"Case Presentation
A 57-year-old Caucasian male with a history of COVID-19 infection five months prior and chronic GERD, not requiring medications, presented to the emergency department to evaluate progressively worsening dyspnea with minimal exertion and intermittent fevers, chills, and fatigue. The patient reported persistent left-sided burning chest discomfort associated with dyspnea and night sweats for the past two weeks. His pain was also aggravated by coughing, leaning forward, and being relieved in the supine position. Interestingly, he received his second dose of BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) mRNA COVID-19 vaccine almost a week before symptom onset. After the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccination, the patient did not experience any side effects such as fever, headaches, rash, or myalgias...
Discussion
...It is biologically plausible that the vaccines could trigger massive immune activation, leading to severe inflammation of the heart and a multitude of organ system involvement. SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines do not contain live viruses or DNA but have nucleoside-modified mRNA, which encodes the viral spike glycoprotein of the coronavirus. In certain individuals, such mRNA vaccine might be detected as an antigen by the immune system, resulting in the activation of proinflammatory cascades and immunological pathways, which may cause myocarditis and pericarditis as part of a systemic reaction...
... [O]ur patient [developed] severe pericarditis, which progressed to hemorrhagic pericardial effusion and cardiac arrhythmias with associated multi-organ system involvement."
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Patel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC-BY 4.0., which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.