12 Year Old Girl Severely Injured After Second Pfizer Jab
On March 10th, 2021, Stephanie De Garay, along with her husband Patrick wrote the following on their Facebook page regarding their 12 year old daughter,
Please pray for Maddie, she has been having a long list of neurological and gastrointestinal issues from a rare adverse reaction she had to the second dose from the COVID vaccine trial she is in. Right now she is in the hospital because of a bowel obstruction that was cleared and also being unable to swallow liquids or solids. She hasn’t been able to eat or drink without throwing up for over a week. Tomorrow she has an Upper GI scheduled that she will have to swallow 6oz of liquid which as of right now seems impossible. We need this for the doctors to understand how her muscles are reacting. If she is unable to eat soon she will have to have an NG tube placed which she did not do well with earlier this week. I believe in prayer, please pray she is able to swallow liquids tomorrow so that her body can get the nutrients it needs and so the doctors can begin to figure out why her body is reacting this way. On top of this she has extreme pain in her back, neck, head and abdomen along with numbness in her legs and arm. She has an MRI of her head and spine scheduled on 3/16.Please pray for her to heal so she can be the energetic 12 year old who loves hanging with friends and learning at school. I can’t stand watching her wither away each day. NOTE: she has not been unblinded but I am 99.99% confident she got the vaccine and not the placebo since everything started about 12 hours after she got the second dose on 1/20/21 and has gotten progressively worse since then.
On the 13th of March, she was discharged from the hospital. Her mother wrote that "When she tried to walk her legs partially collapse and she gets extremely dizzy." At the time she wrote that she did not know how long this would last, but the good news is that she started eating some soft foods.
One month later another update was provided on Facebook,
Now for the update...Maddie was admitted to the hospital again on Friday. I’m not sure how long we will be here. She has significantly declined since she was discharged in March and is unable to eat without regurgitating her food. This caused caused her blood sugar to drop to 47 and she lost about 15 pounds in a month. Her blood sugar is stable and for now she has to be fed through an NG tube which she is having a hard time with. It was really bad for the first few hours and she threw up a bunch of stomach bile. She's been able to tolerate it a little better throughout the day and says it hurts her throat and she hates how she can feel the cold when they do her feeds or meds plus it makes her nauseous.
Maddie was also having up to 20 blackouts/episodes a day 3 weeks ago, they decreased after we weaned her off the Lyrica but she did have 2 today in the hospital. She also has tremors in her arms, especially when she is in pain and random verbal tics.A new symptom is chronic urinary retention (can’t empty bladder). They do an ultrasound of her bladder if she hasn’t gone to the bathroom in 16+ hours or if she has severe pain in her lower abdomen. If it measures over 500ml of urine they have to use a straight catheter.She still isn’t able to walk and she can’t feel from her lower hips down.
She has no leg movement against gravity with her legs. She didn’t sleep well last night or the night before, I’m praying she sleeps better tonight since she was able to get all of her meds through the NG tube today. This time we are on the Neurology floor so the team of doctors that do rounds in the morning are all in that group and pull the other doctors in. We have met with the nutritionist, PT/OT and Child Life. Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation will be here tomorrow, we had to postpone meeting with them due to the NG Tube. She is also seeing a Speech Therapist and they are doing a video swallow test or FEES study for her swallowing/regurgitating problems.
After that we should have a better idea of what the plan is moving forward is. Please pray that she is able to tolerate the NG tube better tomorrow and her urinary retention resolves itself. And please pray the team of doctors/nurses/therapists come up with a plan to help her eat and walk again. We hate watching her suffer and I wish I could take it away from her
The last update from Maddie's mother came on May 25th, prior to the video shared below.
We had a family meeting today to discuss her discharge. She will be discharged Wednesday if she can’t walk without the walker or Friday if she can walk on her own, even if it’s with an abnormal gait. Their plan is to then send her to Lindner Center of Hope to treat her “eating disorder” which is actually regurgitation and swallowing issues due to whatever happened when she got the vaccine that caused the severe abdominal pain followed by vomiting and continued GI issues. She will go home with an NG tube. Her other GI and urinary problems have not really improved as of today. She go from having PT 6 days a week to once a week, no OT or speech therapy and will see the GI in 1.5 months. Her first CBT appointment will be 6/14. I’m not comfortable with this plan but we don’t have a lot of options until we find somewhere else to get her treated. Please pray we can get her the medical treatment she needs to fully recover, her medical treatment up until this last stay made her significantly worse and is unacceptable. Right now we don’t know what to do.
