On Covid vaccines, diabetic ketoacidosis, and the death of Dan Kaminsky

When people die, refusing to ask hard questions about what might have killed them is not heroic. It's the opposite.

Dan Kaminsky died in San Francisco at the age of 42 on April 23, 2021.

He a computer security expert, well-known in that tight-knit community, with almost 100,000 followers on Twitter.

He was also a strong supporter of mRNA Covid vaccinations. On April 16, he tweeted that they were “astoundingly clever.” And on April 12, he proudly reported that he had been “vaxxed!”

Eleven days later he was dead.

I can’t remember how I came across Kaminsky’s death, but I did. I checked to see if he had publicly reported being vaccinated; he had. And so I tweeted on April 25 (those were the days before Twitter had censored me):

“So another well-known person in his forties - not a true celebrity, but someone with a sizable Twitter following - “died suddenly” Friday. No cause of death given, and his family wants privacy. These cases have popped with disturbing frequency since December.”

I didn’t use Kaminsky’s name. I didn’t think doing so would be appropriate.

Nonetheless his friends knew I was referring to him. And they didn’t like anyone pointing out a possible connection between his death and the vaccines.

His niece put out a statement explaining that he had died of diabetic ketoacidosis, a dangerous complication of diabetes caused by very high blood sugar and low insulin levels. “I think Dan would laugh at the idea of conspiracy theorists promoting anti-vax propaganda through his death,” she wrote.

Case closed, the bluechecks said.

One called me a “filthy liar.” (So many people to sue for defamation, so little time.) Brian Stelter of CNN mentioned Kaminsky’s death too, in a story about “baseless speculation” and the “miraculously effective Covid-19 vaccines.”

And the Daily Beast offered this:

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This circling of the wagons never made much sense.

Kaminsky’s death was a tragedy, whether he died from post-vaccine complications or the natural course of his diabetes.

Refusing even to consider that the mRNA vaccines might be responsible for his death was profoundly unscientific - so unscientific that it might have bothered even a pro-vaccine computer scientist like Kaminsky. Am I guessing how he’d feel? Of course I’m guessing. But so was his niece, when she wrote that he’d “laugh” at the idea.

In fact, Kaminsky was the only one who could tell us what he thought of the potential link between the vaccines and his death, and we had no way to ask him. Which gave the outrage - as with so much outrage sent my way over the last two years - a distinctly performative cast. Just shut up already. How dare you? HOW. DARE. YOU. Howdareyou?

I dared because Kaminsky’s death mattered to everyone - and certainly everyone with diabetes - who had yet to take the vaccine.

For to say that Kaminsky died of diabetic ketoacidosis was true but incomplete.

DKA severe enough to be fatal is a very rare complication of diabetes, and it generally occurs in people who are not good at managing their disease and in some cases don’t even know they have it. Kaminsky’s Twitter feed made clear that he was smart, logical, well-prepared, and seemingly healthy. He had dealt with diabetes for a long time. Yet he suddenly fell victim to DKA.

Why?

Even at the time VAERS - the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system - contained reports of people who had developed keotacidosis shortly after being vaccinated. But the vaccine fanatics had all the usual defenses ready: correlation does not prove causation, the reports had not been verified, yadda yadda yadda.

Now we have new evidence.

Three endocrinologists from the same academic medical center have submitted reports on three cases of people who developed severe dysregulation of their blood sugar just days after mRNA vaccinations. “The temporal onset of symptoms… and the brisk clinical course strongly suggests that the hyperglycemic emergencies were trigged by the COVID-19 vaccination,” the authors wrote.

(SOURCE: https://academic.oup.com/jes/article/5/11/bvab141/6375389)

“Clinicians should be aware of this potential rare complication of COVID-19 vaccinations,” the authors wrote.

Exactly. We may never know whether Dan Kaminsky’s vaccination caused the diabetic ketoacidosis that killed him.

But in insisting that it didn’t, that it couldn’t possibly have, the people who claimed to speak for Kaminsky in April were doing other people with diabetes a terrible disservice. Their cheap anger is one small example of the crisis caused by the media’s unwillingness to look honestly at - much less investigate - the potential risks of these vaccines.

When vaccine fanatics dismiss the hundreds of thousands of side effect reports in VAERS, or the strange rise in all-cause mortality in highly vaccinated countries, they do nothing to help the people these vaccines may have sickened or killed.

Yet they put everyone else in greater danger.

And for what reason? Pride? An unwillingness to admit potential mistakes?

When did these vanities become more important than our lives?