RFK Jr. The Defender - July 01, 2021


Pfizer Kids with Justin and Isaiah Harris


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

155.97766

Word Count

2,792

Sentence Count

185

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

Isaiah Harris, an 18-year-old student from Springdale, Arkansas, and his father, Justin, who owns a school in Springdale tell us a little bit about Isaiah's experience with the MMR vaccine and how it affected his life. Isaiah and Justin talk about how worried they were about their son getting the vaccine, and what they did to make sure he was okay. They also talk about the experience Isaiah had with the vaccine and explain why they think it was a good idea to give him the vaccine at the time it was given to him. This episode is sponsored by Moderna, a company that makes the M.O.V.A. vaccine. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Thanks to our sponsor Moderna for sponsoring this episode. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Suneaters, courtesy of Epitaph Records. We are a proud affiliate of NPR.org. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a patron! Thank you so much for your support and supporting our efforts! We truly appreciate your support. We can't wait to hear from you! in the future we'll be looking out for you in the next episode of our new show, Thank You! Thank You so much and we'll get back to you soon. - Thank You, Thank you, Kristy and Justin and Good Morning America - by Mr. by & Good Morning, in . (Isaiah and Good Luck, by Mrs. Harris x , Thanks, , Thank You by Ms. Harris & Good Luck Love, (Alfred, ) "Bye, Mr. P. & Mrs. & Mr. R. , etc., -- @ ~ ? etc. (P. & , "Amberly, " & " , & "Alf& # ) & < | AND + :) And , and is , Mr. MURDER, etc., etc., & &


