An Unforgivable Omission:
Ohio "journalists" ignore crucial Covid vaccine questions after a 19-year-old's emergency heart transplant and death
Disclaimers: I am not a doctor. I am not anti-vaccine. I AM hard-wired to question almost everything I am told – a trait that has only become useful since I began working as a journalist two-plus decades ago.
Two weeks ago, I was scrolling through Alex Berenson’s Twitter feed (he’s an author and former NY Times reporter / current independent journalist covering all things Covid-19) when I came across a disturbing story about a 19-year-old Northwestern University student who’d been perfectly healthy two months ago but had just died in early June after a failed emergency heart transplant, roughly one month after receiving her second Covid-19 vaccine shot. Turns out, this young woman had graduated in 2020 from an Ohio high school just outside Cincinnati, in a suburb called Mason.
Berenson’s writing in this piece is powerful and the story is utterly heartbreaking. You can find it either on his Substack blog post about it or on his Twitter feed. Here are screenshots of the last several frames on Twitter, which detail what happened to Simone eight days after receiving the second dose of the vaccine:
I was so upset the day I first read this, I began searching online to see how the local news would cover it. After all, Cincinnati media people never let a good Queen City connection to a major national story go to waste. Surely they would be rushing to interview Simone’s parents, I thought, to learn if what Alex Berenson had written on his Twitter feed was correct. Surely they would want to report on a potential vaccine side effect that – though seemingly rare – could cause harm to children or young adults who took it, so that their viewers and readers could make informed decisions for their own children.
What I found instead chilled me to the core.
At first I found just this story on WLWT’s website, and this one on WCPO’s (the latter, by the way, notes that Simone, an aspiring journalist, had been an intern at WCPO). In both cases, I was blown away to see that the stories not only ignored Berenson’s interview with Simone’s parents, neither one even bothered to include quotes or interview material from her parents or anyone else in her family at all.
Instead, like a textbook case of everything I have been writing about in this blog for months, now, both stories were intentionally vague about the cause of her death, attributing it to pneumonia and a “suspected virus attack on her heart.” Definitely, as they were both so careful to note, “not COVID.”
To be fair, many of these descriptors of Simone’s tragic illness had been posted on a GoFundMe site someone had set up to help her parents with staggering medical costs when she was still alive. They were also *technically* true. But here’s some food for thought:
Since when do “journalists” just take things they read online as fact and not bother to seek out actual quotes from the actual people involved in the newsworthy event?
Since when do “journalists” no longer feel it’s important to research independent sources in order to clarify what really happened in a news story?
Since when are “journalists” satisfied with reporting only what’s “technically” true and not the whole backstory, which ultimately provides much-needed context?
Eventually, I found one more local story about Simone, written by one lone WLWT anchor three days after the young woman’s death. It’s the only local piece on record that includes mention of the vaccine, noting only that “She’d just received her second vaccine shot on May 1.” Nothing more.
Turns out, the vast majority of Cincinnati news outlets didn’t even cover 19-year-old Simone’s untimely death at all. Our only major newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer? Crickets. Which is especially fascinating since an Enquirer columnist took the time to highlight Simone Scott in this March 2020 article titled: When a contagion interrupts your senior year in high school…
In the case of this particular story, the lack of intellectual curiosity from the Cincinnati media class is staggering and unimaginably tragic, particularly from outlets like WCPO and the Enquirer, both of which clearly had prior interactions with this young woman.
Yes, people die horrible, untimely deaths all the time. And yes, a lot of people have gotten the vaccine so far and haven’t died.
What makes this story doubly tragic, though, is this – just days after Simone’s death, the CDC was scheduled to have an emergency meeting on, among other things, an alarming trend in young, vaccinated people: the sudden onset of a potentially dangerous heart inflammation called myocarditis - THE SAME THING SIMONE SCOTT DEVELOPED AFTER RECEIVING THE VACCINE. Did no one in Ohio media know about this? Did no Ohio “journalists” see the possible connection?
The CDC cancelled the meeting to take off for the new Juneteenth holiday, but ultimately covered the topic in its regular meeting earlier this week. Alex Berenson wrote an excellent summary of it on his Substack page just today, noting:
“At the meeting, CDC scientists presented horrendous data. It showed that even without accounting for underreporting, a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could increase the risk of problems up to 200-fold in young men,” and
“the volume of side effects reports that the CDC has received on the Covid vaccines has overwhelmed its monitoring system. To give you a sense of the problem: In all of 2019, the CDC’s voluntary vaccine side effect reporting system received about 48,000 reports for ALL vaccines. So far in 2021 it has received at least seven times that many for Covid vaccines alone.”
