…
…unpredictable folding [of proteins] resulting in a new shape and new, unpredictable function
[iv] Endotoxin
[From] mass manufacturing [using] massive vats of E. coli bacteria, commonly found in faeces. E. coli has a harmful substance in its outer layer called endotoxin, which can cause various health problems. Vaccine vials were contaminated with endotoxin.
[v] Foreign nucleoside [i.e. the non-natural component discussed above]
The WHO said, “drugs that contain unnatural nucleoside analogues have caused mitochondrial toxicities, resulting in myopathy, polyneuropathy, lactic acidosis, liver steatosis, pancreatitis, lipodystrophy, and even fatality.” They recommended animal testing to assess this issue.
[vi] Autoimmune harm
When the body attacks its own cells resulting in disease, the medical term used is auto-immune disease. The conventional mechanism is that the immune system is misdirected and attacks the cells but the clinical picture would look just the same if the attack was a result of removing cells expressing foreign protein. The more conventional concern of misdirection of the immune system was also valid, especially given the high levels of antibodies that were produced and especially as the spike protein [was 80% similar to] human proteins.
8. These harms were not a surprise
In summer 2020, The Brighton Collaboration established working groups to examine vaccine side effects including, clotting, cardiovascular injury and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children.
On 22nd October 2020, Steven Anderson who was in charge of drug safety monitoring at the FDA presented a [slide listing] 22 “possible adverse events”... The slide was shown two and a half hours into the meeting and was only visible for one second. The list included demyelinating diseases, seizures, stroke, narcolepsy, allergies, acute myocardial infarction, myocarditis/pericarditis, autoimmune disease, deaths, pregnancy and birth outcomes, clotting issues and thrombocytopenia, arthritis and joint pain, Kawasaki disease, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children and vaccine enhanced disease. This was far from a scatter gun list and the FDA was showing considerable foresight. The following day the MHRA advertised for AI software “to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction”.
An AstraZeneca representative said, “This is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk if in ... four years the vaccine is showing side effects.” The Pfizer-BioNTech contract said “the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and… there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known.”
Pfizer-BioNTech insisted on blanket immunity, or, as in the UK, unlimited indemnity as part of its contracts with the government. Matt Hancock, the health secretary was gung-ho saying, “I would like to stress that the data so far on this vaccine suggests that there will be no adverse reactions, and so no liability.” The UK government signed up saying, “Willingness to accept appropriate indemnities has helped to secure access to vaccines…sooner than may have been the case otherwise.”
The Pfizer contracts included a ten-year secrecy clause but the Albanian, Brazilian and South African contracts ended up published online. At a Brazilian Inquiry into covid in May 2021, the resident and health ministry claimed the terms of the contract had been “abusive”. The CEO of Pfizer Brazil in 2020, Carlos Murillo, said “The conditions that Pfizer sought for Brazil are exactly the same conditions that Pfizer negotiated and signed, at this moment, with more than 110 countries in the world.”
The Indian government would not provide indemnity and told Pfizer that they wanted to run an independent trial of the Pfizer/BioNTech product before agreeing a contract as no Indians had been included in the trials. All other vaccine companies agreed. Rather than cooperate to ensure patient safety, Pfizer walked away from a market containing a sixth of the world’s population.
9. Long covid or long vaccine?
Since 2019 there has been a mass disabling event. The UK had a pretty steady 2 million working aged people who were long term sick from 2012 to 2020. By the end of 2023 there were an extra 800,000. In the USA an extra 3 million have been added to the disabled figures in that time period. In UK and USA the numbers rocketed from May 2021 and stabilised at the end of 2023.
Data from the UK:
Data from the US:
How much of this was due to long covid? There are a proportion of people who have prolonged sickness after a covid infection. In previous years, post-viral syndromes have similarly caused a longer debilitating illness in a minority. Modern medicine could offer little but hand holding while time did the healing. As well as the post viral syndromes, I was taught to tell pneumonia patients, even young ones, that it would be a full six months before they would feel fully recovered. There was never a label for these “long pneumonia” patients so there are no measurements with which to compare such patients with post covid-labelled pneumonia. These conditions are real and can be horribly debilitating, altering the lives of those affected in dramatic ways. I honestly feel for those affected. However, that does not mean long covid caused the rise in long term sickness. The data on overall sickness shows that post-viral illness continued at the same rate as before.