What's not mentioned in the video above is what Stephanie experienced when she started sharing her daughters experience on Facebook. On the 25th of May, she also wrote,
It isn’t everyday you stumble upon a conspiracy theory tied to your family. I wanted to share this and clear up why I locked down my Facebook and posts. When I started posting about Maddie’s adverse reaction to the vaccine, it was for prayers...because that’s what she needed. It was only visible to people I was friends with on Facebook. I had several friends and family ask if I would make it public so they could share it with prayer groups. When I did, to my surprise it spread like wildfire across the world which is not what I intended. My posts about Maddie were shared by people all over the world and I started getting private messages from people as well. At first the messages and posts were positive and people saying they were praying for her. Then they turned into hateful threats and people posting their own agendas with incorrect information. So to protect my daughter, my family and honestly my own sanity so I could focus on helping Maddie, I locked down my Facebook and blocked all messages until yesterday. We got confirmation last Monday that she got the vaccine during the trial. We have also connected with several other people that have had similar reactions that Maddie had to the vaccine. We still do not understand why this happened to her. Her health has significantly improved but she still has a long road ahead of her. So, whoever is wondering if this is a conspiracy...it’s not.
You can go here to find a lengthy interview with Stephanie and her daughter.
Are COVID Vaccine Injuries Rare?
This is truly an unanswerable question, and it depends on what you consider to be rare. There are no appropriate systems in place to monitor or track vaccine injuries, and those who are injured by what appears to be the vaccine have to go through what De Garay describes above, the un-acknowledgement and the lack of consideration that the vaccine could have been responsible for the injury.
The United States does have a Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System at the CDC. Below are the most recent reported injuries as a result of the COVID vaccine. You can look up specifics, like date and age by adjusting the filters.
VAERS has been criticized by those on both sides of the vaccine debate. On one had, Facebook fact-checkers have been quick to point out that there is no proof that the vaccine was actually responsible for any of these injuries. They would probably mae the same point regarding this particular story involving Maddie as well. Furthermore, VAERS does not verify vaccine injury reports, this is a problem, but an even bigger problem is the fact that VAERS is the only reporting system we have that's accessible to the public.
Medical staff have also been told to report all COVID 19 vaccine adverse events to VAERS, it's actually a mandatory requirement mentioned on the first page of the FDA fact sheet for vaccination providers.
On the other hand, some publications have expressed that VAERS most likely only captures a small percent of vaccine injuries. But again, how can we know?
The authors of a recently published study, which questions the safety of COVID vaccines, cite multiple sources showing an unreliability in data capturing, and that the median underreporting can be as high as 95 percent. How common are COVID vaccine injuries? According to that study,
Currently, our estimates show that we have to accept four fatal and 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations in order to save the lives of 2–11 individuals per 100,000 vaccinations, placing risks and benefits on the same order of magnitude.
This begs the question, how many deaths and adverse reactions from COVID vaccines have not been reported? Furthermore, if there are long term concerns, will deaths resulting from an adverse reaction, perhaps a year later, even be considered as connected to to the vaccine?
This isn’t the only study to bring awareness to potential vaccine injuries that are most likely not reported. For example, an HHS pilot study conducted by the Federal Agency for Health Care Research found that 1 in every 39 vaccines in the United States caused some type of injury, which is a rather large in comparison to the 1 in every million claim that comes from public health.
How dangerous is COVID for children? A letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden” has found that “Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic…No child with Covid-19 died…Among the 1,951,905 children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.” It was published by Jonas F Ludvigsson a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute.
As of May 28, 2021, there were 259, 308 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Canadians 19 years and under. Of these, 0.48% were hospitalized and 0.06% were admitted to the ICU, and 0.004% died. This means that seasonal influenza is associated with more severe illness than COVID-19 in Canada.
You can find more resources and information here, if interested. This is why some parents are weighing the risks of the vaccine compared to the risks of illness.