Snopes tried to discredit research as a “rumor” when journalist received early results from conference call between researchers and study participants. Spike still detectable in some participants 600-700 days later.
If a writer for the Fox medical-mystery drama House had developed a plotline in which a nebulous illness credited to a novel virus turned out to be caused by the vaccine for the virus, it would have been deemed too cliched to make it out of the writers’ room.
Sometimes reality is more banal than fiction.
Yale University immunobiologists concluded that COVID-19 vaccination is responsible for some cases of so-called long COVID purportedly caused by infection, adding a pharmacological wrinkle to earlier international research that attributed wearing higher-quality masks, loneliness and physical inactivity to symptoms mistaken for post-infection conditions.
But their Feb. 18 preprint research, not yet peer-reviewed, also found alarming levels of spike protein – the primary mechanism for mRNA COVID vaccines – in the blood of never-infected participants as long as nearly two years after inoculation, far longer than the eight weeks found in a 2022 peer-reviewed study.
Federal public health authorities long denied the vaccine-specific spike protein “lingers” in the body or is toxic, as a Food and Drug Administration spokesperson told the self-proclaimed fact-checker PolitiFact in summer 2023.