On the mysterious case of Tom Scocca

Scocca is a lefty middle-aged journalist who publicly loved the mRNA Covid shots. (Yes, like Grant Wahl.) Now Scocca is badly sick with an autoimmune disease. Did the jabs cause it? He's not asking.

You know Tom Scocca, even if you don’t.

Scocca is a progressive. An aggressive progressive. He thinks all the right (left) thinks, and he thinks them on social media with an edge. He hates Donald Trump, but he also hates his liberal cousins who don’t hate Donald Trump enough.

Naturally, Scocca was a Covid hysteric from the get-go. He used the phrase “superspreader event” unironically. He wanted schools closed - in 2022. He called anyone who disagreed with him a “ghoul.”

And naturally Scocca loved the mRNA Covid vaccines. He got his first jab on March 29, 2021, pretty much the first day he could. Then he announced his joy.

SOURCE

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Scocca got his second shot on schedule, too. (Though, as he wrote in April 2021, he planned to “keep my mask on outdoors” even after two jabs. Profiles in courage!)

Through 2021 and 2022, Scocca also mocked people who refused the jabs and supported vaccine mandates - even after the Supreme Court had struck them down.

How many mRNA jabs did Scocca get himself?

Likely at least four, as into the fall of 2022 he publicly complained the United States had not done enough to encourage people to receive the so-called “bivalent” booster - the second mRNA booster.

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(Nothing will make Tom Scocca - ALL the Tom Scoccas - sadder than your signing up for Unreported Truths. Do you need a better reason to subscribe?)

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Like other mRNA fanatics, Scocca built his life around avoiding Covid long after everyone else had stopped worrying. He succeeded well into 2023. No Covid for him.

Yet something strange happened to Scocca in 2023. As he explained in detail in a New York magazine essay earlier this week, his health began to fail. He suffered from swelling, muscle weakness, and other oddities:

The folder of referrals and results I carried to appointments got thicker. My blood tested positive for signs of general inflammation…

As Scocca acknowledges, as his physical ailments mounted, he wondered if he might be having a physical reaction to stress. He had lost his job and not found another:

Paid subscriptions at a newsletter I’d been writing… flattened out at about 20 percent of my share of our living expenses. The household finances began to drain.

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But in August, Scocca’s tale took a turn.

For the first time, he got Covid. Despite (despite?) his jabs, his case was nasty:

The back of my throat was so raw I would wake up snorting for air. Rolling around in my bed, I felt, for the first time, that this body of mine truly was going to die someday.

Of course, one must grade this tale on a curve.

For the true Covid hysteric, Covid can never be mild (at least the first time). Scocca may have foreseen his own death, but he didn’t go to the hospital, and he found the strength to post a couple of pictures of positive tests to his aforementioned newsletter.

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(Yes, Scocca’s Substack is called Indignity. Sign me up!)

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No, Scocca’s real nightmare began a few weeks after his Covid infection.

His muscle weakness grew more severe. A test revealed his blood had very high levels of creatine kinase. As he writes, “the reason my muscles felt so weak was that they were actively dissolving into my bloodstream.”

Scocca was hospitalized, and remained hospitalized for two weeks, while physicians ran every test they could imagine, including a biopsy that was no fun at all.

In the end, they found… not much.

The doctors said he appeared to have myositis. In other words, his immune system was attacking his muscles. But that finding was less a diagnosis than a description. They treated him with high-dose steroids, essentially the first-line go-to for any unspecified autoimmune disorder.

Scocca’s creatine kinase levels duly dropped, and he was discharged. His essay ends on a sad, ambiguous note, with him too weak to hail a taxi (though not too weak to write it).

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In passing, though, Scocca notes that his doctors diagnosed him with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland.

You will be unsurprised to hear mRNA Covid jabs have been linked to both myositis and autoimmune thyroid diseases. For nearly three years, doctors around the world have linked the mRNAs to serious autoimmune problems, including psoriasis, lupus, and even Type 1 diabetes.

Along with myocarditis and cardiovascular problems, autoimmune diseases are the most credible post-mRNA side effects. But (as far as I can tell) no government health agency or drug regulators has even tried to estimate how frequently they occur or how many people worldwide may have suffered post-vaccination autoimmune crises.

Scocca displays the same studied disinterest.

He never wonders, at least not publicly, what his severe Omicron infection - Omicron, a cold for most healthy adults - might tell him about the value of the jabs he wanted so badly. He certainly doesn’t ask if the long-term immune system changes seen in people who receive at least three mRNA shots and are then infected might be related to his problems.

Scocca’s reluctance to ask hard questions is understandable.

Even worse than suffering a dangerous health crisis is having to wonder if somehow you brought it on yourself. When Grant Wahl, another journalist who loudly and proudly advocated for the mRNAs, dropped dead of an aneurysm in Dubai in December 2022, his wife and friends lambasted me for noting that the jabs had in rare cases been linked to aneurysms.

But Scocca’s unwillingness to question whether mRNAs may be linked to his mysterious illness won’t make it go away. And though I have sympathy for him as he attempts to heal, I would have much more if he had not spent three years pressing jabs whose side effects he never understood on everyone else.

Tom, Pfizer never loved you back.

Once upon a time, before Covid fear scrambled your brain, you knew that.