heart warming

I don’t mean to be a tease, but I’m so excited about an entry I’ll be posting later this week or early next, that I had to tender a preliminary. Below is an e-mail I sent to my friend Ana, an attorney in Santa Fe, friend of my brother-in-law Bob. After a very successful career suing doctors, she turned her considerable legal talents to the rights of those bruised by the COVID nazis, and boy are there a bunch of them in Santa Fe. She’s started a foundation www.nmstandup.org and assures me there are similar efforts in most states. Lawyers do save us from things from time to time and maybe this will be one of those instances.

So here’s what I wrote:

Hey Ana

I hope you and Guy are well and enjoying life.  I write to update you on a couple things on the COVID front here in AA.  Right now, I’m as excited as I used to get when I admitted a patient with a rare autoimmune disease.  It came about like this.  Last Friday, Kathy’s Dean announced the equivalent of a vaccine passport for the school, making it clear that life would be miserable for those faculty who did not comply.  We talked it over and decided to cave, knuckle under, roll up our sleeves, and join the sheeple.  We’d been getting concerned about our ability to travel abroad unvaccinated, too.  I had an artist friend lined up to gin us up some counterfeit CDC vaccine cards, but those wouldn’t get us past Kathy’s Dean.  The recent reports of myocarditis in young men who’d received an mRNA vaccine* had me real concerned, and spurned the digging that’s got me so excited.  A PubMed search of “COVID myocarditis” nets 734 citations. I pulled 37 from these, and they sit in a one inch stack to my left waiting to get read.  My skimming so far has me reassured that my senescent sexagenarian immune system isn’t going to respond as vigorously to that science fair spike protein as it did in those boys with their vigorous everything, so my ticker will probably survive these shots.  But I’m concerned with the subclinical stuff, like low grade heart inflammation that produces no symptoms now but leaves a flabby failing heart in 10 years.  COVID affects the heart in many different ways, most immune mediated, meaning a vaccine can potentially kick up the same stuff.  I hope to emerge from a dive into those 37 papers with a clearer understanding of just what those possibilities might be.  This’ll be a blog for sure, but maybe even a manuscript.  Rheumatologists have had a big role in understanding and management of COVID, what’s one more owning up?

I don’t know if you’re integrating this stuff into your legal work.  Surely, if I come up with a scary enough array of potential cardiac complications of COVID vaccination, that would be pretty good ammunition for any client of yours wishing to avoid.  If you like, I can let you know what I find out.

Best wishes

Bob Ike

• https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html