When Henrietta Simoes’ son Victor died suddenly 16 days after his first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, she began seeking answers. Now, the details of his case have been published, providing important evidence for how the vaccine can injure the heart.
When Henrietta Simoes’ healthy, flourishing 34-year-old son Victor died suddenly on May 6, 2021, 16 days after his first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, she began seeking answers.
More than three years later, on Aug. 8, Biomedical Science and Clinical Research published a peer-reviewed case report, detailing the mechanisms through which the vaccine caused an acute aortic dissection that killed her son.
The report was based on the analyses of Victor’s data that she and her family obtained from researchers across the world.
Henrietta hopes the study will be an important tool in the struggle to bring those responsible for the damage caused by the COVID-19 vaccines to justice.
“I can’t get my son back, so it’s not going to help me in that sense,” Henrietta told The Defender. “But I don’t want this to happen to anybody else, ever again. We need to get justice and we can’t ever let it go.”
Henrietta hopes there will someday be criminal prosecutions for the pharmaceutical industry executives, public health officials and politicians who pushed through the vaccine emergency use authorizations, recommendations and mandates.
The study provides a detailed analysis of Victor’s case using evidence from his medical records, the postmortem pathology report, a tissue sample and perimortem serum analysis — which were obtained through extraordinary measures that Victor’s family took to identify his cause of death.
The researchers note the case study is significant, because few cases of injury and death following vaccination have such extensive medical documentation.
This general lack of documentation is a serious issue, indicating the safety data for the vaccines is incomplete, they wrote.
“This case review and our findings emphasize that without the described thorough investigations, accurate safety data cannot be realized,” they wrote, “and in fact, the safety data is likely impacted by information gaps in the reporting.”
In other words, public health agencies are making their risk-benefit analyses of the vaccines without proper safety data, they said. That safety data is also necessary to provide the public with complete informed consent.
Pfizer vax ‘suspected catalyst’ in events leading to Victor’s death
According to the case report, 16 days after his first dose of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, Victor “experienced acute inflammation, sudden thoracic aortic dissection, and pericardial tamponade, rapidly leading to his death.”
Aortic dissection is an uncommon medical emergency in which the inner layer of the large blood vessel branching off the heart’s aorta tears. The condition mostly affects men in their 60s and 70s.
Victor was at a low risk for heart complications, according to the report. He had normal blood pressure, was a non-smoker, had regular glucose and lipid levels and genetic testing showed he had no genetic connective tissue disorders.
He did have a bicuspid aortic valve — a common heart defect present at birth that had never caused any symptoms — but otherwise had no personal history of heart issues, and no one in his family had a history of aortic dissection.
Yet, Victor’s autopsy showed a tear in his aorta, creating a pocket that entered his pericardial space and filled it with blood, compressing his heart and causing cardiac arrest.
Hospital records show that Victor was asymptomatic until a few hours before he went to the emergency room.
Henrietta said that Victor initially complained of epigastric pain. Four hours later, his smartwatch indicated his heart rate was 190 bpm and he had numbness in his jaw and chest. He was up, walking and talking at the time the paramedics arrived at his apartment building, but presented to the hospital with CPR in progress.
He died within an hour.
The medical examiner listed the cause of death as “acute aortic dissection,” and did not investigate further possible issues.
The case report lays out the findings of the autopsy, genetic and toxicological testing, tissue and blood analysis and identified markers of pericarditis and myocarditis, indications of a hypersensitivity reaction, and the presence of the spike protein in his aorta and vascular tissues — along with indications that spike protein was vaccine-derived rather than viral.
Victor had also never had COVID-19.
“Given these findings and a lack of underlying genetic disease, this inflammatory response is suspected to have initiated the deadly vascular and cardiac inflammatory cascade that ultimately took his life,” the report said. “The Pfizer Covid-19 mRNA vaccine is the suspected catalyst for this chain of events.”
The paper presents extensive support for the conclusions.
Support includes Pfizer’s own documents reporting 1,441 cardiovascular adverse events reported to the company that included aortitis, pericarditis and myocarditis. It also includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) admission that there is evidence of a causal association between the vaccine and myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in young men.
Studies have also shown the presence of the spike protein in such cases has been linked to inflammatory responses of heart tissue. Research also shows the lipid nanoparticles travel throughout the body and cause highly inflammatory responses.