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Okay, thank you everybody for joining us today.
00:00:02.000 I have some very, very interesting guests.
00:00:06.000 Isaiah Harris, who is an 18-year-old student from Springdale, Arkansas, and his father, Justin, who owns a school in Springdale, Arkansas.
00:00:17.000 And they are here to tell us a little bit about Isaiah's experience with the vaccine.
00:00:24.000 Isaiah, welcome to the show.
00:00:26.000 How are you feeling?
00:00:27.000 I'm feeling a lot better now.
00:00:29.000 I'm doing pretty good right now.
00:00:31.000 Tell me what happened.
00:00:33.000 I got the Pfizer vaccine and on my second dose it made my chest hurt really bad within 48 hours so I went to the hospital and they gave me a case of myocarditis and they gave me like my troponin levels ended up being that of a heart attack.
00:00:50.000 Did you go immediately to the hospital after you got the vaccine?
00:00:54.000 I did not.
00:00:55.000 So I actually went and walked my graduation.
00:00:57.000 I just graduated community college as well as high school.
00:01:00.000 I went and walked that and it was that night actually it started to hurt and I got a little bit better so I went and lifted weights and then right after that in the morning it was just so bad I couldn't breathe so then that's whenever I went into the hospital.
00:01:16.000 And tell us why what made you take the vaccine?
00:01:21.000 The vaccine.
00:01:22.000 So, I plan on going into med school, and I thought it was a requirement.
00:01:27.000 I think it is, but there's a lot of pressure to get it right now, it feels like.
00:01:32.000 Did you have any reservations about getting it, or did you just think it's, there's no risk here, I ought to get it?
00:01:40.000 No, before I got it, I was under the impression that there was no risk.
00:01:44.000 It was completely safe.
00:01:46.000 It was for the better, and after now, I just, I don't think it was worth it.
00:01:53.000 And so are you completely recovered now?
00:01:56.000 No, I'm not completely recovered, but I'm doing a whole lot better than I was.
00:02:01.000 Did the doctors report that they immediately recognized it as a vaccine injury?
00:02:07.000 No, no.
00:02:08.000 Actually, the first hospital that I went to, they would not acknowledge that it had anything to do with the vaccine.
00:02:14.000 They told me it was a virus and that it was just something that I had caught.
00:02:18.000 But the second hospital I went to, Dr.
00:02:21.000 Alan Klein, he's doing research on it, the link between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, and he's the one who told me that they were linked.
00:02:30.000 Where is that hospital?
00:02:32.000 That's in Cleveland, Ohio.
00:02:34.000 So it's the Cleveland Clinic?
00:02:36.000 Yes, sir.
00:02:37.000 Oh, you had to go all the way up to Cleveland to get a doctor who acknowledged that this may have been a vaccine injury?
00:02:45.000 Yes, sir.
00:02:46.000 And how about the initial doctor you went to?
00:02:49.000 That was the hospital in Springdale?
00:02:51.000 It was in Rogers, Arkansas.
00:02:54.000 So my experience there was not great at all.
00:02:56.000 I went in telling my chest pains and I was in a waiting room for around two hours.
00:03:00.000 And then they kept me in a hallway for six hours because I'm a healthy 18-year-old.
00:03:05.000 They just didn't think it could be a heart attack, I guess.
00:03:09.000 And then what happened?
00:03:10.000 And then it got so much worse there.
00:03:13.000 And then I was hospitalized for four days.
00:03:16.000 After that, they released me and gave me medicine to basically numb my heart and help with the swelling.
00:03:22.000 Did they say, were they apologetic at all for keeping you in the...
00:03:25.000 No, not at all.
00:03:28.000 I called to leave a message for one of the doctors after, and one of the nurses that treated me picked up, and some words were exchanged, and she ended up hanging up on me and wouldn't get me through to the doctor, so I couldn't contact them.
00:03:42.000 It was not a great experience at all.
00:03:45.000 What were you going to say to the doctor, Isaiah?
00:03:49.000 I tell them I'm still in pain and I think there's something wrong with me, but I couldn't get through to them.
00:03:55.000 So I'm just laying in bed, a lot of chest pain.
00:03:59.000 And was this before you went to see Dr.
00:04:02.000 Klein in the Cleveland Clinic?
00:04:04.000 Yes, I actually went to Dr.
00:04:05.000 Klein on June 16th.
00:04:07.000 And when was your injury?
00:04:09.000 My injury was around May 1st.
00:04:13.000 Like you were treated on May 2nd in that hospital?
00:04:18.000 Yes.
00:04:19.000 Justin, you probably were even more worried than Isaiah as the father.
00:04:27.000 We were very worried.
00:04:28.000 It became...
00:04:30.000 At first, having the Moderna vaccine, and he had the visor.
00:04:35.000 Moderna, I got sick on both of them, but it was a four-day sickness, having to stay in bed, but got over it.
00:04:44.000 So at first, we thought, okay, he's just kind of sick.
00:04:49.000 Go ahead, walk your graduation.
00:04:51.000 It was hot that day.
00:04:54.000 We didn't think much of it, and then he went home.
00:04:57.000 He gradually got worse.
00:05:00.000 He's the type that continued to go.
00:05:02.000 He went ahead and worked out.
00:05:04.000 And then he continued to have a hard time breathing.
00:05:08.000 And so we took him into the emergency room.
00:05:11.000 They wouldn't let me go back because of the COVID restrictions.
00:05:15.000 His mom kept on telling him, you know, he's having a heart attack.
00:05:19.000 They ignored us.
00:05:20.000 And that's when eight hours went by and she finally said, you know, he's having a heart attack.
00:05:25.000 And they kind of took her serious.
