I Was Injured in the COVID Vaccine Trials and Still Struggle Every Day: Brianne Dressen

when I got my covid vaccine my reaction started within an hour and it started with tingling down the same arm as my injection it moved to my other arm then it moved to my legs and then it moved to my head into my brain and I had this horrific electrical pulsating sensation through my body 24/7 Brienne dressen was left severely injured after participating in the astroica co9 vaccine trials she he's the co-founder of the nonprofit react 19 which helps people impacted by the covid-19 vaccines react 19 now Advocates on behalf of over 36,000 people we can't be found in any kind of database that the public or anyone beyond the government can access she's the subject of the new book worth a shot secrets of the clinical trial participant who inspired a global movement this is American thought leaders and I'm Yan Kell Brian dressen such a pleasure to have you back on American thought leaders I'm happy to be here thanks for having me you were injured in a covid vaccine trial some four years ago um um you were diagnosed with uh postvaccine neuropathy at the National Institutes of Health NIH and you were actually treated there and it and it helped you and I recall you described this to me as getting the golden ticket where did things stand now it's it's a good question um I was at the NIH back in 2021 so almost four years ago and a lot has happened in that amount of time but also nothing has happened at the same time you know my body is still struggling every day with with this autoimmune condition that continues to eat away at my nerves and at the same time I've been able to find a whole lot of things that have helped my condition as well reading your book one thing that jumped out at me is Diet your husband who's been incredibly helpful to you yeah describe describes a situation where he started just trying diet as a as a possible option and that was actually one of the first things that made a significant difference it was a happy accident because at that point I was really not in a good situation um my cognitive abilities were at the lowest they had ever been I was almost entirely bedbound at this point and we were five six months into this we had tried all kinds of medications the doctors had given us you know we took a picture of it one day and it was literally an entire desk full from edge to edge of just prescription medications that I had taken and failed and you know my husband's like I'm going to to do some research on looking at foods and um neuroinflammation and systemic inflammation and Curbing autoimmunity and sure enough food was one of those things so we cut out gluten and dairy and corn next thing to go was processed anything so anything that came in a box or a bag that all that all went so everything was homemade and organic and clean and it was incredible just in my body with the amount of electrical Sensations vibrations pain brain fog and my personality was not my own at that point because the inflammation was so bad so I started changing the diet you know my husband was feeding me everything at this point and all of a sudden my sense of self returned my personality returned and the pain went from a 9 out of 10 down to a s out of 10 down to a 6 out of 10 down to a 5 out of 10 maybe just for the benefit of our audience we've discussed this before but explain to me you know the sort of collection of symptoms and these are not exclusive to you of course but tell me about that yeah so um when I got my covid vaccine my reaction started within an hour and it started with tingling down the same arm as my injection and moved my my other arm then it moved to my legs and then it moved to my head into my brain and I had this horrific electrical pulsating sensation through my body 24/7 it there was no break from it um and I still have that to this day it's just instead of unbearable we've been able to dial it back with with different therapies I also have extreme leg weakness uh at the beginning I had incontinence um disy Bells it passed out multiple times first time ever in my life that I passed out was was after vaccination and brain fog extreme brain fog confusion disassociation depression um yeah so it was just an onslaught of constant discomfort 24/7 and there was there was no way you know to get it to stop um the the doctors didn't know what to do with it so they just drugged me up with all kinds of medications that are supposed to help nerve pain but really all it did is just make me a zombie so then I didn't feel the nerve pain but I also couldn't feel anything else right I I didn't even know I was in a room sitting up or if I was in bed laying down it was not not a good way to exist so this is certainly not what you expected tell me a little bit about you know how it is you came to be enrolled in this trial and your thinking at the beginning of the pandemic we were watching the mainstream media and we were very concerned about the alarming rates of of deaths and you know hospitalizations and hospitals being overwhelmed and it was humbling enough for me to see that type of Devastation that I I really wanted to be part of the solution because our country was hurting so bad at that point right there was chaos everywhere so I went from collecting masks um for the local hospitals I had several friends and and family members that were working in the hospitals and they were telling us that they were being required to wear bloody soiled masks on their face for days on end because there was a mask shortage so we started collecting masks and just started with sharing with my community hey if anyone has any n95 masks in their garage let me know I'll come pick them up went from that to hey there's clinical trials going on and we were watching the science and phase one clinical trials looked extremely well according to the media phase two you know same thing and here we were in phase three and what the media