Cherie Romney discusses her family's vaccine injuries with RFK Jr. Cherie's son Everest Romney, 17, received the vaccine April 21 and began experiencing neck pain, fever and severe headaches one day later. His mother said her son’s pediatrician initially dismissed the symptoms as a pulled neck muscle.
After more than a week of symptoms and being unable to freely move his neck, the family got this diagnosis: two blood clots inside his brain, and one on the outside.
“In a million years, I never expected it,” Romney said. “The worst thing, the worst thing, is to have the doctor come in and say, ‘OK, well, we found two blood clots inside his brain.’ The hardest thing was I let him get that shot. And he was healthy and well before. But you question it, you can’t help but question it when it all goes wrong.”
Romney doesn’t want to discourage parents from letting their kids get the vaccine because she believes each parent must make the decision for their children, but she wished her choice had been a different one.
I'm joined today by Sherry Romney from Draper, Utah, and I wanted to ask you, Sherry, about what's happened to your family following the COVID shots.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Sherry has two superstar basketball players in her family, including her son, Everest, who's 6'8".
And prior to getting his COVID vaccine, I think he scored 16 points in his high school basketball.
And he's been now in the ICU in the hospital almost since getting the vaccine.
Can you tell us what happened?
So my son is 6'9".
He's a varsity basketball player at Corner Canyon High School.
He plays for Utah Premier, and that's his AAU team.
He got his COVID shot the same day as I did and my husband did on the 21st of April.
He scored he was really sick and even really sick he scored 16 points at his basketball game.
Often it can be even more.
The very next day we were at the pediatrician's office because he had so much swelling in his neck that he couldn't move his neck without using his hands.
My My husband is also very athletic.
And I mean, he's six foot nine as well.
Plays basketball, but not professionally, obviously.
So on the 26th, we took him and my son in.
It was five days after the shot.
We took him into the pediatrician.
He'd had swelling and a lot of pain in his neck.
He thinks that night, he started complaining about it on Thursday, the 22nd, but he says that it started kind of feeling sore that very night.
He's an athlete, so, you know, little owies kind of don't tend to, he doesn't tend to pay attention, but by the time he got done with his tournament, he could barely move his head.
So we took him into the pediatrician, and the pediatrician said it was a pulled muscle, thought it was a pulled muscle.
My son disagreed with him.
My son knows what a pulled muscle feels like.
He said it's not what it is.
He felt horrible, achy, just awful.
He had a temperature of 101 that day.
The pediatrician put a neck brace on him, which actually made it worse, and then sent us home with some antibiotics.
I pushed really hard, and he did get a CT scan.
But he told me if he had three careers in medicine, three lifetimes, he wouldn't see what I'm suggesting.
Because I said, this has to have something to do with the shot.
The pain started on the same side of his neck as he got the shot on his right side.
And he said, well, we'll report it, but I just don't think it's likely.
So it was pretty dismissive.
We were sent home.
Within 24 hours of that, my son got probably one of the worst migraines he's ever had.
And it didn't stop at all.
It didn't let up.
It didn't matter what medication we threw at it.
It didn't any like just regular migraine medication would not touch it.
He was basically incapacitated from that point.
So we called the doctor.
We talked to the doctor.
The doctor said, well, yeah, he has a really swollen lymph node next to his jugular.
Well, he actually didn't say it was next to his jugular, which he had, because it should have probably been paid a little more close attention to it.
But he said, if he's not doing better, then maybe you need to go see an ENT kind of thing.
By Monday, my son had had a headache, a migraine nonstop for eight days, and I was done.
I had been trying to get him into the emergency room.
But my son had been a little resistant because, like I said, he's an athlete.
And they're like, it's just an owie.
It will go away.
So we took him into the emergency room.
And they found he had at least two blood clots in his brain.
And they transferred my son to Primary Children's Hospital, to the PICU, the PEDS ICU, where he was for almost three days.
Then they transferred him to the regular hospital where he was for another five.
And he's been released.
He's since been released to my care.
He's stable.
He has two cerebral venous sinus thromboses in his head.
And he has, we don't know about long-term damage at this point.
Early indications are that he's probably going to be okay long-term.
In the meantime, He has to be escorted to the bathroom to get up and in and out of the bathtub whenever he's walking to the table because he's so dizzy and he has some terrible brain swelling from the trauma to his brain.
He's 17.
So he will be a junior at Corner Canyon High School next year, just turned 17.
And how about your husband?
