Dr. Philip McMillan,  John McMillan

J.D. Vance didn’t set out to make a medical argument. Speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast, the former Vice President described what happened to him after his second COVID vaccine dose in straightforward terms: two days in bed, a racing heart, and the worst he had felt in fifteen years. He was careful to add the disclaimer — “no serious injury” — as if hedging against the accusation of being anti-vaccine. But that disclaimer deserves scrutiny. By the standards that govern vaccine clinical trials, what Vance described was not a minor blip. It was a textbook adverse event.

“The sickest that I’ve been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine. And I’ve had COVID at this point five times. I was in bed for two days. My heart was racing,” he said.

Something else buried in that account tends to get overlooked: five COVID infections in a short span. That frequency is itself a clinical signal. It suggests mucosal immunity is not performing as it should, pointing toward possible interferon autoantibody production or broader immune dysregulation. In a vaccine trial, that history would have been flagged. In the real-world rollout, it was invisible.

The Grading Scale Nobody Applied

The FDA maintains explicit guidance for assessing adverse events in preventive vaccine trials. The toxicity grading scale runs from grade one (mild, no intervention needed) through grade four (potentially life-threatening, requiring hospitalisation). Tachycardia above 130 beats per minute qualifies as grade three. Needing pain relief for fever or muscle pain qualifies as grade three. Being hospitalised tips into grade four.

Vance’s tachycardia, his inability to get out of bed for two days, his description of the experience as the worst of fifteen years — these are not vague complaints. Mapped onto the grading criteria, his reaction sits somewhere between grade two and grade three, with the tachycardia potentially pushing toward grade four depending on severity.

This is not exceptional. In the mRNA vaccine trials, adverse event rates at grade two and above reached approximately 22 to 30 percent across the two leading products. At population scale, those percentages translate to tens of millions of people. The public was told this was a sign the vaccine was working. The clinical reality is different: a hyper-inflammatory response that exceeds intended parameters is not a desired outcome. It is a warning.

“That’s a side effect, and not a side effect that we even talk about enough in this country,” Vance said.

He was right. And that silence is not accidental.

186 Million Admissions and a Rising Line

Set aside the politics for a moment and look at the numbers. Analysis of 186 million NHS hospital episode admissions reveals a trajectory that cannot be easily explained away. Hypertensive disease, myocarditis, heart failure, pulmonary embolism, atrial thrombosis — all of them are rising. Not stabilising. Not returning to pre-pandemic baselines. Rising.

The age-band breakdown makes it harder still to dismiss. In the 30-to-44 cohort — Vance’s demographic — pericarditis has climbed by 167 percent. Migraine is up 145 percent. In the 60-to-74 age group, myocarditis leads the increase. These are not marginal changes at the edge of statistical noise. They are sustained, consistent shifts across multiple conditions and multiple age groups.

The prevailing explanation from public health quarters is post-infection sequelae: lingering effects of COVID-19 driving up the numbers. That explanation is possible. It is not proven. And there is a test for it that nobody is running. If pandemic infection alone explains the cardiovascular surge in the UK, the same pattern should be visible in populations with low vaccination rates but comparable infection exposure — Haiti, Papua New Guinea, similar settings. If it isn’t, the infection-only explanation is insufficient. The data does not yet exist to settle the question, and that absence of data is itself a choice.

Official Bodies in Retreat

In the United States, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was working toward establishing an ICD diagnostic code for vaccine injuries. That effort has been shelved, tied up in the broader restructuring of the ACIP itself. Without a specific diagnostic code, vaccine injuries cannot be systematically recorded in clinical databases. Without systematic recording, patterns cannot be detected. Without detectable patterns, causation cannot be established. The chain of accountability is broken at the first link.

Canada has taken a different path to the same destination. The country’s vaccine injury support programme has been absorbed by the government and renamed — from “Vaccine Injury Support Program” to “Vaccine Impact Assistance Program.” The stated rationale centres on a backlog and third-party mismanagement concerns. But the shift in language is not merely administrative. Moving from “injury” to “impact” signals a shift in framing: from acknowledging harm to assessing effect.

Across both countries, the direction of travel is identical. Close the coding pathway. Change the name. The scientific community is moving on, and the institutional machinery is being arranged to make moving on easier.

Beyond the Binary — Three Mechanisms, One Cohort

The public debate has been framed as a choice between two camps: COVID infection caused the cardiovascular surge, or the vaccines did. Both sides have their certainties, their partisans, their data points. Both framings are too clean.

The more useful model identifies a specific cohort — people who had severe hyper-inflammatory responses to either infection or vaccination. Both groups may share a common vulnerability: an immune system that, when confronted with the spike protein whether delivered by the virus or the vaccine, responds with disproportionate force. That cohort represents a distinct long-term risk. Every subsequent infection is another provocation. Every provocation is another opportunity for the inflammatory cascade to cause damage.

For Vance specifically, the symptom profile — systemic illness, tachycardia, rapid incapacitation — is more consistent with vascular injury than with direct cardiac injury such as myocarditis. The distinction matters clinically. Three cardiovascular pathways are implicated: vascular dysfunction, myocardial injury, and regulatory instability. Each carries different monitoring implications, different treatment considerations, and different long-term trajectories. None of them can be tracked without a diagnostic framework that acknowledges their existence.

Children Showed Us the Map

There is a precedent for what this kind of immune dysregulation looks like in a population that is no longer experiencing a first encounter with a pathogen. In children, COVID produced multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) and overlaps with Kawasaki disease — an acute vasculitis affecting small and medium-calibre arteries. Children did not typically develop the severe pneumonia and micro-clotting seen in immunologically naive adults. They developed something different: shock, kidney involvement, mucosal inflammation, cardiac complications, and neurological symptoms.

The argument being built now is that adults, as the virus becomes endemic and immune memory matures across the population, may be entering analogous territory. The original wave of severe acute disease was driven by immune systems meeting a genuinely novel pathogen. That novelty is gone. What remains is a virus circulating through a population whose immunity is not uniformly effective and whose inflammatory responses, in a meaningful subset of people, continue to exceed what the situation warrants. The COVID storm concept is one framework for understanding this. MIS-C in children is another. They point in the same direction.

The Cost of Looking Away

The pressure to move past the pandemic is understandable. The scientific community is exhausted. Public trust is fragile. The political cost of revisiting old arguments is high. All of that is real.

What is also real is a dataset of 186 million hospital admissions showing lines that continue to climb. A cohort of people who had severe adverse reactions and were never followed up. A diagnostic coding system shut down before it could function. A country that renamed its injury programme and changed the institutional framing.

The virus is still circulating. The cohort most vulnerable to hyper-inflammatory responses is still accumulating exposure. The window for meaningful longitudinal surveillance is not permanently open. Science that refuses to look at a signal is not neutral. It is a decision. And right now, the decision being made, quietly and consistently, is not to look.

Reference:
‘My Heart Was Racing’: JD Vance Talks Stance on COVID Vaccine and His Rough Experience After Taking It
McMillan, P. (2026, April 7). JD Vance’s COVID vax response feels anything but expected
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2007). Guidance for industry: Toxicity grading scale for healthy adult and adolescent volunteers enrolled in preventive vaccine clinical trials.
Udell, J. A., et al. (2019). Abstract 11463: Epidemiological trends and outcomes of acute myocarditis in the National Health Service of England. Circulation, 140(suppl 1), A11463.