Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a recognized expert in cardiac health, is known for his public advocacy around medical and pharmaceutical ethics. He began questioning the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines after his father died of a vaccine-induced heart attack in 2022, and later went public with his concerns.
But what most people don’t know is that before his father died, Malhotra himself was injured after receiving two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 and 2021.
“Within a few weeks of being vaccinated, I suffered inexplicable, significant clinical depression that was diagnosed by a psychiatrist and that lasted several months,” Malhotra told The Defender. “I needed psychotherapy to help me get better — and was 80% there when my father suffered a sudden cardiac arrest.”
Malhotra isn’t alone. Studies and V-safe data link COVID-19 vaccines to a host of mental health issues.
In some cases, victims and their family members attributed mental health issues directly to COVID-19 vaccines.
In others, people report that physical vaccine injuries led to mental health issues — in chronic pain with no access to treatment, they report struggling with daily life, professional obligations and strained relationships with loved ones.
Some people — including the family of a person who committed suicide — told The Defender their mental health suffered when federal health agencies refused to acknowledge the injuries they reported to V-safe and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
An analysis by The Defender of data reported to V-safe during the COVID-19 pandemic identified over 300 reports of severe psychiatric disorders, including reports of suicide and attempted suicide, triggered by the COVID-19 vaccine.
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Those interviewed said the V-safe data reflect their own experiences or those of their injured family members. Some described being gaslit by their doctors.
Psychotherapist Joseph Sansone, Ph.D., author of “Psychopathic Authoritarianism: A Disease of the Soul,” said it’s not uncommon for physicians to dismiss the vaccine-injured and their struggles.
“Medical doctors, in many cases, told them to get the injections,” Sansone said. “Now, when the victims are suffering from chronic disease and illness, these same doctors gaslight the victims and not admitting the injuries and diseases are from the shots.” This often leads to feelings of “betrayal and violation” among the injured.
Following last week’s announcement that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching a new clinic to study and treat vaccine injuries, people interviewed by The Defender called for more — and better — treatment of vaccine injuries and a stronger focus on the mental health struggles that often accompany these injuries.
Dan’s story: ‘Overwhelming medical gaslighting’ contributed to suicide
In early 2021, Dan Van Ackeren — a former state champion tennis player — was leading an active life, according to his wife, Brenda Van Ackeren. But after receiving two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, his health rapidly deteriorated.
“Hours after his second dose, we knew something was catastrophically wrong,” Brenda said. “He woke up screaming in excruciating pain, unable to sit or lie down comfortably. He developed severe drenching sweats, chills multiple times a day, persistent vomiting (four to five times a week) and a complete loss of proprioception” — the ability to sense one’s own body position and movements in space.
Dan required multiple hospitalizations, during which Brenda says medical staff subjected him to “overwhelming medical gaslighting” and “treated him with hostility.” They claimed Dan was “faking” symptoms or had merely “choked on a pill” and that his symptoms were “all in his head.”
A “compassionate” neurologist finally diagnosed Dan with multiple system atrophy, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), dysautonomia, severe microclotting, alpha-synuclein pathology, and brain and ear canal tumors.
By 2025, Dan was fully disabled and bedridden 95% of the time. Emergency spinal surgery earlier this year failed. Dan couldn’t bear it any longer.
“The combination of relentless physical agony, progressive neurological decay, medical abandonment and the total loss of the life he loved profoundly broke his mental health,” Brenda said. “He expressed feelings of suicidal despair dozens of times over the years as his body failed him.”
Dan took his life in July. Brenda said he didn’t want to die — but he “simply could no longer endure the nonstop torture his body had become.”
Angelina’s story: ‘You lose that person that you were before you took the shot’
In early 2021, Angelia Desselle was an administrator at an outpatient surgery center. As an employee at a medical facility, she was encouraged to get vaccinated for COVID-19 “to show leadership within the organization.”
But four days after receiving the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot in January 2021, Desselle temporarily lost the use of her legs.
Despite severe pain, which included “hard convulsions” that made it difficult to perform basic tasks, Desselle was discharged from a hospital in a wheelchair and with a walker — and with many unanswered questions about her condition.
Doctors later diagnosed Desselle with lupus, stiff person syndrome and dysautonomia. By June 2021, she lost use of her legs again and needed the help of family members to eat, bathe and get dressed. She also lost her job.
That month, Desselle began having thoughts of suicide. “I didn’t want to be a burden on my family anymore,” she said. She recalled being moments away from attempting suicide — but was saved after her husband intervened.
“My husband happened to walk in when I was taking handfuls of pills. He stopped that and got me out of the house,” Deselle said. “We just went for a ride. Had he not walked in when he did, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
“The mental anguish was something that I’d never experienced,” Desselle said. “It takes a mental toll. You lose that person that you were before you took the shot.”
