All Episodes
Previous Next
March 14, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:05
I Was Injured in the COVID Vaccine Trials and Still Struggle Every Day: Brianne Dressen
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
When I got my COVID vaccine, my reaction started within an hour.
And it started with tingling down the same arm as my injection.
It moved to my other arm, then it moved to my legs, and then it moved to my head, into my brain.
And I had this horrific electrical pulsating sensation through my body 24-7.
Breanne Dressen was left severely injured after participating in the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trials.
She's the co-founder of the non-profit React 19, which helps people impacted by the COVID-19 vaccines.
React 19 now advocates on behalf of over 36,000 people.
We can't be found in any kind of database that the public or anyone beyond the government can access.
She's the subject of the new book, Worth a Shot, Secrets of the Clinical Trial Participant Who Inspired a Global Movement.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Breanne Dressen, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
I'm happy to be here.
Thanks for having me.
You were injured in a COVID vaccine trial some four years ago.
You were diagnosed with post-vaccine neuropathy at the National Institutes of Health, NIH, and you were actually treated there and it helped you.
And I recall you described this to me as Where do things stand now?
It's a good question.
I was at the NIH back in 2021, so almost four years ago.
And a lot has happened in that amount of time, but also nothing has happened at the same time.
You know, my body is still struggling every day with this autoimmune condition that continues to...
I eat away at my nerves.
And at the same time, I've been able to find a whole lot of things that have helped my condition as well.
Reading your book, one thing that jumped out at me is diet.
Your husband, who's been incredibly helpful to you.
Describes a situation where he started just trying diet as a possible option.
And that was actually one of the first things that made a significant difference.
It was a happy accident because at that point I was really not in a good situation.
My cognitive abilities were at the lowest they'd ever been.
I was almost entirely bed-bound at this point.
And we were...
Five, six months into this, we had tried all kinds of medications.
The doctors had given us, you know, we took a picture of it one day and it was literally an entire desk full from edge to edge of just prescription medications that I had taken and failed.
And, you know, my husband was like, I'm going to do some research on looking at foods.
And neuroinflammation and systemic inflammation and curbing autoimmunity.
And sure enough, food was one of those things.
So we cut out gluten and dairy and corn.
Next thing to go was processed anything.
So anything that came in a box or a bag, that all went.
So everything was homemade.
Organic and clean.
And it was incredible just in my body with the amount of electrical sensations, vibrations, pain, brain fog.
And my personality was not my own at that point because the inflammation was so bad.
So I started changing the diet.
You know, my husband was feeding me everything at this point.
And all of a sudden my sense of self returned.
My personality returned.
And the pain went from a 9 out of 10 down to a 7 out of 10, down to a 6 out of 10, down to a 5 out of 10. Maybe just for the benefit of our audience, we've discussed this before, but explain to me, you know, the sort of collection of symptoms.
And these are not exclusive to you, of course, but tell me about that.
Yeah, so when I got my COVID vaccine, my reaction started within an hour.
And it started with tingling down the same arm as my injection.
It moved to my other arm, then it moved to my legs, and then it moved to my head, into my brain.
And I had this horrific electrical pulsating sensation through my body 24-7.
There was no break from it.
And I still have that to this day.
It's just instead of unbearable, we've been able to dial it back with different therapies.
I also have extreme leg weakness.
At the beginning I had incontinence.
Dizzy spells.
I passed out multiple times.
The first time ever in my life that I passed out was after vaccination.
And brain fog, extreme brain fog, confusion, disassociation, depression.
So it was just an onslaught of constant discomfort 24-7.
And there was no way to get it to stop.
The doctors didn't know what to do with it, so they just drug me up with all kinds of medications that are supposed to help nerve pain, but really all it did is just make me a zombie.
So then I didn't feel the nerve pain, but I also couldn't feel anything else, right?
I didn't even know I was in a room sitting up or if I was in bed laying down.
It was not a good way to exist.
This is certainly not what you expected.
Tell me a little bit about how it is you came to be enrolled in this trial and your thinking.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were watching the mainstream media and we were very concerned about the alarming rates of deaths and hospitalizations and hospitals being overwhelmed.
It was humbling enough for me to see that type of devastation that I really wanted to be.
Part of the solution, because our country was hurting so bad at that point, right?
There was chaos everywhere.
So I went from collecting masks for the local hospitals.
I had several friends and family members that were working in the hospitals, and they were telling us that they were being required to wear bloody, soiled masks on their face for days on end because there was a mask shortage.
