An 18-year-old Clark County woman who became critically ill after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine Johnson & Johnson underwent three brain surgeries related to dangerous blood clots., a spokesman for the patient’s family said Monday.
The young woman, Emma Burkey, began to feel ill about a week after she was vaccinated on April 1 and eventually experienced seizures that sent her to the hospital, Bret Johnson’s spokeswoman said.
Burkey is in the St. Louis area for the first time. Rose Dominican Hospital, Siena Campus, treated in Henderson before being transported to Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California for specialized care. Her parents, Russ and Kathy, are at her bedside, but only for a short time every day due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“She’s slowly improving,” Johnson said in an interview. The word we got from her parents last night was ‘slow, slow slow’. “
Burkey was recovered from an induced coma and from a respirator. She has a tracheostomy tube that impedes speech, but she speaks a few words and blinks her eyes to communicate, her parents told Johnson.
“She can smile 3/4 at will, and she likes to bother me about how badly I read lips,” Russ Burkey said Sunday in an online update.
Although Burkey is experiencing a ‘massive brain injury’, her parents are ‘cautiously optimistic’, Johnson said.
“They are cautiously optimistic because she’s improving, but very, very slowly,” said Johnson, president and founder of The Hastening, a local ministry where Russ Burkey volunteers.
To help with Burkey’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses, Johnson organized a GoFundMe fundraiser that raised more than $ 10,000 from Monday afternoon.
Federal regulators have suspended the use of the J&J vaccine, also known as the Janssen vaccine, pending an investigation into six reported cases, including those in Clark County, which include rare blood clots in the brain.
The six women, between the ages of 18 and 48, experienced cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, where blood clots occur in arteries that drain blood from the brain. The blood clots occurred six to 13 days after vaccination. Approximately 7 million doses of the single dose of vaccine have been administered in the USA
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that health officials are investigating a handful of new but unconfirmed reports of blood clots. It is also not clear whether the vaccine was responsible for the original half-dozen cases.
As early as Friday, a committee advising the CDC could recommend whether the suspension of vaccine use be lifted.
“If you follow the national news, the J&J vaccine was set up because of these rare cases,” reads a report on Burkey’s GoFundMe page. “Unfortunately, Emma is the ‘one in a million’ here.”
Contact Mary Hynes at [email protected] or 702-383-0336. Follow @ MaryHynes1 on Twitter.