My brother is vaccine-injured. Probably.

At age 56, he looks and walks like an 86-year-old man. He was once a runner.

In late March I went to Madison, Wisconsin — the town where I grew up — to see my brother Mark, who is staying in an assisted living facility there.

It’s strange to even write this, because I don’t have a brother old enough to be in an assisted living facility.

Mark is 56. He ran cross country and track in high school. But he dropped out of college his freshman year and has spent the last 30 years on Social Security disability (SSI) and being treated for a mental or psychiatric condition that no one can quite define. All that everyone says is that it includes “grandiose thinking.”

But in recent years, things were looking up for him. He’d gone back to college and graduated, finally, in 2019, earning a bachelor’s degree.

My father and my brother Mark on his graduation day - May 2019

After graduation he applied to graduate schools and was admitted to Florida International University in Miami.

But he delayed going because of Covid, and then another year because he was getting dental implants (all his teeth had fallen out when he was in his 30s — something he now knows was a side effect of one of the psychiatric medications he was taking).

Somewhere in there — and I can’t remember exactly when it was — we had a phone conversation in which I told him not to get the Covid vaccine.

I’d been looking at VAERS every day starting in mid-January of 2021 and had started posting on Facebook what I was seeing (and calling and emailing TV stations.) The vaccine was killing people. I was reading the accounts written by caregivers and could see it. People in nursing homes were being given the shot and the next morning, they’d be found dead in their beds.

But on the phone, Mark just kept saying, “Margaret, I think the vaccine is good. I think it’s a good vaccine.”

I tried to tell him that I was looking at these actual reports of people who’d died after getting the shots, or had had massive heart attacks or blot clots. But he seemed confused by this, and just unwilling to hear about it.

He ended the conversation abruptly and we didn’t speak for several months.

In the fall of 2022, I was talking to him on the phone and he was saying that he was having terrible chills and that he couldn’t get warm. He’d been complaining about the Wisconsin winters for years, and wanted out of Madison. But this seemed like something different. He was talking about feeling a terribly cold draft when he walked down the street, and how he felt it in his bones.

His health had been deteriorating in recent years and my family had been slow to acknowledge that this was quite obviously the result of the psychiatric medications he’s been on. I noticed when I saw him in the summer of 2020 that his hand was shaking — involuntary tremors. Also, he was more than 100 pounds overweight and had been for years.

But now something else was happening — something much more drastic.

It started with him telling us about the chills and difficulty swallowing, which had become such a problem that he almost had to call an ambulance once when food would not go down. (It’s not that food was getting stuck in his throat. Rather, it was the feeling that it was lodged further down, in the sternum, and not going down into the stomach.)

Then he started having trouble walking and it was hard to understand what was going on. Why could he not walk? He said often he could not make it the two blocks to the bank and back.

At one point, he was saying that the whole left side of his body wasn’t working properly, and said it was something about “left brain versus right brain.”

The way he described it to me is that when he tries to put weight on his left foot to take a step forward, the foot just won’t hold the weight.

Starting in December of 2022 and for the year that followed, he was in and out of hospitals. The doctors could find nothing and kept discharging him.

(They didn’t seem interested in his vaccine status. He’d gotten the Covid vaccine and all of the boosters, I learned later.)

Finally, it was determined that he could no longer keep his apartment, and after one of his hospital stays, he was discharged to an assisted living facility.

The first two didn’t work out, and now he’s in a third one.

I hadn’t seen him since before all of this started to happen, and wasn’t at all prepared for what I saw — the person I saw.

When I walked into his room at the assisted living facility on that Monday morning in March, my brain could not really compute that the person in front of me was my brother.

The man seated at the desk was shirtless, pale and very thin. His face was gaunt, and his right hand was shaking violently.

I tried to recover with words, so that my brain would have time to adjust. I told him that I’d come a bit early because he hadn’t picked up the phone. He said it was because he was napping.

“In the morning? You nap in the morning?” I asked.