But here are two other quotes from stories I found about the meeting online:
“During a panel discussion later Thursday, Dr. Cody Meissner, a member of the [FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory] committee, said he was “worried” about the heart issue reported in young vaccine recipients. He questioned whether there will be scarring of the muscular tissue or arrhythmia as a result of the condition. ‘I think that’s unlikely but we don’t know that,’ said Meissner, also a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine. “So, before we start vaccinating millions of adolescents and children, it’s so important to find out what the consequences are.” - CDC says heart inflammation cases were higher than expected in 16- to 24-year-olds after second Covid vaccine shot, but still rare – Berkeley Lovelace Jr., CNBC
“More than 1,200 cases of heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults following Pfizer’s or Moderna’s COVID vaccine have been reported to health authorities in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on June 23… Of the 323 cases meeting the CDC’s case definition, 309 were hospitalized. Nine are still hospitalized.” - CDC Finds More Cases of Heart Inflammation Than Expected in Vaccinated Young Males – Zachary Stiber, Epoch Times
Yesterday, I also listened to an interview with Dr. Robert Malone - an inventor of MRNA vaccine technology - on Tucker Carlson, regarding the potential for health problems in young people who receive the vaccine. When Carlson asked Dr. Malone if “the benefits [of the vaccine] outweigh the risks for young people,” Dr. Malone said:
“…certainly I can say that the risk benefit ratio for those 18 and below doesn’t justify vaccines, and there’s a pretty good chance that it doesn’t justify vaccination in these very young adults.”
If all of that wasn’t bad enough…
I was cleaning up my inbox yesterday and came across this story, about an Ohio State University student named Greyson Follmer – a young man, roughly the same age as Simone, it seems – who had almost the exact same response to the vaccine. Thank God, he is still alive, but he is severely incapacitated and in constant pain. He can’t go back to school. He can’t play football. He can’t participate in ROTC. In his mother’s own words:
“I think what’s frustrating to me right now is that nobody told me that if you have an enlarged heart or heart inflammation, don’t get the shot. Not one person ever told us this. I never would have thought in a million years my kid would get sick.
I was ready to give my daughter the vaccine — she is going to be 12 in August and has one lung and a reconstructive airway. There is no way on this planet I would give her the vaccine now. Greyson’s twin brother will also not be getting the vaccine after seeing what his brother has gone through.”
It’s incredibly disturbing to note, by the way, that BOTH Greyson’s story and Simone’s had to be broken by journalists outside Ohio. No one in Ohio media is covering Simone’s story anymore, and no one in Ohio media has picked up Greyson’s story at all.
Maybe Simone’s & Greyson’s conditions were rare, but vaccine related; or maybe this was just a huge, bizarre coincidence and they weren’t. Either way, right now, we don’t know WHAT is causing this heart problem in young people, so ALL POSSIBILITIES MUST BE ON THE TABLE.
It’s not up to the media to pick and choose what information you get to know. It’s up to them to report the facts. Every last one. Even the inconvenient ones – the ones that might cause some people to forgo the vaccine. Think about it this way:
What kind of people knowingly hide stories that could potentially help save the lives of other kids who may be at similar, serious risk?
Do we really want people like that in charge of disseminating our news?
Three weeks ago, a distraught reader sent me a note saying she couldn’t read my blog anymore because she felt I was not being fair to people in media who “work so hard” to try and help news consumers. She also speculated that I “must have a lot of time on my hands”to be wasting it “nitpicking” the way news outlets present Covid information to their consumers.
I didn’t reply. I know it’s tough to read a lot of what I write. Trust me, I wish it wasn’t true as much she does. I spent 20+ years, in fact, wishing our nation’s “news” problem would go away or get better. I’m only writing this blog because it’s gotten so much worse. Now I find myself in the surreal position of writing that people are quite possibly dying and/or suffering because, inexcusably, my home state’s media class refuses to share pertinent information that could help its citizens make more informed decisions. Ohio’s “journalists” have failed the public they exist to serve.
It’s no coincidence that both Greyson’s and Simone’s parents said that they were completely unaware that some children and young adults are having horrible (and, at times, lethal) reactions to the Covid vaccines. These families were completely unaware of the potential harm the vaccine could cause because the media – the industry in which Simone herself had hoped to work someday – has chosen, both here and nationwide, to suppress or disregard stories about negative responses to the Covid vaccine, especially those involving heart inflammation – myocarditis - in young people. They defend themselves by saying, as often as they can, that these reactions are “rare.” And yet, how “rare” are these reactions, really, if two people nearly the same age had nearly the same response in one state over the past two months?