Lori’s story: Thoughts of euthanasia, suicide followed severe COVID vaccine injuries
Lori Green, a former U.S. Army information technology specialist, said she believed in vaccines. But she expected “a functioning process” if something went wrong.
Green got two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot in late 2020 and early 2021. She said she felt reassured that the federal government had vaccine injury surveillance systems such as V-safe and VAERS, and she had faith in the military’s healthcare system.
“What I did not understand was how difficult it would later become to determine what happened to the information after I reported it.”
Soon after her vaccination, Green developed tinnitus, migraines and severe dizziness. Increasingly severe conditions later followed.
“Over time, clinicians diagnosed conditions including dysautonomia, orthostatic blood-pressure abnormalities, vestibular migraine, chronic migraine and vertical heterophoria with convergence insufficiency,” Green said.
Green sought help from military doctors, but with little success. “What I could not find was someone with both the authority and willingness to say: ‘This is our incident,’” she said.
As “frustration with conventional medical pathways increased,” Green began having increasingly depressing thoughts.
“By late 2022, I had reached one of the darkest periods of my life. I had lost much of my independence. My career was disappearing. My memory was unreliable. I did not know whether I would recover,” Green said. “I repeatedly denied suicidal intent, suicide planning, attempts and self-harm.”
That year, Green considered euthanasia if she “could not obtain answers” or achieve “meaningful improvement” in her physical health. Thoughts of suicide or euthanasia stopped only after her memory, vision and overall health began improving, sometime in 2021.
Michael’s story: ‘I am shocked I am still here’
In early 2021, Michael C. Tokar was an Ironman athlete, marathon runner and construction executive. In April 2021, he received the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) COVID-19 vaccine and immediately experienced reactions.
“In the weeks and months that followed, I experienced numerous health issues, multiple trips to the emergency room, and Bell’s palsy,” Tokar told The Defender.
The injuries occurred weeks after Tokar completed his 20th Ironman half-triathlon — a competition involving over 70 miles of swimming, biking and running. “I was the type of person who embraced physical challenges and rarely sat still,” Tokar said.
Eventually, Tokar was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Today, he faces chronic pain and debilitating health conditions, including burning sensations from the waist down, weakness and leg heaviness, balance problems, stiffness, spasticity, fatigue, bladder issues, trigeminal neuralgia, Lhermitte’s sign and worsening mobility limitations.
The injuries took a mental toll on Tokar, who said the “hardest part isn’t just the physical symptoms. It’s what those symptoms have taken from me.”
“When you spend years wondering what happened to your health, whether your condition will worsen and whether you will be able to continue supporting your family, it inevitably affects your mental health,” Tokar said.
These feelings include “a profound grief that comes with watching abilities you once took for granted gradually slip away,” Tokar said. “When I think of all the dark days I have had … I am shocked I am still here.”
Dedra’s story: Brain feels ‘forever changed’ after COVID vaccine injury
In 2021, Dedra Long was a surgical technician. But within weeks of getting the Pfizer-BioNTech shot in 2021, she experienced seizures and memory loss.
“I could memorize surgeries, instruments, all kinds of things,” Long said. “Now, on some days, I can’t remember what a hairbrush is or what other daily items are.”
These conditions led to mental health issues and thoughts of suicide. “I’d never had serious mental issues or truly considered taking my life until after I was affected by the Pfizer gene therapy they called a shot,” she said.
Long said she’s never had a moment in her life that she “couldn’t come back from,” but following her vaccination, her brain feels “forever changed.”
“This has hurt not only me but my family. Many times, I thought I was dying, and my family and husband didn’t know if he would come home to find me dead,” Long said.
‘A deep, systemic failure’
Most interviewees said they submitted reports to VAERS and/or V-safe, but received limited or no follow-up from federal health agencies.
“One of the most difficult parts of this journey has been feeling unheard, dismissed, or overlooked,” Toker said. “One of the most frustrating aspects of the process has been the lack of any follow-up and support. For many people, filing a report is only the beginning of a long and often lonely search for answers.”
Brenda Van Ackeren said her husband was “a victim of a deep, systemic failure.” She said she submitted two reports to VAERS, but “it has felt entirely like screaming into a void — no agency representative ever followed up, investigated or acknowledged the submissions.”
Desselle said she never received a sufficient response from health agencies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention left her a voicemail message asking why she couldn’t return to work. An email exchange with the NIH led nowhere.
When she posted a video online detailing her condition, Desselle — a Louisiana resident — said her state health department launched a “media smear campaign” against her, questioning the authenticity of her vaccine injury claims.
The people interviewed for this story called for more support for the vaccine-injured. “Neither the physical nor the mental injuries are receiving the urgent attention they demand,” Brenda said. “While awareness has grown, the response is nowhere near enough.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
