Medical examiners investigating deaths following COVID-19 vaccination sought advice from colleagues about heart abnormalities, including those identified in a previously healthy 16-year-old boy who died four days after receiving his second Pfizer shot, according to emails obtained from the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME).
The records — among 1,970 pages of emails obtained under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) — span from October 2020 to July 2024. They reveal how the nation’s largest medical examiner’s office and its peers discussed deaths that followed COVID-19 vaccination, amid emerging evidence linking mRNA vaccines to heart damage.
The messages, first obtained by attorney Jimmy Wagner and reviewed by The Defender, also reveal disagreements among medical examiners over how to evaluate vaccine safety concerns.
Wagner accused city officials of putting “their personal feelings ahead of sound scientific policies.” He said their private discussions contradicted public assurances that the COVID-19 vaccines were safe. . .
“Has anyone done an autopsy on a suspected myocarditis in an adolescent following the second Pfizer dose?” Gill wrote. “We are currently investigating the death of a 16 year old boy who was found dead in bed four days after receiving his second dose.”
“His heart has striking ischemic changes (more of a stress cardiomyopathy picture than a myocarditis),” he added. “Otherwise healthy. Covid-19 negative. Looking to compare findings.”
Ischemic changes suggest reduced blood flow or oxygen delivery to heart tissue. Stress cardiomyopathy, also called broken heart syndrome, is a condition affecting the heart’s ability to pump blood. It differs from myocarditis, although both can produce serious cardiac complications.
Gill did not respond to questions about the autopsy results being directly linked to the COVID-19 vaccine. In a 2022 study published in Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Gill and colleagues described autopsy findings in two adolescents who died shortly after receiving their second COVID-19 vaccine doses.
The researchers reported cardiac abnormalities that differed from typical myocarditis and resembled stress-related heart injury.