So we started collecting masks and just started with sharing with my community, If anyone has any N95 masks in their garage, let me know.
I'll come pick them up.
Went from that to, hey, there's clinical trials going on, and we were watching the science, and phase one clinical trials looked extremely well, according to the media.
Phase two, you know, same thing, and here we were in phase three, and what the media was saying was, it's time.
It's time for us to just increase the numbers just enough so we can get these clinical trials done.
And then we'll be able to end the pandemic by stopping the spread of COVID through these vaccines.
And so that sounded like an incredible, you know, thing to participate in.
I'd never had any previous problem with any vaccine before in my life.
Fully vaccinated, you know, it was just no big deal.
And that all changed with this one dose of the COVID vaccine.
The process of getting from that day to, you know, finding these dietary changes to getting diagnosed and treated by NIH to today.
After my injury, the drug company was gone, right?
Like, we called them multiple times.
We cried out for help, you know, in emails, phone calls, literally tears running down my face, like, begging for them to help, which is...
What they should have been doing with what they agreed to in our contract.
The contract that the drug company signed with me states that they will help me physically, medically, and financially if there was a research-related injury.
And they didn't either.
So my husband reports my injury to the National Institutes of Health, and that was January 11, 2021. So if you think about January 2021, the vast majority of America still had yet to even be able to have the opportunity to get their first dose.
So January 11th is when the NIH started a study on neurological complications to the COVID vaccines.
They already were receiving reports from Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J people that were injured with the same cascade of symptoms that I was experiencing.
And that's when an official government body really started investigating this.
And they started flying people out, Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, vaccine-injured people, to collect their samples, figure out what exactly is going on in their bodies.
But then they also went a step further to give diagnoses.
So I was diagnosed with post-vaccine neuropathy and therapies.
and they've tracked how we were progressing with these therapies that they that they had given us over several weeks.
So that was a span of from January to August.
This was a longer process with them.
But in the meantime, my doctors at home were not cooperating with the NIH. They were not following the NIH's instructions.
They were, you know, typical corporate healthcare system where vaccine injuries are We
experienced a lot of panic at the beginning.
I remember telling my husband, I was like, please just tell me that this is going to go away, that this is going to get better.
And he kept repeating back to me, yes, there's no way a vaccine can do this.
So yes, this is going to get better.
It's going to be okay.
And that desperation of just needing to get my life back, my health back, some kind of relief from the pain, turned into loss and a substantial loss.
And with that went, you know, like a will to live and hope.
But we were able to work through that and through a lot of work to pull out of it.
But on the other side of that was very simple things like food, diet modification, cleaning up the water that we drink, spiritual alignment and mental and emotional regulation.
Bree, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Breanne Dressen, the subject of the new book, Worth a Shot.
You know, you have a chapter in your book, The Darkness.
You considered suicide.
What struck me in reading this chapter and just sort of the general thoughtfulness in this book by Caroline is that some of the lessons on suicide might actually be applicable beyond COVID injury.
It's obviously...
Even the thought of checking out and ending your life, there's so much shame that comes with that, right?
And because of the extreme shame with it, people are walking around all the time with this going on that they're struggling with, and they don't say a word.
I'd been suffering for several months.
I hadn't been able to sleep at all because the discomfort was so bad.
My sense of identity was gone.
So as a preschool teacher before this, I was a mom that was active in my community and, you know, organizing all these different events for my kids and the other kids in our community.
And we had this beautiful, typical, thriving, happy life, American life.
And it was beautiful.
And then it, within a matter of months, had transformed into...
This profound level of pain and suffering that was shrouded in an illness that was so politically charged that, you know, this topic was never going to see the light of day.
And there was no end to the suffering.
There was no break.
Turning around my emotions mentally and just turning around to face that reality of my new existence was The hardest thing I ever did.
Tell me about your husband finding these letters that you had written to your family.
Yeah, so obviously I have kids that I love more than life itself.
When things were at their worst, I wrote them these letters.
And looking back on it now, now that I have my thinking, my brain has clicked back into place and I'm no longer dealing with the brain fog.
The letters were so incoherent.
I can't believe that I almost left that as like a final testament to my kids because they were so poorly written and it was very obvious that someone very, very ill had written them.
So I had written them and my husband, who was at this point in a constant crisis phase, he was trying to keep the family together.
He was trying to keep the kids literally alive, right?
Because there was no longer their mom taking care of them all the time.
