AUSTRALIA – Dan Petrovic, Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimization (SEO), has developed pericarditis after his second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Petrovic, who describes himself as an avid “pro-vaxxer” who has long advocated vaccines to his more hesitant friends, is now raising questions about how side effects are reported.
The 42-year-old marketing executive at DEJAN received his second Pfizer dose on September 14th and developed constant chest pains for six weeks after the shot reports News Australia. On September 18th, just four days after his jab, Petrovic began to feel unwell while watching TV.
“I can’t lean to the left side, I feel a bit short of breath. It’s just like constant pain and palpitations. It doesn’t go away. Imagine enduring six weeks of that.
This wasn’t a little bit of pain, this hits really hard and it was lingering for a long time. It’s a debilitating condition – can’t work, can’t walk, can’t walk up and down the stairs, can’t play with my daughter.”
After weeks of appointments and $3000 in medical costs, he has now largely recovered with only a “little bit of pain” once a week.
Petrovic at the Marketing Festival in 2015
While he still doesn’t regret taking the vaccine, Petrovic says one thing concerns him. Neither his cardiologist nor his GP would submit an adverse event report to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
After his experience, he fears that the TGA, which monitors adverse vaccine reactions, may not be getting the full picture.
“I asked my doctor, ‘Are you going to submit this to the TGA as suspected pericarditis?’
He said, ‘You can go online to do it. I’m too busy.’
Shouldn’t this be mandatory for medical practitioners? I believe every doctor, every medical professional, when a patient complains of a complication after a vaccine, they should make a report.”
He did submit his own, which now appears in the Database of Adverse Event Notifications – the TGA’s anonymized list of raw, unconfirmed reports – but it’s unclear whether his case is included in the regulator’s overall numbers of pericarditis.
Petrovic added:
“I don’t appreciate working with bad data. Bad data means bad science. To me that’s not OK. In my profession I work with data – if I have bad data I make bad decisions for clients, and that’s just marketing. In health there is an even bigger responsibility.”
Petrovic worries that people being brushed off by health practitioners only fuels mistrust and conspiracy theories.
“The public cannot lose trust and confidence in science and the scientific method.
It’s a slippery slope. If this is just laziness of doctors or bad administration, that’s OK, we can fix that. But if it’s, let’s just keep it quiet, hush hush, vaccinate as many people as possible and release the reports later … that’s conspiracy talk. But we can’t have people sweep things under the rug just so we get the vaccinations now.”
He is now wrestling with whether to vaccinate his daughter, who has asthma. He first wants to know if she may be genetically predisposed to suffering the same reaction.