mRNA vaccine found in human hearts

This paper made some strange claims

A very interesting study came out in September 2023: Duration of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine persistence and factors associated with cardiac involvement in recently vaccinated patients

This paper caused a bit of a stir when it first came out, because it showed mRNA vaccine in the heart tissues of recently vaccinated deceased patients:

Vaccine was detected in the myocardium in a subset of patients vaccinated within 30 days of death.

Now that was interesting by itself, but this paper also had some remarkably strange things hidden within its results.

What the study did

In its introduction, the study mentioned that the “biodistribution and time course of persistence of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 in humans are not well understood.” So they decided to look into that.

The study looked at tissues from lymph nodes, heart, liver, and spleen derived from 20 people¹ who had been vaccinated, plus 5 non-vaccinated control patients. They specifically looked for the presence of vaccine using RT-qPCR, which is a way to detect specific sequences of RNA.

Patients with a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection were excluded from the vaccine group and the non-vaccinated control group.

What they found

Here were the results:

“Days from last dose” means the number of days that had passed between the last dose of vaccine, and death. So if it’s 1, it means 1 day after the patient received their last dose, the person died.

What’s interesting is that a very high percentage of people who died within 30 days of their last dose, had detectable vaccine in their lymph nodes (ALN). 8 of the 12 people who had died within 30 days of their last dose had detectable vaccine in their lymph nodes.

I suppose we are supposed to believe this is a coincidence.

Moreover:

…all three (100%) of the patients with vaccine in the heart had healing myocardial injury which initiated before or at the time of the most recent vaccine injection compared with only 2 (22%) of the 9 patients without vaccine in the heart.

So of the 3 patients who had vaccine in the heart, all 3 had suffered from myocardial injury in the heart.

Also:

Healing myocardial injury is associated with macrophage infiltration of the myocardium. Those patients with vaccine in the heart had more macrophages in the myocardium than those patients dying within 30 days of vaccination without vaccine in the heart.

So it’s natural to wonder whether the vaccine in the heart caused the myocardial injury to the heart.

Some very curious claims

There were some puzzling claims in this paper.

Patient 10

Of the 3 people who had vaccine in their hearts, one of them, patient 10, had vaccine detected in both ventricles of the heart. The paper mentioned that the cause of death for this patient was “severe coronary artery disease.” Could the vaccine have contributed to the person’s death?

Well, they stated that “myocardial injury occurred well before the second vaccine injection 2 days prior to death.” In fact, they estimated that the myocardial injury dated to 3-4 weeks prior to death. However, the timing of the first vaccine injection was not known.

The authors say that the myocardial injury was due to the person’s “coronary artery disease”:

This patient died from severe coronary artery disease, and the myocardial injury at autopsy was most likely related to the coronary artery disease.

But from reading their account, it is not possible to determine whether and to what extent the patient had coronary artery disease before their first dose, since we don’t know when the first dose was.

Now, perhaps the patient had a history of coronary artery disease before any vaccine doses, but even then, isn’t it possible that vaccine in the heart contributed to their death? The authors of the paper do not consider this possibility.

Apparently no one’s death was caused by the vaccine

In fact, according to the authors, no one’s death was caused by the vaccine:

In none of the vaccinated patients was the cause of death linked to the vaccine (Supplementary Table 1).

If you look at “Cause of Death” in the table above, you’ll see several that relate to the heart: 4 cases of coronary artery disease, 3 of cardiomyopathy. Again, I don’t think we can say for certain whether the vaccine contributed to their deaths.

Moreover, we can’t say for certain whether any of the other causes of death weren’t ultimately caused or exacerbated by the vaccine, given that the vaccine can go all over the body randomly. For example, this case report showed vaccine mRNA in a man’s brain. Neurodegenerative disease anyone?

It’s also remarkable that they could be so certain that the causes of death weren’t linked to the vaccine, when so many people died relatively soon after their last dose. Here’s a table from their supplementary materials, showing what we know about when patients got their doses:

I’ve circled all the patients that died within 30 days of their last dose.

There was even a patient that died one day after their last dose (patient # 1). Unfortunately, we don’t know what the patient’s cause of death was. All we know about this patient was that they had high levels of vaccine found in their lymph nodes (from Figure 2).

For some reason, the authors did not match up the causes of death with this table showing days since last dose. Unfortunate.

Putting the findings into context

This study also found that the mRNA vaccine was found “within 30 days of vaccination.”

This finding is not new at this point. This paper found mRNA vaccine could last at least 2 months post-vaccination. Two months (60 days) was the max amount of time sampled in that study, so in some people the vaccine mRNA might even last longer.

The fact that vaccine could be found in heart tissues is also not new.

This paper from August 2021, showed that mice given the Pfizer (BNT162b2) mRNA vaccine had detectable levels of vaccine mRNA in their heart tissues. Here was an image from their supplementary materials:

This shows “spike gene copies”² from the mRNA vaccine in heart tissue.

The green triangles (IV) were from mice that were injected with mRNA vaccine intravenously. The blue diamonds (IM) were from mice that were injected with mRNA vaccine intramuscularly. “NS” was normal saline controls.

You’ll note that not only did they detect vaccine mRNA in the heart tissues of these poor mice, but that there was not much difference between the IV and IM injected mice.

Then there was this case report, mentioned earlier, which found vaccine mRNA in heart and brain tissues of a man: A Case Report: Multifocal Necrotizing Encephalitis and Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccination against COVID-19

It’s curious that the current study did not find the vax mRNA in the liver or spleen. According to documents that Pfizer submitted to the Japanese health authorities, the LNPs that encase the vaccine can end up in liver and spleen (as well as other places):

So if anything, it might be that the current study was not sensitive enough in detecting mRNA vaccine in tissues. Or perhaps they just happened to get samples from people who didn’t get vaccine in their liver or spleens.

At any rate, this study is just another nail in the coffin for those who claim that the mRNA vaccines stay at the injection site. We now have multiple lines of evidence showing that this is not the case.

1. Most of the patients (12) received two doses of either BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273, but six only received one dose and two received three doses.

2. It was “normalized” to expression levels of the β-actin gene, which is supposed to be a “housekeeping gene,” which is supposed to be a gene that is more or less expressed at constant levels.