00:05:27.000 And we had to fight with the hospital.
00:05:29.000 It was a continuing, you know, this is serious.
00:05:32.000 We had to beg them basically to do something.
00:05:35.000 And of course, I finally got to go once he was admitted.
00:05:38.000 And they just would never relent or say that, you know, this is part of the vaccine.
00:05:44.000 They said he probably came in contact with someone who had a virus.
00:05:49.000 And then that's how he caught it.
00:05:51.000 The myocarditis.
00:05:53.000 When his lungs filled up with fluid, they just didn't know what to say.
00:05:59.000 And then when he continued to have problems afterwards, they wouldn't answer our phone calls.
00:06:04.000 We couldn't get anybody.
00:06:06.000 And fortunately, Isaiah has a friend in the executive world that had connections with Cleveland Clinic.
00:06:13.000 And we were fortunate to get with Dr.
00:06:17.000 Klein, who did research beforehand Oh, I think there's a lot more than that.
00:06:43.000 Right.
00:06:44.000 Well, that was at the time when he first wrote the first article.
00:06:47.000 There was only 77 cases in the world.
00:06:50.000 Now, by this time, he has seen over, Isaiah knows the number, but I think he has seen hundreds cases just himself.
00:07:00.000 When we reported it, they have not gotten back with us on Isaiah's case to know what they're going to do or Get medical information on Isaiah, so we're still waiting to hear from the CDC on even further information on him.
00:07:19.000 Did the CDC contact you?
00:07:21.000 You reported it was the Bears, right?
00:07:23.000 Yes, we did.
00:07:25.000 Who reported it?
00:07:26.000 Did you or the doctor?
00:07:27.000 The doctors never reported it.
00:07:30.000 Yeah.
00:07:31.000 Yeah, they didn't report it from the hospital.
00:07:34.000 So you personally did the report?
00:07:37.000 We did.
00:07:37.000 I contacted, I'm friends with the Surgeon General in Arkansas and he had asked us to report it and he sent us the link and then that's how we reported it.
00:07:48.000 Does that worry you at all that you had to know the Surgeon General of Arkansas or it would have never got reported?
00:07:55.000 It does worry me because it makes you wonder, even though, I mean, honestly, we were going to report it anyway for Isaiah, but he kind of nudged us a little bit to report it because it probably would have took us a little longer to report it.
00:08:12.000 That does bother me because I think the hospital should have done it automatically, but they didn't.
00:08:18.000 They just assumed it was a virus and not connect the two at Mercy Hospital.
00:08:23.000 That does concern us.
00:08:26.000 How long did it take you to report it?
00:08:28.000 Well, we ended up reporting it, I think, seven days after his incident.
00:08:34.000 But how long did you have to spend on the link, figure it out, and then pull out the form?
00:08:40.000 Was it five minutes or 15?
00:08:43.000 I would say...
00:08:46.000 Probably once we got in there, it only took about 10 minutes.
00:08:50.000 Where I found a lot of issues on reporting it was they wanted us to put all the medical information in there.
00:08:57.000 And I'll be honest with you, that was a little tough for us because putting all of his test numbers in there, we couldn't do that because he had so many tests ran.
00:09:10.000 All the four days, we couldn't do that.
00:09:14.000 And that does bother me because if we can't give the CDC all the information, how are they going to get it?
00:09:22.000 And so I was only able to give them the first days when he was in the emergency room, those tests.
00:09:30.000 So they don't even have a picture, overall picture of what happened to Isaiah to know if it I read in the Defender, in the article that appeared in the Defender, that it was a nurse who came in with an article that said that myocarditis is a side effect of the vaccine.
00:09:52.000 Yes, he came in and showed me a study done in Israel, actually.
00:09:57.000 I think it was teens, male teens.
00:09:59.000 It was very common in them.
00:10:02.000 So this was a time when the doctors were telling you it wasn't the vaccine, and a nurse came in and...
00:10:07.000 Yes, the nurse came in telling me, I was talking to him about, I thought it was the vaccine that caused it, and he said, yeah, I don't really, I don't agree with getting the vaccine, even though he's in the medical field, and then he showed me this article from Israel.
00:10:23.000 It was a male nurse.
00:10:25.000 Yes.
00:10:26.000 It was a male nurse who initially said it wasn't the vaccine and then came and said, oh, I made a mistake.
00:10:32.000 Maybe it wasn't the vaccine.
00:10:33.000 He couldn't confirm it was the vaccine, but we were talking about how it was very possible because of Israel.
00:10:40.000 Justin, what do you understand the prognosis of his rising?
00:10:45.000 The diagnosis?
00:10:47.000 And the prognosis, long term, what's going to happen?
00:10:51.000 What does his life look like now?
00:10:53.000 As of right now, according to Cleveland, he has six months of basically bed rest.
00:11:02.000 He cannot, because of some of the medicine that Mercy put him on, they numbed his heart.
00:11:07.000 But the next six months, all he can basically do is walk his dog.
00:11:12.000 No lifting weights, no sports, or he can have a possible heart attack.
00:11:19.000 And what they're going to do is the local doctor will have to do continued lab work, looking at his heart to see how he's going to do.
00:11:28.000 And then they'll have to see from there to see if the inflammation of the heart goes down.
00:11:35.000 And they'll just have to monitor from here on out to see how his heart is doing.
00:11:41.000 Isaiah, you just mentioned that you were thinking of going to medical school.
00:11:47.000 Does this experience, do you think it's going to color the way that you might act as a doctor to your own patients?