My husband...
Oh, it's all happened.
So much has happened.
Saturday morning, just before six, my husband got up in extreme excruciating pain.
He's six foot nine.
He fainted.
Obviously, I'm six and a half months pregnant.
My husband's on the floor, cannot breathe, and we have no idea what's going on.
I called.
I can't move him.
He can't move.
He got the jab.
He did.
He got it on the 21st and same day as my son.
And he'd been having some pains in his chest and in his, and he thought it was like, he chucked it up to anything, pulled muscle.
Like I said, he's athletic, pulled muscle.
He did say at one point the pain was so bad, he wondered if maybe he was having a heart attack, but it wasn't up in his shoulder.
So he ignored it and he waited and it went away.
And it had been happening since about the fifth or sixth day after the shock.
But we've been dealing with my son, and my husband had just been kind of ignoring the pains.
Well, what happened on Saturday morning was that he had a pulmonary infarction, which means he's lost about a fourth of his left lung permanently.
When they got him to the emergency room, they did an x-ray, and they saw that his lungs looked terrible.
They since did a CT with contrast.
They found he has hundreds, over a hundred, Blood clots in his lungs.
So my son had them in his neck and near his jugular and in his head, and my husband has them in his lungs.
Which vaccine was it?
Well, that's the interesting thing.
So my son actually got the Pfizer vaccine, and my husband got the Moderna vaccine.
But I've been doing quite a lot of research, and from what I understand, they're the same mechanism.
They're different manufacturers, but the same mechanism.
So both of them are mRNA drugs.
And so they...
Interact with your system pretty much the same.
It almost doesn't matter who manufactures it.
But they did get different vaccines, but on exactly the same day.
Have you found a doctor who is actually sympathetic?
Let me tell you what.
The first seven and a half days at the hospital, the doctors were looking for anything and everything besides the vaccine.
They absolutely were hesitant and very, really didn't want to put this together with the vaccine.
They were very resistant to that.
They looked at the most obscure of illnesses.
They tried so hard to put like a, you know, a round peg in a square hole and it wasn't working.
And finally on the last day they said, okay, yeah, we think this may have something to do with the vaccine.
Finally, like probably a couple hours before we left.
It was the first time they actually finally admit it, really.
When my husband went in, his physician said he actually refused to do one of the antibody tests that is more indicative of whether or not when my husband got the shot he might already have had COVID. Because we did find out that my son had already been exposed to COVID. What we do know is that thromboses are more common,
and we know this just already from how many shots been given, if you get the shot when you have a lot of antibodies to COVID already.
In other words, if you had a fairly recent case of COVID. Having said that, my son was tested Every other week, because he's an athlete, so he could play, and it came back negative.
So we're trusting these tests that are not very useful to us.
We took him in to get the shot because we thought that's what was best for him.
We had no idea he had been exposed to COVID. None whatsoever.
He had never gotten a positive test.
He hadn't gotten sick.
Same thing with my husband.
When we took them in for the shot, they were not sick.
There were no fevers.
In fact, I come from a pretty medical family.
I've got lots of physicians that are siblings and my dad.
I was so careful.
I checked their temperatures before we all went in.
Like, no one was sick, no sore throats, nothing like that.
But the doctor at my husband's hospital said he did think it was highly suspicious that both my husband and my son, following the jab, got blood clots.
Are they both in the hospital today?
Say that again?
Are they both still in the hospital?
No.
Both of them have now been released.
My husband was released last night.
They're stable.
They're conditioned.
My husband's lung loss, tissue loss is permanent.
My son's damage to his brain is unknown.
We're hopeful that it's all going to be okay.
But right now we won't know until those blood clots recede and they can actually look at the rest of his brain.
And he's got so much swelling right now that it affects his vision.
And they don't really know how much of that will be permanent.
So they've both been released to my care and they're just being watched carefully.
And then they sleep kind of all day and they just need help getting around a little bit.
But they are both home.
We're so grateful they're both home.
I do want to say that when this all happened, I had an incredibly healthy family.
I had a very active family.
We're very active.
We're big into hiking and outdoor stuff and sports.
My husband and my son play basketball every day.
My son is what I would consider an elite athlete.
It was probably just the most devastating thing to see him going from scoring 16, 18 points in a game to the ICU within a matter of days.
The only thing that has carried us has been everybody's prayers.
And I felt it, and I just, I mean, or their positive thoughts, and I've needed it because I've had to carry this all alone.
