After years of organizing and advocacy by people suffering autoimmune injuries from the Covid-19 vaccine, one of the world’s top scientific journals reports on the existence of “Long Vax.”

Mainstream publications and regulatory agencies have buckled to public pressure to admit the COVID-19 vaccine can cause injuries such as myocarditis and pericarditis – but until recently, they’ve published little or nothing about the substantial number of people suffering from autoimmune disease after vaccination.

However, on Tuesday, the journal Science published an article confirming that Covid-19 vaccines are linked to autoimmune disorders, such as small fibre neuropathy and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).

“We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs about these things happening,” Agnieszka Wilson, founder of #CanWeTalkAboutIt says. “And finally, slowly, it’s being acknowledged.”

The #CanWeTalkAboutIt campaign is a global effort to break the silence around injuries from the Covid-19 vaccine.

Suzanna Newell, former board member of the vaccine-injured patient advocacy group React19, says: “I am extremely grateful that doctors and medical institutions are now willing to talk about adverse reactions. [They] should have been listening to the injured. We even have many injured medical professionals among the injured who have had trouble being heard.”

Science reported that in addition to abnormal blood clotting and heart inflammation, the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines give rise to “another apparent complication”: “[This] debilitating suite of symptoms that resembles Long Covid, has been more elusive, its link to vaccination unclear and its diagnostic features ill-defined.

“But in recent months, what some call Long Vax has gained wider acceptance among doctors and scientists, and some are now working to better understand and treat its symptoms.”

According to Science, Long Vax cases “seem very rare.” They include a wide range of symptoms such as persistent headaches, severe fatigue and abnormal heart rate and blood pressure. The symptoms can begin to appear within hours or weeks after vaccination and are difficult to study, the authors of the article said.

Science reported that increasing numbers of researchers are making diagnoses that include small fibre sensory neuropathy, which causes tingling or electric shock-like sensations, burning pain and blood circulation problems, and POTS – a condition that affects blood flow and can result in symptoms such as lightheadedness, fainting and increased heartbeat – that appear when standing up from a reclined position.

Post-vaccination symptoms could have features of one or both conditions. People with long Covid can suffer similar symptoms, according to the article. Small sensory fibre neuropathy and POTS also are associated with other vaccines such as Gardasil, Merck’s human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

Commenting on the article, Substacker Igor Chudov wrote that the authors acknowledge the suffering, but also minimise it, falsely asserting that it is rare. “It goes on and on about how ‘rare’ vaccine injuries are.”

Brianne Dressen, founder of React19, said that despite the fact the article qualifies some of its key claims, she sees it as an important step toward getting these conditions more widely recognised.

Dressen observes: “Science Magazine is speaking to an audience that the rest of us who have been pigeonholed into this corner can’t speak to because they don’t even know we exist. We’ve all been censored to no end. So how are we going to reach those people?

“They’ve been hammered over and over again in outlets like Science Magazine – which is kind of ironic – with the idea that the vaccines are wonderful and there’s no possible way that anything bad can happen… So if we ever get an opportunity to put a little bit of content out there in their lane for them to question even just a little bit what’s going on around them, then we’ll be able to pull them back over to, you know, to the truth.”

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were attempting to study and treat patients with Long Vax symptoms in 2021. They published a preprint report on their work, but the study was abruptly halted without explanation and the NIH has stonewalled attempts to discover details about what the agency knew early on.

Science also cited previous and forthcoming research by Sujana Reddy identifying post-vaccine POTS, and a study published in Nature Cardiovascular Research by researchers from Cedars Sinai Medical Centre last year that linked Covid-19 and the vaccine to POTS.

Other peer-reviewed research reported similar links and has revealed a wide range of immune system and neurological effects from the Covid-19 vaccine. Numerous people with autoimmune disorders from the Covid-19 vaccine have also shared their stories with The Defender. Some reported difficulties in submitting their health information to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

A total of 1,569,668 reports of adverse events following Covid-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and June 23, 2023, to VAERS. The latest available data from VAERS show 770 reports of POTS with 578 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 160 reports attributed to Moderna’s and 31 reports to Johnson & Johnson’s.

“Under-reporting is a known and serious disadvantage of the VAERS system,” according to VAERs expert Jessica Rose.

Rose writes, “Unfortunately, we can never really know how many people are suffering from adverse events. Reports can go missing, reports can remain in temporary VAERS ID limbo or never get filed in the first place.”

“You see one or two patients and you wonder if it’s a coincidence,” Anne Louise Oaklander, a neurologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School, told Science. “But by the time you’ve seen 10, 20,” she continued, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

In addition to Oaklander, a top researcher on small fibre neuropathy, Harlan Krumholz, a Yale cardiologist, Sujana Reddy, an internal medicine resident physician at East Alabama Health, Tae Chung, a neuromuscular physiatrist who runs a POTS clinic at Johns Hopkins, Matthew Schelke, a neurologist at Columbia University and Lawrence Purpura, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University and William Murphy, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis all commented on their ongoing research on autoimmune illness associated with Covid-19 vaccination.

• The Defender report