Peter Lederman in Second Bout With COVID-19

@retipper  You can write a lyric for sure. Beautiful and melancholic. The last quatrain creaked my voice reciting it to my sig other.

Hang in there. Best of luck to both of you.

Peter, Did anyone bother to isolate your infecting virus?  If anyone else of lesser credibility had told me your story (serious clinical disease after both prior infection AND the first dose of Pfizer vaccine), I would have been skeptical; the odds are so heavily against that sequence of events.  It raises the question whether your second illness was caused by an antigenic variant virus that eludes antibodies induced by the vaccine and by prior infection with the wildtype strain, which is why I ask whether anyone took a sample of your secretions during the acute phase.  It is vitally important that antigenic variants are verified and documented. I would go so far as to say that yours is a reportable case, if the data were available on which to base a report.  Was your first case proven by a positive PCR also?

What's most important is that you are in recovery.  Take your time. And obviously we are all so happy to know it, including me.

"is there a chance the vaccine caused the clots?"

Clots are very common in COVID. They show up in many people and may be responsible for some of the more unfortunate outcomes. Clots after the vaccine are probably a few zebras lost among all the horses running around the world.

To be more emphatic than glupson. No, the mRNA vaccines, namely the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, cannot and do not cause clots.  The adenovirus-based vaccines do have that potential, but despite the hysteria in the press, it is a very rare adverse event, which of course is no comfort if you happen to be one of the rare cases.  One diagnostic sign of the adeno-vaccine induced clotting is elevated D-dimers (a degradation product of the clotting factor fibrinogen), which Peter does report, but that also happens with COVID-induced clotting.  However, the vaccine-induced mechanism starts with a marked reduction in platelet count by an auto-immune mechanism, which separates it from the COVID-induced phenomenon. The adeno-vaccine induced clotting mechanism has now been defined in the context of several reports that occurred in the New England Journal of Medicine in the last two weeks.  Turns out, it can be successfully treated if recognized early enough, but that's the trick.  It's so rare that routine screening is not (yet) done.  Look for that in future, because it will be hard to do completely without the J&J vaccine.  The AstraZeneca adeno vaccine has many other problems, as well.