And now then with my husband coming down and being in bed and having to recover from these blood clots, it's been, I need everybody's support and I have been very appreciative of it.
Was there coverage in the local press or the national press?
So there was some, but a lot of it was cut and pasted.
You know, people ask me about the vaccine and my perspective on the vaccine and I said, That I thought everyone needed to weigh their own rewards with the potential risk.
And that I thought they needed to do what was best.
I'm only learning about, and I was always careful about vaccines, but I'm only learning about a lot of the stuff that we didn't know about vaccines.
And I feel like we haven't had accurate reporting, it seems like to me.
And it's not that I think vaccines aren't good.
I do think they're good.
I do think that they'll be better if we have more open and accurate reporting and if we can make them even better and safer if we can share this information rather than being fearful of it or hiding it or brushing it under the rug.
So I did have some news outlets and I actually had a lot of help from two particular reporters who were wonderful and helped connect me with some doctors who I could maybe Talk to because they had some experience with interviewing other people who had negative side effects and that was very helpful.
One of them connected me to a physician who's got some experience with this and he helped guide a little bit some of the testing that was done on my son and that was very helpful.
So we have had some coverage of it.
It's just it feels like it has been the coverage they're willing to give and as a result not the entire truth if that makes sense.
Have you experienced pushback in other areas of your life?
Yes.
Even my own daughter went to dance and a little girl came up to her and said, your mom says that this has nothing to do with COVID and the COVID shot.
And my daughter said, that's not true.
It does.
And she said, no, you don't know what your mom is saying.
You don't, you don't know.
And my daughter was like, it's my mom.
It's my brother.
This was before what happened to my dad.
I mean, my husband.
I think that there are some people who would be tempted to think I'm a massive anti-vaxxer or to dismiss my message.
And it really is just that we have to gather all the information.
We may not know enough right now.
We may not be distributing it safely right now, especially as they're distributing it to children.
The physicians that are going to see the side effects like what happened to my son are not trained.
They are not trained to take it seriously.
They aren't taking it seriously.
They are being dismissive and it's causing further complications.
So yes, there has been some backlash, but for the most part, everyone, regardless of the vaccine component, I've had a lot of support, more support than I have had backlash.
I've just been surprised at how My words have been taken out of context, especially by people who haven't interviewed me and how I've been summarized without having ever talked to them, things like that.
About two weeks ago, the Lancet, which is one of the highest, maybe the highest gravitas medical journal, published the The demographic data on COVID-19 injuries,
and what they say is based upon their data sets, that the risk from COVID, the disease, to children between four years old and 17 years old is 1.6 deaths per million.
And what I think worries a lot of people We don't advise people to get the vaccine or not to get the vaccine.
We try to give people information, that's all.
I think one of the things that's really troubling to me is we really don't know how many people like Everest are out there who are getting injured by the vaccine.
We have no way of gauging whether the risk from the vaccine is worse than the risk from COVID. The risk from COVID is basically zero to that age group.
It's very high to older age groups.
In fact, the Lancet article and the BMJ, the British Medical Journal, have said the risk to older cohorts is about 1,200 times the risk to young people.
There basically is zero risk to young people.
And if the vaccine has any risk at all, then you have to question whether or not You know, we should even be giving it to children the age of at risk.
Well, I think that's exactly it.
And I agree with you.
And that's what I've been...
I mean, you've summarized better than I could, I think.
What I've been saying is that we have to weigh the risk of the shot.
And since...
What I will tell you is that the way they categorize my son's side effects are acute lymphadenopathy, which just means swollen lymph nodes.
But it was blood clots in his brain.
They're calling it a complication.
So depending on how it's reported, it isn't even showing how bad the possible side effects of the shot are.
So that is concerning to me because I did not know it was such a low risk for him to get COVID. I did it because of what was being told to me and I did it because My son is on an elite traveling team, and he's gone every weekend, and I thought I was doing what was best for him and what was safe.
The reality is he'd already been exposed to COVID, and I didn't even know it.
My biggest fear is that children probably are the highest ones that are walking around out there Who have been exposed to COVID without us knowing it.
And we're giving them the shot and potentially increasing their risk too of the side effects of that shot because we don't know how soon.
We don't know if they're presently, if they're in the middle of COVID, but asymptomatic and they're getting the shot.
To me, from my perspective and having experienced what I've experienced, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
But in the very least, I think every parent should have the right to make that decision.
