Things have not been the same since June 2021 for 53-year-old Douglas Howey from Colorado.
Around a year after he received the second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, the 6 foot 4 and a half inch paraplegic man who once weighed 262 pounds lost over 100 pounds after the sudden onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an incurable and fatal disease that gradually kills a person’s motor neurons.
Though he never told his doctors that he started developing symptoms a month after the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, his family thinks that his sudden sickness a month later and dramatic weight loss within weeks seemed like too much of a coincidence.
This suspicion was further confirmed after Linda Howey, Douglas’s mother, heard a podcast by Del Bigtree where Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talked about her research on possible links between neurodegenerative diseases and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Once patients are diagnosed with ALS, they are normally given a life expectancy of two to five years. The disease is mostly diagnosed in men, and often between the ages of 55 to 75.
Douglas is younger than this and his illness has progressed much faster than most. He has already entered the late stage of the disease and is experiencing breathing difficulties although he has only been sick for one year.
Linda recalled that Douglas’s fever began in June, around a month after he received his second Moderna COVID-19 vaccine dose on May 21, 2021. He experienced high fever and was bedridden for a month.
Douglas’s father passed away in 2011 after a 25-year battle with a brain degenerative disease called frontotemporal dementia (FTD) that has a genetic component.
Within the last week or so of life, Douglas’s father began to experience ALS symptoms. Though Douglas also has the FTD gene, he was not expecting any significant progression for the next 20 years.
By HEALTH 1+1 and MARINA ZHANG
