At the age of 68, I was in excellent physical condition. I had none of the underlying conditions published by the CDC in the summer of 2020 that were causing the majority of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid. My philosophy at the time was, “if it comes from a pharmaceutical company, I don’t want it in my body.” Largely because of the early misinformation about the mRNA vaccine preventing both infection and transmission, I was guilted into taking it.
I received the second dose of the Pfizer shot on March 26, 2021. About a month later, I noticed a pain in the joint at the base of my left big toe. When the pain continued to worsen, I went to my family doctor who made the diagnosis of gout. I have never had gout before, and my uric acid level was normal. After initial treatments with prednisone and colchicine, the symptoms only worsened. By July, my entire left foot was extremely swollen. Additional attempts by my doctor with different combinations of the same drugs only lessened the symptoms slightly. Considering that a typical gout attack only lasts about a week, this was obviously a reaction to the shot. I had also found some research that explained the mechanism behind how the mRNA vaccine can trigger inflammation: https://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S1471-4914(22)00103-4
In September, my doctor sent me to a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist very matter-of-factly stated that their practice saw may patients with gout and arthritis reactions to the mRNA vaccine that they provided the typical treatments for. I had also found hundreds of entries of gout and arthritis reactions in the CDC’s VAERS database. (The rheumatologist’s estimate was that less than 10% of adverse events are actually reported to that database.) He put me on 30 days of colchicine. By the end of that 30 days, the symptoms were almost gone. After a few more weeks, I could say that I finally had no more symptoms. But I really had no way of knowing whether that last lengthy round of colchicine was what got rid of my symptoms, or if it just went away on its own after almost 5 months. There was never any fluid drawn from my left big toe joint to determine the presence of urate crystals.
Fast forward to late March of 2023, when I started noticing some pain in my left wrist. As it started getting worse, my doctor referred me to a wrist/hand specialist. After taking x-rays, his diagnosis was tendonitis and put me on a 6-day methylprednisolone pack. After the first day (6 pills), the pain decreased noticeably, but increased again over the next 5 days. After about another week, I was back at the rheumatologist who thought it was either gout or pseudogout and prescribed colchicine again, which I took from May 14 to June 5. Beginning in early/mid-May, symptoms typical of different types of arthritis started showing up in other areas. My right wrist and hand began hurting as much as my left. I felt neck pain if I moved my head to far either up and down or left and right. My shoulders started hurting. If I take a deep breath, my I feel some pain in my rib cage. Finally, both feet have been very swollen for several weeks. It is now June 18, and all those symptoms are still present. I’m alternately taking ibuprofen and acetaminophen now to help reduce the pain. Same as two years ago, there was nothing in my blood work or anything else that would normally be connected with these different types of arthritis (PMR?).
I have found more research that starts to call into question the claim that the mRNA vaccine cannot alter a person’s DNA. I also found an article that investigated the effect of vaccines on people with two genetic variants of the Methylenetetrahydrofolate-Reductase (MTHFR) gene, C677T and A1298C. Having done 23&Me, I discovered that I have both of those variants. Unfortunately, there does not seem to have been any studies looking specifically at a link between those variants and the mRNA vaccine. Hopefully, we will see more research performed on both of these topics that might help to explain not only the reaction I had in 2021, but a return of similar, but more extensive, arthritis-type symptoms nearly two years later.
I will provide an update at some point as my symptoms progress. Having spent most of my adult life learning about and practicing many things good for my health, I have been mostly mad at myself for giving in to the pressure of taking the shot, but of course I’m also furious about the misinformation from Fauci and others. My only hope now is that this isn’t something more permanent.