The Daily Beast’s Mark Hay: When and why did you decide to start this aggregation effort, and what (if any) effects do you hope it will have?

Circle of Mamas: Vaccine Injury Stories page was started many years prior to the current pandemic, serving as a documentation of the reactions and injuries after vaccines told from the family’s perspective. Reading another persons experience as told in their own words humanizes who these people are.

I think it’s easy to forget or maybe it’s not understood that the people who no longer vaccinate because of injuries, often called anti-vaxxers by the media, were people who all vaccinated. Something just went wrong. They were the unlucky ones, and more than anything I hope to bring back empathy and compassion to this conversation. Just like any other survivors’ or victims’ support groups, memorial pages, forums, these people deserve to have a voice, and to have their stories told.

MH: Why, specifically, did you decide to start aggregating individual stories instead of just citing or linking people off to VAERS data, frequently used to communicate similar sentiments? 

C: VAERS is hard to navigate and most people don’t have the time to do a search, although I do have a tutorial video on my website to help people. Sharing the more personal stories, linking to their real names and accounts, showing their faces, their family’s writings about their death—is all much more personal than VAERS. While VAERS is a very useful tool to detect signals with vaccines, and it has received over 3,000 reports of death alone, which far surpasses any other year, it’s still very underutilized.

A 2010 Harvard Pilgrim report funded by HHS found fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are ever reported. Most people who share that their loved one’s heart stopped, or had a seizure, or began having tremors after a vaccine, still don’t know to report these reactions to VAERS. And some others may not know to report for several weeks or months. What is in VAERS may only be a small percent of the actual vaccine adverse events that people are experiencing. So part of my job is conveying to people that all adverse events after a vaccination need to be reported, in order for our vaccine safety system to work.

MH:  How do you source and verify the stories that end up on this page?

C: Many of the stories come straight from the people or families of the victims themselves, either something they posted on their own pages, or shared to a vaccine injury group. So many people are sharing photos or videos of themselves getting vaccinated, everything is so out in the open, so when the next post or announcement is them getting hospitalized or dying suddenly and unexpectedly, then an obituary, then a gofundme–it’s very important we document these as possible vaccine reactions.

There is a bias and prejudice that vaccines are only ‘safe and effective’, but no medicine is safe and effective for everyone—not even antibiotics or Tylenol–so it’s important to be critical of products that are being distributed and administered to the general population without first considering individual health.

MH: Do you believe or suspect that all of the deaths listed on your page were caused by COVID-19 vaccinations? If so, why do you believe that? 

C: My page collects injury stories from all vaccines, from pediatric vaccines to adult vaccines—not just COVID-19 vaccinations. But it’s well documented in the medical literature for more than a century that all vaccines can cause death or serious injury, and some are associated with a higher mortality rate such as DTP vaccine, which was finally phased out in the US in the 1990s because of parental concern.

What many people misunderstand is that vaccinations can affect our bodies in multiple ways and can aggravate other conditions and/or trigger a response leading to a person’s death. The COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials phase 2/3 only had between 15,000 and 18,000 people enrolled in the vaccine group, around 5,000 of whom were over the age of 65, and fewer than 10% of them had comorbidities.

So when we then vaccinate tens of millions of people with all different medical histories and conditions, many of whom have multiple comorbidities, we are going to see a completely different picture. We should be paying attention, we should be listening, we should be taking this way more seriously.
When the CDC says “there’s no evidence”—it’s not the same as saying “there is no cause”. Language is very important. Absence of evidence is not proof of absence.

MH: If not, what is your logic for listing deaths that occurred after a vaccination but that you and others do not necessarily believe were caused by that vaccination under the banner of vaccine injury stories? 

C: Science is supposed to be based on observation. We aren’t supposed to censor or downplay or erase data to achieve a predetermined result—but this is exactly what is happening right now. Some of these stories of people who died were previously healthy and young, and some others may have had underlying health issues—but all of these should all be taken in as evidence.

We know that all pharmaceuticals have risks. What may be safe for you, may not be for me. We cannot hide information from the public just to maintain an illusion of safety.

There is something really wrong when the stories of victims are subjected to a higher level of scrutiny, then a pharmaceutical industry that is immune from all liability.

No industry should be untouchable, or ‘too big to fail’.