[ET Via Zero] A 22-year-old Army National Guard member has suffered an array of health issues—including two heart attacks that pushed her to the brink of death—after receiving two doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.Karolina Stancik once considered herself "very healthy," playing multiple sports from adolescence through early adulthood. At 21 years old, she chose to serve the country by joining the U.S. Army in February 2021.
"We were told that it was going to be required and we should take it before we shipped out to basic training," she said, which was before Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 announcement of the military vaccine mandate.
This messaging, according to Stancik, made the new recruits feel like, "You’re a bad person if you don’t get the vaccine, and you don’t care about the people around you."
"As a young, new soldier, I and a lot of others around me, did what we were told," Stancik said.
"We were too new to know all the rules and possible loopholes," she added. "I pretty much blindly took it because I didn’t know you could get exemptions" for medical or religious reasons.
Stancik ended up taking the Moderna vaccine in March and April 2021; since then, "life has been an uphill battle," she said.
First, came the breathing issues.
"I was dealing with what doctors considered asthma at the time without a diagnosis, and I had never had any lung issues at any other point in my life," she said.