Yes, vaccines are amazing inventions. And yes, the vast majority of people who’ve taken this vaccine seem to be OK, so far. But clearly some people are having bad reactions. Why is it a crime in 2021 to discuss such things? Wouldn’t being open about them help the scientists who formulate these experimental vaccines work even harder to make them even better? And why are schools and colleges in such a hurry to try and mandate these vaccines for students if things like this are happening, even on a small scale?
Isn’t one life lost one life too many?
Instead of asking questions like these, though, dissenting voices are stifled and crucial information now dies every single day – to borrow imagery from our “friends” over at the Washington Post - in utter darkness.
Media suppression of information that could help people safely evaluate their risk of taking the vaccine vs. dying from Covid is unacceptable. It has crossed the line into something far uglier, even, than propaganda. It is, in fact, the crime of the century.
The question is, who in the media will ultimately stand trial?
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON COVID VACCINE SAFETY:
(starred entries apply specifically to young people)
*Heart problems in vaccinated students trigger medical, legal scrutiny of campus COVID mandates – Just The News, Greg Piper
“though they accounted for only 9% of administered mRNA vaccines, 12-24 year-olds represented more than half (277) of myocarditis and pericarditis reports through May 31, according to Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Team.”
*University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics; College students aren’t guinea pigs – WSJ Op-Ed by Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of UC Irvine’s Medical Ethics Program & professor psychiatry and Gerard Bradley, law professor at the University of Notre Dame
Are Covid Vaccines Riskier Than Advertised? There are concerning trends on blood clots and low platelets, not that authorities will tell you – WSJ Op-Ed by Dr. Joseph Ladapo, associate professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. And Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health.
*Do COVID-19 RNA-based vaccines put at risk of immune-mediated diseases? In reply to “potential antigenic cross-reactivity between SARS-CoV-2 and human tissue with a possible link to an increase in autoimmune diseases” - A National Institutes of Health-published editorial response by a representative of the Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Rheumatology Unit, University of Messina, University Hospital "G. Martino", Messina, Italy
*This piece makes specific note of how potentially dangerous the current Covid vaccines are for young women, potentially triggering inflammatory / autoimmune responses: “Therefore, young and female patients who are already affected or predisposed (e.g. immunological and serological abnormalities in absence of clinical symptoms, familiarity for immune-mediated diseases) to autoimmune or autoinflammatory disorders should be carefully evaluated for the benefits and risks of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. According to epidemiological data, these subjects may develop the infection asymptomatically or pauci-symptomatically and it is worth noting that, in line with the article of Vojdani et al. [1], the presence of autoreactive cells and autoantibodies cross-reacting against SARS-CoV-2 epitopes may even turn naturally protective towards the infection. Until proven otherwise, the administration of a nucleic acid vaccine may instead put these individuals at risk of unwanted immunological side effects by either sensitizing the PRRs or generating cross- reactive cell clones and antibodies. Moreover, COVID-19 mRNA vaccine might differently stimulate myeloid or plasmacytoid dendritic cells (DCs), generating an unbalance in the downstream cytokine pathways that play a crucial role in autoimmunity and autoinflammation [3].”
Amazing yet disheartening. Thanks for doing this hard work Lisa.
Lisa, I don't know why Ohio journalists didn't interview Simone's family. (Maybe you should ask them and see what they say.) I can tell you that NBC news was upfront all along about the number of cases of heart inflammation showing up in young people about a month after the second vaccine. So was HLN. I remember worrying about my son when I heard this news, but he is older than these young people plus he is refusing to get the vaccine. (But his reason is that he has had covid and has the natural antibodies so he doesn't need the vaccine or associated risks.) .... I think this particular story would benefit from the use of statistics. For example, I want to know, what percentage of people who get the flu vaccine every year develop health problems a month later. I'm sure it happens but the number is probably very small. Then compare this to the number of cases of these heart problems. If the number in the later group is significantly higher, it would give doctors and parents more data to make an informed decision. .... As a cautionary method, maybe our young people should be seen by a doctor and their heart listened to for any preexisting conditions before the covid vaccine. Some young people collapse on sports fields every year from a cardiac arrest and die. This is very sad and the causes can be many. Maybe they didn't have enough electrolytes in their body that day. OR maybe they had a pre-existing heart problem that went undetected. When I had my cardiac arrest my electrolytes were low but it turns out I also had a pre-existing condition, an abnormal heart rhythm.. Thus low electrolytes (I was eating poorly and drinking a lot of diet pop) and abnormal rhythm together led to my near-death experience....Sometimes I wonder if the reason more stories aren't covered or are not covered in depth is that there just isn't enough time or people to do the work. Every company is running lean on employees these days - profit is the bottom line. And right now we have a huge shortage of low-income workers - there are help wanted signs everywhere.