After 12 days of symptoms, I still have COVID. My symptoms are considered mild, but I’m still tired, have no appetite, and am frequently feverish, so writing a long post is not my favorite activity right now. I also have a small amount of viral pneumonia, but not enough to be treated for. For an update, I’ll just state for now that cases are coming down rapidly in the US right now. I may add a real update to this post later.

Aspiration by vaccinators: I did want to point out that I saw a very interesting video recently from John Campbell that is very instructive. He points out that vaccines are intended to be given in an “intra-muscular” fashion, meaning the injection is supposed to remain in the muscle it’s injected into. If this happens, the vaccine makes Spike protein just in that localized area, and your immune system finds it there and mounts a response. Unfortunately, if a vaccine is injected into a blood vessel, the vaccine can travel throughout the body, making adverse events much more likely. For the flu, this is still not a big risk because the flu proteins only really interact with respiratory cells. But for COVID, the Spike protein can interact with cells all over the body and cause various effects including inflammation.

There is a simple way to avoid injecting in to blood vessels. A vaccinator can simply push the needle in, then pull the plunger back slightly to make sure there is no blood, then inject (Demonstration of this process starts at 22:00 of the video). This eliminates the possibility of a blood vessel injection. Unfortunately, this procedure is standard practice in just a few countries like Denmark, S. Korea, and Japan. Most countries including the US, UK, Canada, and many others do not practice this. John Campbell is very pro-vaccine, but wishes aspiration was standard.

My doctor friends tell me blood vessel vaccine injections are very rare.

In the US, lots of people in the health care industry basically ignored adverse events due to COVID vaccination. This includes me for a time. The CDC is still not capturing all of the available data on adverse events. Many of these events could have been avoided with a small change in policy.

Vaccination has helped a lot of folks have milder COVID symptoms. It’s too bad that the lessons from adverse events were not absorbed sooner. If you get vaccinated or get a booster, see if you can get them to aspirate before they inject!

The UK drops COVID restrictions: The Omicron wave has come and gone in the UK, and the country has basically dropped all COVID related restrictions. The US is a few weeks behind the UK, so we may be able to drop restrictions here soon too.

Omicron is milder, but I certainly haven’t had an easy time of it, so I wouldn’t recommend running out and getting your natural immunity by getting Omicron. If you haven’t had it yet, continue to wear your N95, KN95, or KF94 while indoors in public. Or even outdoors in groups. I probably got COVID outside but in close proximity to someone with COVID. The stuff that worked with previous versions doesn’t necessarily work with Omicron.

Don’t fear, but be smart,
Erik