by Walker Larson
$40,000.
That’s how much Kate Zerby has spent trying to put herself back together after the Moderna COVID vaccine wreaked havoc on her body.
As Intellectual Takeout reported back in 2022, Kate Zerby of St. Paul, Minnesota, suffered a serious adverse reaction to her Moderna shot, beginning the night after she got it, February 16, 2021. At 3:30 a.m., she awoke, gripped by a pervading sense of gloom and foreboding and the unsettling sensation that something strange was slithering through her system. At the same time, an interior voice seemed to tell her, “If you get the vaccine again, you will die.”
Over the next few weeks, she developed symptoms she’d never experienced before: arm swelling, severe tinnitus, left-sided weakness, headaches and head pressure, vertigo, heart enlargement, massive unexplained bruises, abnormal EKG, and atrial fibrillation. Some days, she had to miss her work as a teacher or leave early, and she used up all her sick days, although she considers herself luckier than many COVID vaccine–injured people because she didn’t have to quit her job entirely.
Kate’s road toward healing was to be rocky and costly—and in many ways it is ongoing.
Kate headed to her regular doctor not long after these mysterious symptoms materialized. She also saw an allergist. These doctors felt sure that Kate had simply experienced a delayed allergic reaction to the vaccine, some kind of anaphylaxis. They told her to consult with the Center for Disease Control (CDC). But the CDC just told her to talk to her doctor. The same unhelpful response was provided by the Minnesota Department of Health. In other words, she was sent on a medical merry-go-round, with the entities involved referring her to one another in a loop. It was a dead-end.
So Kate, who has always been scientifically-minded and a strong reader and researcher, began looking for information online. She discovered a number of Facebook groups for people suffering from symptoms like hers. Some of these groups specifically connected the symptoms to receiving the COVID shot; however, some of them were later censored. Still, Kate was able to make connections within a number of these online communities, including a group for dizziness and tinnitus.
One such connection was nurse practitioner and vaccine victim Shaun Barcavage, mentioned in a recent New York Times piece on COVID vaccine injuries. Kate became an administrator alongside Barcavage for a tinnitus group. In these online forums, members shared research and resources relating to their experiences of vaccine-injury, putting together the puzzle pieces of diagnosis and treatment.
These groups included many medical professionals, scientists, Ph.D.s, and researchers who were themselves vaccine-injured (along with nonexperts), and Kate praised the intelligence and quality of these people engaged in trying to understand what happened to them and how to get better. In some instances, they shared the names of the few doctors who were willing and able to treat their conditions effectively and for what they were: vaccine injuries.
In a conversation with ITO, Kate lamented the fact that even though we have medical specialists for virtually every condition and every physiological system within us—from otolaryngologist to obstetrician gynecologists—there is no specialist for vaccine injury.
“That kind of tells you everything,” Kate said. “It doesn’t exist, and they don’t want it to exist.”
She compared the efforts of regular people to heal without the guidance of such a specialist to the task of general contracting your own house remodel—a formidable project for someone without construction experience. There is no officially trained and recognized “general contractor” for vaccine adverse effects in our medical system, and patients are often left to patch together their own treatments from disparate sources, like the array of Facebook groups described above. And that treatment is generally a complex process that must address a range of intricate and interrelated systems damaged by the vaccine, from the neurological system to gut flora to blood circulation.
Kate uses an insightful analogy to explain the far-reaching effects of vaccine damage: “Our bodies are all like we’re a piano. We’re playing our keys, and we’re living our life. We might have an off key here or there; that’s our piano. But a vaccine injury—it’s almost like someone took your piano and threw it down the stairs … and it’s a mess.” Thus, a wide array of the body’s systems are affected, and in distinctive ways from person to person, just as no two smashed pianos are identical.
Fortunately, Kate was eventually able to meet a doctor who would serve as her “general contractor” to help her put herself back together. When Kate was picking up supplements one day, the store owner told her about a doctor who used to work with a major clinic, had set up a private practice, and was treating patients for vax effects. This doctor wishes to remain anonymous but was able to greatly assist Kate in her healing process. The compilation of treatments that have helped Kate improve were the result of consultations with this doctor and Kate’s own research.
These treatments have included:
- High dose IV vitamin C, which help with her gut biome, among other things. She receives 20g per week, at $200 per visit. Kate has also taken a gut recovery probiotic to help with her gut flora.
- Pulse Electromagnetic Fields Therapy (PEMF), in which pulses of electromagnetic energy are applied to tissues. This helped with Kate’s neurological symptoms, including her mitochondrial function, which her doctor suspected had been disrupted.
- AVACEN® Treatment Method (ATM), used to improve microcirculation. This was implemented in place of the more expensive hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) and helped with the bruising.
- Mind/body treatments to calm the nervous system.
- Red light therapy (including natural red-light therapy from time spent outdoors).
- Mega IgG2000 capsules, an immunoglobulin concentrate that supports healthy digestion and gut barrier function.
- LifeWave X39 patch that uses light to stimulate nerves on the skin causing biochemical changes.
Kate has also seen a therapist to aid her in the psychological and emotional fallout from her experience. One serious psychological wound is the way that many have ignored or dismissed her sufferings, denying the possibility that a vaccine could cause them. Many vaccine-injured people lose friends and family, Kate said, because the relationships deteriorate when the latter refuse to believe in the suffering the patient is undergoing. And this isn’t helped by the fact that the companies whose products may have injured people are not held accountable. Vaccine-injured people face indifference, denial, and a serious lack of institutional support.
For instance, the private practice doctor that Kate saw was not covered by insurance. She had to pay out of pocket. Kate reiterated the comment made by another vaccine victim interviewed by ITO, Craig Norkus, who said, “Every test, every doctor that I had that did not help, that did not work, was at least in some way covered by insurance. Everything that did help was not covered by insurance.” This is one of the main reasons Kate has had to bear such a financial burden—upward of $40,000—in her pursuit of healing and recovery.
For those struggling with vaccine injury and lacking the financial resources to properly tackle the problem, Kate recommends that they reach out to React19, a group offering medical and sometimes financial support for the vaccine injured. Reach out to other injured people as well since the community often supports its own members with donations, she says. She also encourages the vaccine-injured not to give up hope of recovery and suggests making use of free treatments like intermittent fasting and time in nature and sunlight (natural red-light therapy).
Kate concluded her comments to Intellectual Takeout by acknowledging that she has become politically disillusioned, preferring to rely on God rather than any human intervention. She and others like her have been ignored by politicians. “I don’t understand what’s happening … it’s hard for me to see that it’s continuing to happen and no one’s getting help. Why don’t they listen?”
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Walker Larson holds a BA in writing and an MA in English literature. Prior to becoming a writer, he taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin. He is the author of two novels, Hologram and Song of Spheres. When not working on his acreage or spending time with family and friends, he blogs about literature and education on his Substack, The Hazelnut.