was saying was it's time it's time for us to just increase the numbers just enough so we can get these clinical trials done and then we'll be able to end the pandemic by stopping the spread of covid through these vaccines and so that sounded like an incredible um you know thing to participate in I've never had any previous problem with any vaccine before in my life fully vaccinated you know it was just no big deal and that all changed with this one dose um of the covid vaccine chart to me the process of getting from that day to you know finding these dietary changes to getting diagnosed and treated by an ah to today um after my injury the drug company was gone right like we called them multiple times we cried out for help you know in emails phone calls um literally tears running down my face like begging for them to help which is what they should have been doing with uh what they agreed to on our contract the contract that the drug company signed with me states that they will help me physically uh medically and financially if there was a a research related injury and they didn't either so my husband reports my injury to the National Institutes of Health and that was January 11th 2021 so if you think about January 2021 the vast majority of America still had yet to even be able to have the opportunity to get their first dose so it January 11th is when the NIH started a study on neurological complications to the covid vaccines they already were receiving reports from madna fizer and J&J people that were injured with the same uh Cascade of symptoms that I was experiencing and that's when an official government body really started investigating this and they started flying people out fizer madna J&J vaccine injured people um to collect their samples figure out what exactly is going on in their bodies but then they also went a step further to give diagnosis so I was diagnosed with post vaccine neuropathy and therapies and they tracked how we were progressing with these therapies that they that they had given us over several weeks so that was a span of from January to August um so was a longer process with them but in the meantime my doctors at home were not cooperating with the NIH they were not following the nih's instructions they were you know typical corporate Health Care System where vaccine injuries are not a real thing if they were a real thing they would have you know been disclosed by the drug companies because they're required to by law to disclose the the side effects of their products to the public and to the medical community so it was you know two very different sides to the same coin and at that point um we experienced a lot of you know panic at the beginning I remember telling my husband I was like please just tell me that this is going to go away that this is going to get better and he kept repeating back to me yes it's there's no way a vaccine can do this so yes this is going to get better it's it's going to be okay um and that desperation of just needing needing to get my life back my health back some kind of relief from the pain turned into loss and substantial loss um and with that went you know like a will to live and hope but we were able to work through that and you know through a lot of work um to pull out of it but on the other side of that was very simple things like food diet modification cleaning up the water that we drink um spiritual alignment and mental and emotional um regulation Bri we're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be right back and we're back with Briand dressen the subject of the new book worth a shot you know you have a chapter in your book The Darkness you considered suicide what struck me in reading this chapter and just sort of the general thoughtfulness in this book by Caroline um is that some of the lessons on suicide that might actually be applicable Beyond covid injury it's obviously even the thought of checking out right and and ending your life there's so much shame that comes with that right and because of the extreme shame with it there's a people are walking around all the time with this going on that they're struggling with and they don't say a word I'd been suffering for several months I hadn't been able to sleep at all because the dis Comfort was so bad my sense of identity was gone right so I was a preschool teacher before this I was a mom that was active in my community and you know organizing all these different events for my kids and the and the other kids in our community and we had this beautiful typical thriving happy life American life and it was beautiful and um and then it within a matter of months had transformed into this profound level of pain and suffering that was shrouded in an illness that was so politically charged that you know this topic was never going to see the light of day that's where and there was no end to the suffering there was no break turning around my emotions mentally and just turning around to face that reality of my new existence was the hardest thing I ever did tell me about your husband finding these letters that you had written to you know your family yeah so obviously I have kids that I love more than life itself when things were at their worst I wrote them these letters and looking back on it now now that I have my thinking my brain has clicked back into place and I'm no longer dealing with the brain fog the letters were so inco parent they I I can't believe that I almost left that as like a final Testament to my kids cuz they were so poorly written and it was very obvious that someone very very ill had written them so I had written them and my husband who was at this point in a constant crisis phase he was trying to keep the family together he was trying to keep the kids literally alive right because there was no longer their mom taking care of them all the time he was trying to keep his job and then he was also trying to keep me alive and um and so he found these and um for him it