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Brianne Dressen was “healthy” and “in prime physical condition” when she decided to participate in the clinical trial for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in 2020. But within an hour of her vaccination, she experienced the first of several serious adverse events, resulting in symptoms that “changed every aspect” of her life.
“Instead of being an active, caring parent, I’m essentially a bystander in [my children’s] lives and I get to cheer them on from the sidelines now, instead of being super-mom,” Bressen said. “That, to me, has been the worst punishment of all.”
Doctors told her that she was merely experiencing “anxiety” and, having lost her ability to walk, that she simply “wasn’t trying hard enough.”
It wasn’t until she participated in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study on the vaccine-injured in 2021 that she received a proper diagnosis and care for her conditions, which include chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).
But when the NIH abruptly aborted this study in early 2022, “We realized that no one was going to help us, so we had to do it ourselves,” Dressen said. She subsequently founded React19, a nonprofit organization advocating for vaccine injury victims.
Dressen, along with Children’s Health Defense (CHD), has called for the release of government documents relating to the aborted NIH study.
Dressen attended a Feb. 15 U.S. House of Representatives hearing on vaccine safety. She discussed this and more on this week’s “The Defender In-Depth” podcast.
‘We realized that we had been duped’
According to Dressen, the NIH brought her and other vaccine-injured individuals to its headquarters in 2021 for testing and examinations.
“We thought we were contributing to something that was going to then result in thousands more [people] that we knew of at the time to be able to get help,” she said. “They promised us …that’s what they were going to do with the information that they were collecting. They didn’t.”
Dressen said the NIH canceled a follow-up appointment she had for September 2021, telling her that “Delta is raging, so we don’t want to cause any undue harm.”
Later, “all of a sudden, communication just stopped,” she said. “At that point, we realized we had been duped.”
“The real root of the problem is that the information they have never made it out,” Dressen said. “We realized that we had to start speaking out.”
To get that information, CHD filed a Freedom of Information Act request followed by a lawsuit, which forced the NIH to release 7,500 pages of documents at a rate of 300 pages per month. The documents released so far have been heavily redacted.
“It’s no surprise that they’re going to do what they need to do to protect [themselves], and sadly that means that they’re not going to be … serving the best interest of the public,” Dressen said. “They’re going to take care of themselves.”
From the documents released so far, “one of the most interesting things … is actually what is not being said” — specifically, that NIH doctors were “not exploring any other causal link” to account for the symptoms the vaccine-injured were experiencing.
In other words, the NIH acknowledged the COVID-19 vaccines caused Dressen’s and others’ injuries.
“The other interesting thing is that [the NIH was] providing small treatment recommendations” to the vaccine-injured, including “sending references … to doctors that could help them further,” Dressen added.
‘Obscene to see the lengths to which they’re willing to go to protect themselves’
At the Feb. 15 hearing, the three witnesses, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Daniel Jernigan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. George Reed Grimes of the Health Resources and Services Administration, defended the COVID-19 vaccines, the government’s surveillance of vaccine injuries and treatment of the vaccine-injured.
Dressen said she “wasn’t shocked” about the witnesses’ testimony, but considers it “obscene to see the lengths to which they’re willing to go to protect themselves.”
Despite the witnesses’ claims that government vaccine injury surveillance systems such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) have been effective, Dressen said her own experience, and an audit by React19, tell a different story.
Dressen said React19’s audit “found that 1 in 10 [VAERS] reports were deleted” and approximately 20% of VAERS reports “never make it out for public review.” As a result, “1 in 3 reports, real reports in the VAERS system [are] not visible for the public,” but are instead confined to a non-public-facing section of VAERS.
Dressen said she and others from React19 met with Marks in late 2022 to present these findings. According to Dressen, the FDA asked to review this information, but despite “a year and a half of these very laborious, exhaustive emails” following this meeting, the agency has taken no action.
According to Dressen, Marks also did not acknowledge her presence at the hearing, even after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pointed her out. Instead, “one of the staffers turned and kind of looked out of the corner of her eyes.”
“We’re not going to go away,” Dressen said. “At this point, it’s very firmly understood that the FDA isn’t going to do what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re going to have to be forced into it.”
Dressen also addressed revelations made by Grimes at the hearing that the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which handles COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation claims, has issued payouts to only 11 individuals.
“They paid out $41,000 total to 11 people. Compare that to $10 billion that the White House has paid out for increasing vaccine uptake and $3 billion of which went to the CDC for ‘vaccine confidence,’” Dressen said. “We know where the priorities of the health agencies lie.”
‘We’re going to take this head-on’
Dressen said React19 is “working with CHD’s lobbyists and other advocacy groups to try to figure out how the vaccine-injured can get real help.”
This includes a vaccine injury lawsuit against the Biden administration and a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services challenging CICP — and proposed legislation in Congress, including a bill that will move COVID-19 vaccine injury claims from CICP to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) fund.
“We’re going to take this head-on, because there’s no other way to be able to beat this type of corruption,” Dressen said. “The end goal truly is to try to restore the health of the people that have been harmed.”
Watch this week’s ‘The Defender In-Depth’:
Listen to this episode on Spotify.