He was trying to keep his job.
And then he was also trying to keep me alive.
And so he found these.
And for him, it was like this deep sense of hurt and betrayal that I had even gone there.
And he was so angry.
It was the first time in our marriage I had ever seen him so just like deeply.
Hurt and angry.
I think it hurt him, you know, more than anyone else, obviously.
But also through that experience, he really redoubled his efforts to make sure that he's like, no, I have to save my wife.
I have to make sure that somehow this is resolved.
I can't lose her.
I can't lose my family.
Yeah.
React-19.
Tell me about briefly how React-19 was formed and where you're at today.
React-19, it really was created because the government wasn't doing their job.
And because they weren't going to do it, we had to.
So a bunch of us that are injured by the COVID vaccines got together and started a 501c3 nonprofit.
And our goals are pretty simple.
We are dedicated to providing physical, emotional, and financial support to people that are harmed by the COVID vaccines, which right now we represent over 36,000 people in the United States alone.
And we have a partnership with over 20 other countries with other organizations that are founded by the injured for the injured, just like we are.
You know, the federal compensation programs globally are broken, and people...
Can't get disability for an illness that still is not acknowledged.
There's not even a diagnosis code for it.
So, yeah, the organization has been a lifeline for people.
There's an underground network of providers that we have that are doctors that will acknowledge vaccine injury and help these people, which, believe it or not, there's a huge crisis in corporate healthcare right now where These doctors are not allowed to write down vaccine injury in people's charts.
How are you going to treat something if you can't even look at what could be causing it, right?
So it's been an incredible amount of work, but it's also been an incredible gift to be able to do this.
So for example, there's a child that was injured and healthy kid, totally typical eight-year-old kid, She ended up in a wheelchair and diapers, and her parents, desperate trying to help her, took her to a major hospital system in the state, and they locked her up, and they put her in the psych ward.
This kid was in the psych ward for a long time, and of course, because they were treating her as a psych patient, her condition continued to get worse.
So her family found...
And worked with Stephanie and Maddie DeGarry, and they worked with our provider network, our underground network of providers.
The mom broke her kid out of the psych ward, took her to a doctor on our network three states away, and through the CARE Fund, which is the compensation program that we independently run, she was able to fund getting her daughter the therapy that she needed.
She walked into school that fall as if nothing had happened to her.
I keep thinking about how odd it is that on the one hand, you know, you were actually diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health.
On the other hand, they give guidance even, and some doctors just won't accept that guidance because you would think that that would be exactly the type of guidance they would accept, right?
Yeah.
And then the second part is there's no...
Code to this day, right?
Yeah.
So unpack that for me.
It's a classic example of what happens when corporate interests overtake common sense and bureaucracy as well.
So the diagnosis codes are very simple billing codes that doctors use to bill for insurance.
What's important about these is they can track heart attacks, they can track cancers, all kinds of things that they can track through the system based on these codes.
So it's very convenient, right, that there is no COVID vaccine injury diagnosis code, because then you can't actually query in the system to find a rate of incidence to figure out what other comorbidities there may be with these people that have a vaccine injury.
The data collection databases that there are, those are all in full control of the federal government.
And over the last four years, they have not been transparent at all.
We can't be found in any kind of database that the public or anyone beyond the government can access, which I think is a very concerning problem.
I don't think people realize that when you're harmed by a COVID vaccine, you can't sue.
You can't sue anyone.
There is no...
Accountability coming, which is against everybody's essential constitutional rights.
If you have a problem with a peanut, like if you have a peanut allergy, you can say that you have a peanut allergy without people getting defensive, right?
If you say you have a vaccine injury, you're met with a very emotional, confrontational...
And this is literally just a physiological reaction to a new pharmaceutical product.
And for all pharmaceuticals other than vaccines, you can sue.
You can hold the drug companies to account.
And this actually motivates drug companies to make safer products because they don't want to get sued.
That takes their profit margins way down, right?
But because the...
The government has stepped in.
This has been an amazing update.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
Yeah, if people are struggling, if they're struggling just with their families not believing them, if people are struggling even politically with their family members just abandoning them, if people are feeling alone, just remember that there is an incredible community that cares about you.
That you really do matter.
And the world needs you.
There's resources out there.
There's resources at react19.org.
And there's people that do value you and your voice.
So that's probably what I would end up with.
Well, Breanne Dressen, it's such a pleasure having you on.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you all for joining Breanne Dresden and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
▲
Export Selection