The spike protein and evidence of inflammation were present in Victor’s heart.
The authors also noted that there have been many cases of fatality following recent COVID-19 vaccination without the autopsy histopathological examination and complete patient diagnosis that occurred in this case which makes the accurate reporting of vaccine-linked fatal injury difficult to know.
It is also likely, they noted, that many cases of cardiac damage and anomalies following vaccination, including issues like myocarditis go “undetected, untreated, and excluded from statistical analysis,” because they go unreported or because the testing necessary to identify the issue is either not available or is not done.
Family’s journey to find Victor’s cause of death
Victor got the shot, Henrietta said, because he was under pressure from many different directions. He was a senior manager at Amazon and anticipated that his employer would likely mandate the vaccine. He and his girlfriend traveled frequently and he was particularly concerned about exposing his elderly grandparents to COVID-19 if he had an asymptomatic infection.
Two weeks post-vaccination, Victor was healthy, happy and dancing with his girlfriend just hours before his chest pain, numbness and racing heartbeat compelled him to call emergency medical services.
His family — who raced across the country from New York to Seattle as soon as they were informed that Victor had been raced to the hospital and died — knew that his death did not make sense and immediately suspected the vaccine.
“But we had a long fight for the truth,” Henrietta said, “because no one wanted to admit this is what could have possibly happened.”
Washington state required an autopsy, Henrietta said, and the family knew that the samples of tissues, serum and fluids collected by the medical examiner would be crucial to future investigations and obtained them.
In addition to the autopsy, testing ruled out any genetic factors.
Then Henrietta began to contact specialists throughout the world, seeking someone who would analyze the blood and tissue samples they had, to determine whether the vaccine had played a role in Victor’s death.
Henrietta wanted to protect the names of the researchers because so many people have been subject to backlash for questioning the COVID-19 vaccines. She said they eventually found a world-renowned specialist at a top university hospital who analyzed Victor’s blood serum.
They found evidence that his cytokine and inflammatory markers were “through the roof,” she said, as the report later detailed.
Next, they sought out experts who would do a histological, or microscopic, examination of Victor’s tissue. An expert in Germany found that Victor had myocarditis and pericarditis — although he had exhibited no symptoms — along with evidence of spike protein in his aortic tissue.
Henrietta on Sept. 9 reported her son’s death to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. — because the hospital did not file a report, The Defender reported.
The CDC, she said, did not investigate her son’s death. Instead, despite multiple attempts to speak with someone at the agency, they responded to her with form letters.
One staff member eventually confirmed the agency had received the report, but then simply referred her to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.
To date, that program has paid out only 14 claims for injuries from the COVID-19 vaccine.
As they gathered the data that would help them to confirm Victor’s cause of death, the Simoes family also began connecting with others who were injured by or lost loved ones to the COVID-19 vaccines.
That included connecting to React19, a nonprofit that provides support for vaccine-injured people. With colleagues there, Henrietta helped establish the React-19 Bereaved support website.
Through her experience traveling the country and meeting with others impacted by the COVID-19 vaccine or doctors and scientists researching its effects, she connected with others committed to changing the legal structure that allowed this to happen.
Henrietta and her husband are currently plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by Moms for America seeking to strike down the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act or PREP Act — the federal law that granted legal immunity to companies such as Pfizer and Moderna for injuries caused by their COVID-19 vaccines and other COVID-19 countermeasures.
The lawsuit alleges the act unfairly “immunizes defendants from a staggering panoply of fundamental and historically enshrined common law causes of action like negligence, medical malpractice, gross negligence, products liability, wrongful death, and even intentional torts like assault and battery under a completely subjective risk/benefit analysis.”
It also sets a “breathtakingly short” one-year statute of limitations for injuries compensated by the government.
In doing so, they argue, “the PREP Act unconstitutionally created an opaque, unappealable, quasi-judicial tribunal to adjudicate claims lacking even a fig leaf of due process and explicitly disclaimed judicial oversight.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the PREP Act unconstitutional. It also asks the court to declare that the plaintiffs can sue companies like Pfizer and Moderna in federal and state courts.
Henrietta said she won’t stop fighting until there is justice for her son and all vaccine-injured people. “We are shattered. And they did this to us. They murdered my son and they murdered other people.”
Watch Henrietta’s interview with the CHD Bus here:
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