00:11:56.000 Yes, I definitely think that I'll be doing it differently than some of the doctors did with me.
00:12:03.000 Yeah, for sure it will.
00:12:06.000 In what way?
00:12:09.000 Well, I would, especially with something like a vaccine that we don't have research done on, a lot of research, I would treat people who say they were basically being experimented on.
00:12:20.000 I would make sure that they're okay, especially if they come in saying they have heart pains.
00:12:25.000 I would make that top of my priority.
00:12:27.000 I like to do some research into this, like how mRNA vaccines affect us.
00:12:34.000 All right, so I just called up the numbers.
00:12:37.000 It says, according to the latest data from VAERS, which is the American system, there have been 1,117 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, which is heart inflammation in all age groups reported in the U.S. following COVID vaccinations since December 14th, 2020.
00:12:56.000 The 686 cases attributed to Pfizer, 391 cases to Moderna, 36 cases to Johnson& Johnson, and that probably reflects the uptake of those separate vaccines.
00:13:11.000 As a parent, what is your reaction, Justin?
00:13:14.000 Isaiah's a pretty private person when it comes to this, and I'm glad he's wanting to speak out on this, but why we came out is I think it's time for parents to educate themselves, and I think one of Isaiah's point and our point is to say parents really need to educate themselves,
00:13:34.000 and I'm encouraging the CDC to stop the vaccination of teenagers and children from On the COVID-19 vaccine.
00:13:45.000 I think it's the dangers of it.
00:13:49.000 Really, it's just not okay.
00:13:53.000 One thing Isaiah said, even in the article, that if kids and teenagers have, if they can overcome COVID, I don't think the vaccine's worth having a heart condition for the rest of their life or live with this than having a vaccine that could cause damage for the rest of their life.
00:14:13.000 And I used to believe in vaccines.
00:14:17.000 I took the Moderna myself.
00:14:19.000 My wife didn't take any vaccine.
00:14:21.000 The other two sons didn't take the vaccine.
00:14:24.000 But I think it's time that they put a stop to this.
00:14:27.000 What is Isaiah's mom?
00:14:29.000 What's her reaction?
00:14:30.000 She's the one who was sitting for eight hours in the hallway with him.
00:14:34.000 How does she feel?
00:14:35.000 You know, she's heartbroken.
00:14:37.000 She was against the vaccine.
00:14:39.000 I was more for it because he's social.
00:14:42.000 He's very out there.
00:14:44.000 Goes places and does, you know, a lot.
00:14:48.000 We were literally locked down.
00:14:50.000 Arkansas was not a lockdown state, but us personally, we stayed inside and didn't go anywhere.
00:14:57.000 Isaiah actually didn't go anywhere for several months and he never got COVID, never had COVID. For him to have the vaccine and then this happened, it was heartbreaking for her because we talked long about this vaccine.
00:15:14.000 And she did not want him to have it.
00:15:16.000 And so she's definitely heartbroken.
00:15:20.000 This has been very hard for her.
00:15:22.000 Like I said in the article in The Defender, I feel a lot of guilt for it because I encouraged Isaiah because if he's going to be out, you know, to have the vaccine, we play both sides of it.
00:15:34.000 She's really heartbroken about it.
00:15:37.000 Are those your two younger brothers?
00:15:41.000 No, one's 19-year-old.
00:15:43.000 He's 19 and he's in college.
00:15:45.000 And then the other one is 16.
00:15:48.000 And we let them decide what they wanted to do.
00:15:51.000 And why did they base their decision?
00:15:53.000 Were they educating themselves or are they just, you know, against any kind of intervention like that?
00:15:59.000 No, they educated themselves, and we educated them.
00:16:03.000 We told them, of course, myocarditis, to be honest, wasn't even on our radar, but there was some other factors that we weighed in, what we had learned about it, that we had shared with them that could have been a possible side effect.
00:16:18.000 And we even shared that with Isaiah, and he was okay with some of the risk.
00:16:24.000 That myocarditis wasn't even one of those risks that we had even heard of.
00:16:29.000 That was not something we had heard of.
00:16:31.000 But there were some other things that we had heard of, and Isaiah was okay with it.
00:16:36.000 But possible death was not part of it.
00:16:39.000 That was a shock to us.
00:16:42.000 Yeah, I think it's tough when you have, you know, vaccines are the only medical intervention that is administered to healthy people.
00:16:51.000 And every other medicine is given to somebody who has already suffered, who is suffering some risk or some diminishing quality of life.
00:17:01.000 And somebody like that may be willing to take in an enhanced risk.
00:17:06.000 If it's a prophylactic medication, according to virtually any compilation of medical ethics, you don't want to be risk-free.
00:17:15.000 You're giving it to somebody who has no risk.
00:17:18.000 I think that's something that Americans need to understand.
00:17:23.000 We really have a right to understand these risks.
00:17:27.000 And if there is risk, A healthy person has a right to refuse this intervention.
00:17:33.000 Exactly.
00:17:33.000 You're right.
00:17:35.000 Thank you.
00:17:35.000 It was an honor to talk to you very much.
00:17:38.000 Thank you very much for your courage.
00:17:40.000 Thank you for joining us.
00:17:42.000 And we will ask all of our viewers to pray for you, Isaiah, for a quick recovery.
00:17:48.000 And I know that you're going to make a really good doctor when you graduate from medical school.
00:17:53.000 So thank you for speaking up.