The Governor of the Bank of England (15:23) commented to the Parliamentary Treasury Committee in May 2022 on a 450,000 person drop in the labour force including 320,000 with long-term sickness. Estimates based on surveys and modelling in March 2022 reached a figure of 80,000 for the number of people not working because of long covid. It is not clear how that compares to post-viral and post-pneumonia syndromes from the past. There is an obvious huge discrepancy between the 320,000 people missing from the workforce and the [figure of 80,000] attributable to long covid.
A team at Imperial College stepped up to solve the problem. They carried out a survey and claimed a third of covid patients had self-reported symptoms at 12 weeks. It seems no-one stopped to think whether that seemed realistic. The authors admitted that the offer of a free at home antibody test will have created bias in who responded yet they pressed on and extrapolated their findings to a claim that nearly 2 million, or 1 in 36 of the population had long covid by May 2022. The government disseminated this information and the headline writers then joined in too. The proliferation of this massive number meant the actual gap between reality and long covid could be hidden and dismissed.
How common was it really? A research group at King’s College London established a symptom tracking app, the Zoe App, in early 2020. 4.7 million people used it to enter daily symptoms. Because this followed people before they had an infection there is less room for bias. They found not a third, but only 2.3% had self reported symptoms (of any kind) at 12 weeks. That would mean the total in May 2022 would have been in the tens of thousands not 2 million.
For long covid, every coincidental problem that people have after a positive test was attributed to covid. For post-vaccine problems, every genuine problem was dismissed as a coincidence.
Imagine a study that set out to define “long vaccine”. Every patient admitted to hospital within 28 days of their vaccine would be described as a “vaccine patient”. All subsequent health conditions in this population that were over and above the general levels in the population would be described as “long vaccine”. It would be obvious that this would massively exaggerate the problem and would include all sorts of conditions that are simply more likely in the kind of population who end up in hospital for any reason. However, when the word covid is attached [i.e. when considering “long covid” rather than “long vaccine”] people become blind to these biases.
The timing of the rise in disabilities is critical. Through 2020, there was nothing unusual about the number of people describing themselves as long-term sick. The spring covid wave left no trace on these figures and neither did the first covid winter. The numbers only rocketed from May 2021 and the exact same timing was seen in the USA. The lack of impact on long term sickness prior to spring 2021 does not mean long covid did not exist. It simply means the numbers of people with long covid were equivalent to the numbers with post-viral syndromes and long pneumonia seen in previous years. The timing of the rise in disabilities [which coincided with mass vaccination] was ignored.
The strongest risk factors for developing long covid were being female and having mental disorders especially anxiety. One study showed 48% of those who developed long covid had a mental health problem, predominantly anxiety, and these rates were double the rates in the control group. These risk factors are also predictive of other physical symptoms regardless of the presence of an infection. The clincher should have been that [actually] having had covid, as measured by antibodies, was not a risk factor – only the belief that one had had it. None of this evidence seemed to shift the belief that the disabling event was due to long covid.
Even when a study claimed the symptom most predictive of long covid was having no symptoms at all, the believers doubled down. The founder of USA long COVID advocacy group Survivor Corps said “What's the symptom of acute COVID that is most predictive of #LongCovid? Being ASYMPTOMATIC. No one is protected against #LongCovid. Fear it like the devil.”
10. Did the vaccines prevent long-term symptoms?
Blind faith led to the oft-repeated claim that vaccines would prevent long covid. The Zoe App data showed there was no difference in the likelihood of having persistent symptoms based on vaccine status. Concerningly, 98% of the long covid reported in the study from spring 2021 was seen in the vaccinated group.
There were studies that claimed vaccines prevented long covid but they used more statistical chicanery. One method was to compare long covid rates in spring 2020 in the unvaccinated patients, a disproportionate number of whom were only tested because they were hospitalised, with rates in the vaccinated after [the milder omicron variant]. Rates of long covid after omicron infections were much lower in the unvaccinated as well as the vaccinated so claiming that was a vaccine effect is, at a minimum, disingenuous.
The vaccinated population seemed to fare even worse when they then encountered the virus… Whereas the long covid rate was claimed to be 2.3% in in the unvaccinated Zoe App population, for the vaccinated in Australia it was 18% and this was after omicron infections where the risk is far lower…
11. How much long covid was really long vaccine?
The Zoe App team also showed an interesting change in what were called long covid symptoms before and after vaccination. Both the spring 2020 Wuhan wave and the post-vaccine Delta wave resulted in a similar number who had persistent respiratory symptoms. However, after Delta there were three times as many who had neurological symptoms with no mention of respiratory symptoms. In addition the number who had multi-organ, systemic and immune related symptoms was five times as high. Did these people have a vaccine injury in addition to or rather than long covid?