I can't tell you, and I don't know how your audience would feel, but I can't tell you how horrible it is to know that it was my choice and that basically my choice did this to him.
And in other words, I had a very healthy, very active, athletic little boy who's right in the middle of recruiting season and now can barely walk.
It's devastating.
As a parent, we do our very best to make the decisions we make for our children because we think it's what we're doing that's for the best of our child.
But if we're not given all the information, how can we be making the right decision?
And that's very, I think that's very wrong.
And that's very bothersome to me.
And that's some of why I've been willing to do these stories because I feel like some of this data was out there, but it was not revealed.
Since this happened to you, have you run into friends or neighbors who have also had vaccine reactions?
Yes, I have.
Even my own husband's family, I've been saying, okay, you guys all need to go get checked for blood clots now if they've gotten it.
But there are a lot more extreme reactions than I realized.
And so we're talking about how COVID has these lingering side effects.
Well, It turns out, because a lot of people have come to me, it turns out so does the shot.
There are people who had their shot at the very beginning of April who are still experiencing significant side effects from the shot.
And keep in mind that my husband and my son shot, it wasn't their second.
It was their first.
Everything you're hearing is the second is the worst.
My son and my husband will not get another COVID shot.
They will not.
It's not wise.
It's not safe for them, clearly.
But there are people who clearly are reacting to the COVID vaccine very negatively, with lingering side effects, and it's not really being reported or talked about.
What's your husband's reaction?
How is he holding up psychologically?
Is he angry?
How does he feel about it?
That's a preloaded question.
It's not angry so much as helpless a little bit you know that and deceived we feel deceived and helpless and he is my husband is amazing he is a rock star he is so strong and my son is too and they are trying really hard to spend time on okay Like in the hospital,
my son kept saying to the doctors, he's fought them pretty dang hard.
Where he's at right now with regard to his basketball is he's saying, I don't care if the risk is that it might kill me, I'm gonna play basketball.
He is that determined.
And because of that determination, because of his attitude and his character and my husband's character, we're to the point now where it's just, we wanna look forward.
How are we going to heal from this as a family and get back to hopefully as close to the lives we had as before?
At the same time, how are we going to help others so they don't have to go through this?
And so for all of us as a family, that's probably been the biggest thing is that we've decided we have to talk about it because we didn't know.
We didn't know what we were getting into.
We didn't know what risk we were taking.
And I think it's easier to make a decision and end up being on the side of having had negative reactions if you knew that was even, you know, a likelihood or a possibility.
But really went into it thinking, we'll be fine, it's the first shot, not a big deal.
I find myself completely at a loss because I'm actually a psychologist and I do all the emotional side on our family, but my husband is a cloud architect.
So anything technical he does.
So this has been a huge challenge for me because My resource, my number one resource is kind of not available now.
And I've had to learn how to, I mean, it sounds funny, but open my own email, like on our main computer, you know, because normally it just comes up on my phone.
So I'm trying really hard.
And hopefully I'll be a fast learner.
But I appreciate your help.
Thank you so much.
You're an amazing person and you're an amazing mom.
And we're going to ask all of our viewers to pray for you and send their prayers to you, Sherry.
Robert, can I say I don't feel like an amazing mom.
You are an amazing mom.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of moms in our community who have been through, you know, of children who are injured because they did what their doctors told them to do.
They did what people they trusted told them to do.
And that's what we all do.
That's how virtually everybody in this community ended up in this community, not because they were anti-vax, just because they were trying to do the best thing for their children based upon...
The information they had, and they saw the injuries, and they started educating themselves.
And you need to take the experience, and I know you're already doing this, that you've been through, and the pain that you've been through, and the injury that you've suffered, and try to turn that into something really good.
I think that's what God wants us to do with our suffering.
Thank you.
I know that you're doing that.
You know, I can tell, I think anybody who sees this can tell the caliber of human being that you are, Sherry.
And you're the kind of mother I think everybody who looks at this is going to wish they had.
Thank you.
Thank you for saying it.
Thank you for your time.
Well, I want to thank you for joining me, Shree Ramney, and I want to ask all of the people to take a moment today, just take a minute of your time to send your prayers to this amazing family that Everest heals, Preston heals, that you heal, and That you don't carry bad feelings about yourself.
You know that you're a good mother and that you did what you knew from the information that you were given was in their best interest at that time.
And please, to all of you who listen to this, please send your prayer to this amazing family.
Thank you for joining me, Sherry, and thank you for sharing your story with us.