Yes, he said. He gets up early and by mid-morning has to lie down for a nap because he’s very tired. Later he explained that he takes three naps a day: one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.

I waited out in the lobby to give him a chance to get dressed. When I went back to his room 15 minutes later, he’d only managed to put on a t-shirt. He was holding a red zip-front jacket that was a stretchy cotton material.

“Margaret, can you help me put this on?” he said.

I reached over and put one of his hands in one armhole, and brought the jacket around and put the other hand in the other hole, pushing it through, and then straightened the jacket on his frame.

It was just like with my grandmother, I thought, when she was in her 90s and in the nursing home in Florida. Like trying to help her get her sweater on when her arms couldn’t reach.

Mark was standing, but his knees were bent and shoulders hunched.

But it was when he turned and I saw him walk that I was really shocked.

His shoulders were rolled forward and he walked as though every step was an effort and he could fall at any time.

He had aged 50 years since June of 2022, when I saw him last. He was an old man.

I was badly shaken.

He’d lost so much weight — more than 100 pounds — that his shorts didn’t stay up well, and he had to reach around and yank the waistband up from behind.

For some reason, seeing him do this made me sadder than anything else I saw while I was with him.

My brother Mark in March of 2024 after getting the Covid vaccine and all of the boosters.

We spent most of the day together. He wanted to get away from the assisted living facility so we went to a Mexican restaurant and then a coffee shop. We walked a total of about eight blocks and he said it was the most he’d walked in several months.

I found out that he cannot sit on hard surfaces for more than a few minutes, often needs help standing up from a chair, and sometimes has trouble holding his head up for more than a couple of hours.

His speech was so slurred — as though his tongue was thick in his mouth — that it was often difficult to understand him.

He told me the neurologist he recently saw told him that he has “drug-induced Parkinson’s” and that he won’t heal until he gets off the medication.

She didn’t say what medication had caused it. Maybe she doesn’t know.

He is on lithium, and was also on Risperidone, an anti-psychotic used to treat schizophrenia.

A few weeks after my visit, he said that he’d quit the Risperidone, and suddenly, his speech improved and he sounded like himself again. Also, he can walk better.

But he still cannot shave himself or do all that’s necessary to care for himself. Our family is thinking it’s not likely that he’ll be able to live on his own again.

What part of this can be attributed to the Covid-19 vaccine?

How did it factor in to his sudden decline?

It’s impossible to say, and it’s this uncertainty that has kept many of us, I’m sure, from talking openly after a family member’s possible vaccine injury. My working theory is that the Covid vaccine triggered something in him such that he can no longer tolerate lithium and Risperidone like he had before.

I’ve tried to help him. I sent him high-dose Vitamin C, but he cannot swallow the pills. I sent liquid zinc, but he doesn’t use it. I’d like for him to see Dr. Pierre Kory, in order to receive treatment by telemedicine. But it’s hard to see how this could even happen in the state he’s in: It would require someone to be there with him for every appointment to facilitate it or it won’t happen, in all likelihood.

Traditional doctors are useless. They will not consider that the vaccine could have caused any of my brother’s ailment. And besides, they can only see the person in front of them. They don’t know what my brother was — that he was admitted to Florida International University for graduate studies in Spanish and foreign relations, that his dream was to work for the State Department, that he was in Honors English at our Catholic high school and that he ran cross-country and track for four years and played violin in the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Mark was always the dreamer in our family, the one who was always looking at the sky, and talking about how the clouds looked. He could feel the sky, I think, the mood of it.

His fault was that he was too trusting — he believed the government when the government said to get the vaccine, promising that it was “safe and effective.”

He believed the TV. He doesn’t anymore and now changes the channel when the pharmaceutical ads come on.

He knows the vaccine is probably the reason for his decline and says he’ll never get another one.

If only there was a way to undo the damage that’s been done.

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Side-by-side comparison:

Mark in 2019, left, and in 2024, right.