Public health authorities use data for what people search for on Google as a tool for tracking covid. In theory it is imperfect because news stories can affect search numbers as well as sickness, but in practice it is a useful tool. If long covid was a significant problem you might expect Google searches for “long covid” to rise and fall with a lag after the searches for “covid symptoms” but both search terms were perfectly in synchrony. As soon as people recovered from acute covid they stopped searching for “long covid”. Searches for “vaccine side effects” aligned with the first two doses of the rollout but were far lower for the third dose. However, Google searches for “long covid” surged after the booster doses in late 2021. Were those people who were most concerned about covid and long covid and therefore most likely to take a booster also those least open to the idea of vaccine side effects? If so, the fact that long covid has been measured and studied based on self reported symptoms may mean that adverse reactions have been mislabelled as long covid.
The Imperial survey study that claiming 2 million people had long covid showed a much higher risk of reporting long term symptoms among the older cohorts and in health and social care workers. The study was in early 2021 when these were the only vaccinated groups, yet the v-word did not get mentioned at all. Very few long covid papers examined the relationship to vaccines, but little bit by little bit the association became evident. In January 2022, Science magazine said there were rare instances where the vaccine caused long covid and eighteen months later said this "rare" link was starting to "gain acceptance." They estimated 1 in 450 vaccinated people would end up with a small fibre neuropathy affecting their heart rate and blood pressure. That is too common for a definition of “rare” to apply.
During the vaccine rollout, researchers at Yale University and others suggested, based only on anecdotal evidence, that vaccination could reverse long covid symptoms. The reverse was true. In February 2024, it was shown that when people with long covid were given a vaccine it “prolonged symptoms of long-COVID for more than one year after the initial infection.” A group who designed a test for long covid demonstrated that it was caused by the immune response to residual spike protein. They went on to show spike protein “alone delivered by vaccination can cause similar pathologic features”, and concluded it may be a “major contributor” of long covid symptoms after infection or vaccination.
12. Long covid unknowns
There was a serious lack of meaningful research. The US government committed $1 billion to long covid research but, after two years, not a single patient had been recruited to a treatment trial. The UK government claimed to have spent £314m on specialised healthcare services for people with long covid. Anyone with long vaccine had to go along with the lie that their condition was caused by the virus in order to get treatment. That meant contributing to the inflated claims of the effect of the virus.
Long covid, i.e. post-viral syndrome, does exist but attempts to exaggerate the problem have distorted people’s perception of the risk, keeping them scared. Numbers have been inflated by failing to properly define the syndrome and allowing self-reporting of every medical condition as long covid. Severity has been inflated by equating someone with a long period of loss of smell or a lingering cough to those with debilitating fatigue. The failure to be honest about vaccine injury may also mean that substantial numbers of people who believe they have long covid were actually harmed by vaccination. A failure to acknowledge this possibility prevents vaccine injury being properly defined and measured.
The one measure we do have is the tip of an iceberg of the total number of people unable to work because they are long-term sick. People who were sick managed to sustain work for varying periods before giving up. Thankfully, the rise seemed to plateau at the end of 2023 such that the number of newly long-term sick matched those no longer sick. However, it is worth reiterating that there are an extra 800,000 long-term sick on top of the 2 million pre-2020. Since the vaccine rollout, an extra 1 in 53 working aged people in the UK [are] now not working because of long-term sickness. The vaccine rollout was a far bigger public health crisis than that caused by the virus it failed to prevent.
Clare Craig is Co-Chair of HART and author of Expired: Covid the untold story. I have read several good books on the covid era, but Expired is the one I would most recommend — it’s quite an education.
Related:
Dear Church Leaders most-read articles
Some posts, including a version of this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered
For example, this article, featuring the paragraph below, passed peer-review:
SARS-CoV-2 being the virus that causes covid
The FDA being the US Food and Drug Administration, the body (supposedly) responsible for protecting and promoting public health
N1-methyl-pseudouridine, where — for anyone who remembers A-level chemistry — one of the nitrogen atoms (N1) is attached to carbon (a “methyl” group) rather than hydrogen