The COVID-19 pandemic is almost over—at least, officially.

Yet many long-haulers and the vaccine-injured see no end in sight as they wake up every day to debilitating symptoms.

Critical care pulmonary specialist Dr. Pierre Kory, who shares a private practice treating both long COVID and COVID-19 vaccine injuries, told The Epoch Times that his clinic has treated more than 200 of these patients since February 2022.

He has only gotten “five or six off of medicines completely.” For most of them, it’s a chronic illness that needs chronic medication.

While long COVID has received plenty of media coverage and research, long-lasting post-vaccine symptoms rarely have been mentioned. Some may wonder if post-vaccine symptoms even exist.

Across the United States, long-COVID clinics have popped up one after another, yet many long-haulers feel that their problems are not being addressed.

Compared to long COVID, COVID-19 vaccine injuries receive significantly less media coverage and research.

Currently, there is no approved diagnostic test for either long COVID or vaccine injury. Existing clinical tests often yield normal results, even though many patients report discomfort and sickness.

These two conditions also have similar clinical presentations, making it even harder to tell them apart.

Doctors, therefore, need to look at a patient’s medical history and determine the events that led up to the symptom onset to come to a diagnosis.

The criteria for diagnosis mostly pertain to whether the chronic symptoms were preceded by a COVID-19 infection, in which case the illness is likely long COVID; if symptoms were preceded by vaccination, the patient may have a vaccine injury.

Some doctors have developed their own diagnostic methods.

Dr. Sabine Hazan, a California-based gastroenterologist and CEO of Progenabiome, uses gut bacterial composition as supplementary information in her diagnosis and treatment.

The distinction of spike protein-injury syndromes is important, as it highlights that the condition is systemic and can be related to many organs and body systems.

There are also spike protein injuries that involve only a single organ, such as myocarditis and pericarditis. While these adverse events may also be caused by vaccine spike protein, treatment is more straightforward, since only the heart is affected.

The impairment of these mechanisms can therefore cause a collection of symptoms including cognitive problems, migraines, fatigue, malaise, breathing problems, rapid heart rates, neuropathic pain, and seizures.

There tend to be two major groups of long-COVID patients. The minority progresses from acute COVID-19 into long COVID without a period of symptom alleviation in between.

There are also two major groups of symptom onset of vaccine injuries.

Clinicians noticed other minor differences between patients who were diagnosed as long-haulers and those diagnosed as vaccine-injured.

Kory’s vaccine-injured patients tend to have more neurological symptoms, including neuropathies, seizures, tremors, and tinnitus, while Berkowitz said that he observes more cardiac problems among his vaccine-injured patients.

Board-certified internist Dr. Syed Haider, founder of MyGoToDoc.com, an online platform that connects over 50,000 long-COVID patients with health care professionals, said that with his patients, those who developed symptoms after the vaccine usually have one or two particularly prominent symptoms, while the long-COVID patients tend to have more of an even mix.

Hazan, on the other hand, notices subtle differences.

“The differences in the presentations are all in the history taking,” she said.

From early 2022 to now, Kory and Berkowitz have seen a shift in the patients presenting in their clinics. A year ago, the majority of patients they treated had long COVID; now, people who first developed symptoms after vaccines make up the majority.

For Haider, the majority of his patients are still long-haulers, while Hazan sees around a 50-50 split.

While Berkowitz and Kory have continued to see long-COVID symptoms in people infected with Omicron, both say that long COVID after Omicron tends to be less prevalent.

Regardless of doctors’ own diagnostic methods to determine whether symptoms are caused by infection or vaccination, the consensus among clinicians interviewed by The Epoch Times is that people who have been harmed by the spike protein, whether through long COVID or vaccinations, should avoid getting reinfected, infected for the first time, and getting a booster.

Subsequent vaccinations are also ill-advised. “I’ve had patients who took the first shot, really got kind of sick in the weeks afterwards, and actually got a second shot,” Kory said.

People who fell ill after the first shot are advised to speak to their physicians about potential health risks to decide whether they should continue vaccinating.

While there are long-COVID cases in which patients feel better after vaccination, these cases tend to be rare, with most patients experiencing symptom aggravations after a subsequent infection or vaccination.

“My approach to treating both syndromes is essentially the same,” said Haider, explaining that clinicians currently do not know how to remove the lipid nanoparticles, polyethylene glycol, intact mRNA, or fragmented mRNA from people who have been vaccinated with the mRNA shots, so there’s no specific way to address the differences.

Since treatment protocols are similar for the two conditions, vaccine-injured patients may benefit from treatments available at long-COVID clinics, provided that they are receiving proper treatment.

Kory said that a majority of his patients tried going to primary care doctors and long-haul clinics, received little treatment or help, then came to him in despair.

“The other plight of the long-hauler and the vaccine-injured is that the majority have normal tests,” said Kory. “You might find some abnormalities [but] there’s no smoking gun to point to what the problem is, in testing.”

Therefore, a large portion of long-COVID and vaccine-injury treatments aim to target the underlying mechanisms that may be causing the symptoms, hoping that the mechanism that is targeted is the right one.

Sometimes these patients simply need time to recover. Kory observed that his long-haul patients tend to see improvement in their symptoms over time, while he found that there seems to be less of a time benefit for people who have post-vaccine symptoms.

“We use this phrase: a tincture of time,” he said.

Long-COVID patients also tend to have more pulmonary problems from their prior infection; therefore, they may be prescribed steroids such as prednisone to control pneumonia.

Berkowitz, on the other hand, sees patients of various presentations and has to adjust his treatments to suit each patient. Vaccine-injured patients especially tend to have more symptoms, and this inevitably increases their recovery time.

“I don’t think [the studies are] purely about long-haul, unless it’s [published in] 2020 before the vaccines came out,” Kory said.

Therefore, data on long COVID may be confounded and impure.

Focused attention on long COVID while denying vaccine injury syndromes promotes a vaccination agenda, as people may be led to think the vaccines are safe and without harm.

“It will continue to propagate this non-recognition of the scope and scale of vaccine injuries,” Kory said. “If anything, it could make people want to get vaccinated because they don’t want to get long COVID.”

Hazan, who has clinical trial experience of more than 30 years, told The Epoch Times that there has been a lot of resistance against published research that went against the mainstream narrative on vaccine safety and early treatment.

Though she has yet to publish any studies on vaccine injury, her previous papers that speculate on the possible benefits of ivermectin have faced scrutiny, and there have been multiple external attempts to remove them.