was like this deep sense of like hurt and betrayal that I had even gone there and he was so angry it was the first time in our marriage I I had ever seen him so just like deeply hurt and and angry I think it hurt him you know more than anyone else obviously but also through that experience he he really redoubled his efforts to make sure that he's like no I have to save my wife I have to make sure that this that somehow this is uh resolved um I can't lose her I can't lose my family um yeah react 19 tell me about very briefly how react 19 was formed and you know where you're at today react 19 it really was created because the government wasn't doing their job and because they weren't going to do it we we had to so a bunch of us that are injured by the covid vaccines got together and started a 501c3 nonprofit and our goals are pretty simple um we are dedicated to providing physical emotional and financial support to people that are harmed by the co vaccines which right now uh we represent over 36,000 people in the United States alone and we have a partnership with over 20 other countries with other organizations that are founded by the injured for the injured just like we are you know the federal compensation programs globally are broken and people can't get disability for an illness that still is not acknowledged there's not even a diagnosis code for it so yeah the organization has has been a Lifeline for people there's a underground network of providers that we have that are doctors that will acknowledge vaccine injury and help these people which believe it or not there's a huge crisis in in corporate Healthcare right now where these doctors are not allow allowed to write down vaccine injury in people's charts they and how are you going to treat something if you can't even look at what could be causing it right so it's it's been it's been an incredible amount of work but it's also been an Incredible Gift to be able to do this but so for example there's you know a child that was injured and um healthy kid totally you know typical 8-year-old kid um she ended up in a wheelchair and diapers and her parents desperate trying to help her uh took her to a major hospital system in the state and they locked her up and they put her in the psych ward this kid was in the psych W for a long time and of course because they were treating her as a psych patient her continue her condition continued to get worse so her family found um and worked with Stephanie and Maddie de Gary and they worked with our provider Network our underground network of providers the mom broke her kid out of the psych ward took her to a doctor on our Network three states away and through the care fund which is the compensation program that we independently run she was able to fund uh getting her daughter the therapy that she needed and she walked into school that fall as if nothing had happened to her I keep thinking about how odd it is that on the one hand you know you were actually diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health um on the other hand and they give guidance even and some doctors just won't accept that guidance because you would think that that would be the exactly the type of guidance they would accept right yeah and then the second part is there's no code for to this day right yeah so unpack that for me it's it's a classic example of what happens when you know um corporate interests overtake common sense and bureaucracy as well so the diagnosis codes are very simple billing codes that everybody that doctors use to bill for insurance uh what's important about these is is you know they can track heart attacks they can rate you know track cancers all kinds of things that they can track through the system based on these codes so it's it's very convenient right right that there is no covid vaccine injury diagnosis code because then you can't actually query in the system to find a rate of incidents to figure out what other cor comorbidities there may be with these people that have a vaccine injury the data collection databases that there are those are all in full control of the federal government and over the last four years they have not been transparent at all we can't be found in any kind of database that the public or anyone beyond the government can access which I think is a very concerning problem mhm I don't think people realize that when you're harmed by a covid vaccine you can't sue you can't sue anyone there is no accountability coming which is against everybody's essential constitutional rights um if you have a problem with a peanut like if you have a peanut allergy you can say that you have a peut allergy without you know people getting defensive right if you say you have a vaccine injury you're met with a very emotional confrontational response and this is literally just a physiological reaction to a new pharmaceutical product and for all Pharmaceuticals other than vaccines you can sue you can hold the drug companies to account and this actually motivates drug companies to make safer products because they don't want to get sued that takes their profit margins way down right but because the the government has stepped in this has been an amazing update um any final thoughts as be finish um yeah if people are struggling if they're struggling just with their families not believing them if people are struggling even you know politically with their family members just you know abandoning them if people are feeling alone just remember that there is an incredible community that cares about you that you you really do matter and the world needs you um you know there's resources out there there's resources at react 19.org and there's people that that do value you and your voice so that's probably what I would end with well Brian dress and it's such a pleasure having you on thanks for having me thank you all for joining Brian Dron and me on this episode of American thought leaders I'm your host Yan Kell [Music]