A mother’s struggle with deteriorating bones led to a critical surgery, with some doctors now drawing a link to the COVID vaccine.
Mrs Burnette, 34, was working at a nursing home in her native Tennessee when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020. She watched patients die alone and missed her son’s birthday out of fear of becoming infected and bringing the virus home with her.
In January 2021, Covid vaccines became available and, feeling a sense of duty to protect her patients, she took the Pfizer vaccine.
The article examines her case and presents expert opinions on this unexpected connection. Learn more about the factors involved and what this might mean for public health.
She experienced no immediate side effects, but in July 2021, Mrs Burnette developed ‘unbearable’ pain in both of her hips. She was told she had arthritis at 31 years old and had to use a wheelchair when the pain made it too hard to walk.
Believing her pain was something else, another doctor ordered an MRI, which revealed Mrs Burnette’s hip bones were literally rotting, and she underwent her first hip replacement in December 2021. The second followed a few months later in 2022.
However, her hips were just the beginning. Over the next nearly four years – and still ongoing today – Mrs Burnette would undergo surgeries on both shoulders and knees, three surgeries on her elbow, one on her left foot and she is scheduled to have another procedure on her right foot next week.
About a year after her ordeal began, one of her doctors attributed her complications to her bout of Covid in late November 2020 and subsequent vaccines.
Mrs Burnette told DailyMail.com: ‘The pain is so debilitating. I have never felt so helpless in my entire life. I’ve always been trying to be the best provider I could be caring for other people.’
However, due to Mrs Burnette’s condition, she had to quit her job as a nurse and director in an elder care home and go on disability.
She continued: ‘Now I can’t even drive my kids to school in the morning anymore… it’s devastating.
‘I have really had to mourn the life that I thought I was going to have because I will no longer be able to be the same person I’ve always wanted to be because of a virus and a vaccine.
‘It’s absolutely destroyed my life, and so I’ve had to just totally sit back and reevaluate everything.’
Like thousands of Americans who suffered injuries shortly after getting their Covid vaccine, Mrs Burnette attributes her ailments to the shot. But a lack of research and evidence has left vaccine victims without answers, lacking support and being cast as anti-vaxxers.
However, last week, a small Yale University study offered some support to victims’ stories as experts discovered a previously-unknown condition – dubbed ‘post-vaccination syndrome.’
Symptoms include brain fog, dizziness, tinnitus and exercise intolerance.
The condition also appears to reawaken a dormant virus in the body called Epstein-Barr, which can cause flu-like symptoms, swollen lymph nodes and nerve issues.
While Mrs Burnette’s symptoms don’t match all of those mentioned in the research – she has experienced nerve complications – the researchers said vaccine injuries can manifest differently from patient to patient.
Mrs Burnette told DailyMail.com she remains a supporter of vaccines and she and her children have all received routine shots, but she is hesitant to get new ones going forward.
One of the hardest things about her complications is the impact it has on her as a mother.
