Abstract
High school and middle school athletes were observed retrospectively following vaccination with mRNA COVID vaccines. Of twenty student athletes, half were vaccinated and half were not, according to their parents’ prior choices. In this study we compare sports performance of vaccinated versus unvaccinated student athletes doing the same activities. We also compare the sports performance of vaccinated student athletes with their own sports performance prior to vaccination. The observed changes post-vaccination can be helpful to illustrate the cardiovascular changes that occur with COVID vaccination.
Introduction
A preponderance of evidence is accumulating with regard to injuries and deaths correlated with the COVID mRNA vaccines. Clinical studies that document this phenomenon now number in the hundreds.1 Over 1,500 types of adverse events, many of them known to be permanently disabling, with over a total of 158,000 adverse reactions, have been found after administration of the Pfizer COVID vaccine, and the reader is encouraged to read the list of these in the last 9 pages of the Pfizer report linked here.2 This Pfizer document was not made available to the public by the FDA, and the FDA argued that it should be sealed for 55 years, and then for 75 years, but rather it was forced to be released in December 2021 by court order.3 The overall risks of severe injuries and deaths from the COVID vaccines have alarmed physicians and scientists all over the world. Renowned immunologist and microbiologist Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and pathologist Dr. Arne Burkhardt have summarized these vaccines’ causative role in deaths after vaccination.4 Autopsy results showed more cardiovascular derangement than for any other organ. Increased inflammatory markers correlate with COVID vaccines.5 And it is thought that the sudden deaths among athletes during 2021 since the widespread use of the COVID vaccines is mostly due to severe cardiac or cardiovascular pathology.
Methods and Results
Two sports coaches were interviewed regarding performance of their teenage student athletes. On questioning, we learned that there are twenty student athletes with shared training time among the two coaches. Fifteen of these student athletes are high school students, and the rest are younger. The student athletes spoke freely and informally with the coaches about who received the vaccine and how they felt afterward, and who did not receive any vaccines. The student athletes’ parents’ choices regarding vaccination of their children were unknown to the coaches or to us until after those injections. The parents’ choices regarding vaccination of their children had spontaneously formed an experimental group versus a control group, with none blinded.
Strict anonymity is observed regarding the student athletes, their parents, their coaches and their schools, due to the range of emotional responses toward vaccinated and unvaccinated people that has been encouraged over recent months by political leaders such as Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.
There was no comparison study of the two groups planned before or at the time of data collection. The two coaches, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity for all involved, retrospectively observed the following of the COVID-vaccinated student athletes, and we report their findings in this retrospective study.
1) None of the vaccinated student athletes are competing up to their own previous level; all are performing worse than in 2020, in the assessments of the two coaches.
2) None of the vaccinated student athletes can endure the same exercise drills for the same amount of time that they used to tolerate prior to vaccination.
3) Recovery from exertion took longer in the vaccinated student athletes than before vaccination and took longer than in the unvaccinated.
4) After the injections, most or all of the vaccinated student athletes talked about one or more of the following reactions after vaccination:
- chest pain;
- dizziness;
- seeing stars;
- feeling as if they would faint;
- shortness of breath.
The student athletes talked freely and spontaneously about the above symptoms without anyone taking notes at the time. There was no prompting from coaches about reporting of symptoms.
5) The unvaccinated girls are now beating vaccinated boys in competition, whom they could not do well against last year. This change was unexpected and was considered unusual by the coaches.
1), 2), 3) and 5) are still observed in all of the vaccinated student athletes, up to several months after the earliest student athletes were vaccinated.
In contrast, the unvaccinated student athletes had none of the foregoing symptoms or deficits in sports performance or declines in sports endurance, as observed by the two coaches, and continue to improve in their endurance and performance, as expected by the coaches.
Discussion
Athletes may be expected to have more robust circulation during exertion than while sedentary, and generally increased blood flow than is seen in sedentary individuals. Such enhanced circulation, during high activity or exertion serves the purpose of supplying the increased oxygen needs of the body and increased metabolic activity that exertion requires.
To increase blood flow requires increased cardiac output and arterial vasodilation. With high cardiac output, there arises increased demand for, and then supply of, coronary arterial blood flow. Coronary arterial vasodilation is regulated by autoregulatory mechanisms, as well as the neurologic vascular innervation mediated by the autonomic nervous system and hormones that serve to adjust vasodilation versus vasoconstriction, as physical activity requires.
The mRNA COVID vaccines begin a process of spike protein production throughout the body. Spike protein effects on ACE 2 receptors in the vascular endothelium serve to vasoconstrict. The result may obstruct the body’s supply of increased blood flow and oxygen, just when the demands are greatest, during exertion. Spike protein associated immune and inflammatory factors can also affect perivascular and periarterial cells, as well as CD8 and NK T-cell infiltration.6 All of these can reduce coronary vasodilation.
Further compounding the problem of blood delivery to peripheral and coronary tissues are the spike protein positions and effects. Jutting from the endothelial surface, spike proteins are docked onto ACE-2 receptors. These are thought to adversely affect blood flow through turbulent rather than laminar flow. As stagnant blood pools, the clotting cascade begins ubiquitously throughout the body. Such micro-clotting thickens and slows the blood, which would further impair the delivery of blood and oxygen to the capillary beds in the heart and in the periphery. Thus, coronary blood flow can be adversely affected by high viscosity, which is also caused by spike protein induced RBC aggregation from adhesion through CD 147. As a result, the heart is burdened to push a more viscous liquid than normal blood through the body’s arterioles and capillaries.
The above-described mechanisms, further described here,7 create obstacles to optimal blood flow that would necessarily affect all recipients of spike protein generating COVID vaccines. We therefore must recommend avoidance of any of the COVID vaccines by any child or young adult with current or future plans to engage in physical exertion.