I am going to talk about something I have held on to for a long time. It's going to be sad & gnarly & every trigger warning applies. Long thread.



Thank @weaponizedword1, @NotOfIt7k and their merry bunch of #antivax fanatics for why this is needed.

There was a time I did not know anti-vaxxers were a thing. Sure, I witnessed, from the fringes, the Wakefield scandal, but as far as I understood, it was a fringe phenomenon. As someone living with CVID2, my college nurse first told me about them, cursorily.

I understood my vaccination situation was complex at best, and assumed that kids who did not need ten tries and eight titre tests for a flu shot were lucky and their parents were happy to protect them so easily – just a sharp scratch & a lollipop.

I'm going to be vague with some of what follows, because I do not even accidentally want to breach privacy – I hope you'll understand. Some identifying details will have been altered but the truth of the story is all the same, and so is its lesson.

Anyway, I managed to talk my way into getting a sabbatical and joining a pretty cool pilot programme in a European country where I'd work with a forensic practitioner. I chose criminal forensic pathology. I had to sit exams I was expected to fail: anatomy, tox, etc. I passed.

This job was my first exposure to the realities of the biomedical field (and the start of what became a career). It was a job equally horrifying and gratifying. We saw a lot of dead bodies. But we also got bad people locked up. We helped prove people innocent. We served justice.

Part of that was that it was not up to us what we'd get. Children were the hardest. When I tell people about this job, their first question is what the gnarliest stuff I've ever seen was. To me, nothing beats pinprick bleeds in the eye of a child. Ask me why.

Anyway, one day, this kid comes in. Just five years old, a death in the same hospital we worked at, he still had all the central lines and ECG sensors and the endotracheal tube in situ. He was probably still alive when I left for work, and now, there he was, on the slab.

And he had this rash that I've never seen before, not outside a textbook. Here I was, in one of the world's most affluent countries, and I was looking at the body of a child who died of measles? Turns out the country had a 'Bible Belt', where certain protestant sects opposed vax.

There was a lot of fuss about whether I should even be around this case, given my dubious immunity to measles, but the chief of pathology okay'd it, as long as I did not handle the body. Which I had zero desire to anyway. It was all pretty bewildering to me.

I'll cut to the chase, because an autopsy is long and not pretty. And if you're eating, if you have a weak stomach, if you are easily grossed out, this is your chance to stop reading.

OK, still here? Fine. There's a part in the autopsy protocol where the brain becomes exposed. You get an idea for the state of the brain based on what you see. With the meninges peeled back, a brain's surface appearance already tells a story.



This one told one of sheer horror.

It did not look anything like... anything I've ever seen. The MRI scans on the DICOM station did not do the reality justice. The brain looked swollen, bloody, shredded. There were bleeds, horrible bleeds, and parts that looked consumed.

That child's tiny brain, that brain that just a week before was teaching a six-year-old's body how to play football, that brain that held a person, a son, a brother, a grandchild – it looked like someone took a stick blender to parts of it.

I read the clinical notes – they're customarily included where the reason for the autopsy is an unexpected death in a hospital –, and that was just worse. In the span of a week, a healthy child became febrile, then the seizures started, until the coma set in, and he died.

I have not found any autopsy too hard until this one. I de-gowned, walked out, and spent an hour vomiting and crying. I was all things at once: sad and upset and angry and grieving and most of all, fucking mad at the fuckers who could have prevented this.

I was, and am, religious. I believe in God and I try to live a life He hopefully will find was good enough to keep me out of Hell. But nowhere in my holy books, the books I share with that deceased boy's parents, does it say "hey, it's ok to let your kid die in total agony".

That was the first, and to this date only, autopsy of measles encephalitis I have ever seen. I think of that kid often. He'd be in his mid-teens today. He was into soccer – maybe he would be trying out for a junior team? He'd have his first crush. His first heartbreak.

He'd have his first kiss, and maybe he'd start to think of where in this world he'd fit in. He'd hate Maths but love Music. Or maybe the other way around? We'd never know. Because none of that will happen. Because he died, in the course of days, of measles encephalitis.

So here it is. Here it is for those who speak of brains damaged by 'aluminium' and 'heavy metals' and 'mercury' (but have no evidence not produced by their pet scientists). Here it is for those who think measles is this harmless rash, a mild childhood disease.

That's all stuff his parents believed. And their son is now forever five, a reminder of their folly. But hey. At least Big Pharma didn't get to sell them vaccines, right? And the kid didn't get the mark of Satan and all them heavy metals, right?

Please. Please remember him. And think. If you're an anti-vaxxer: understand that some things you can't take back – like a dead child. But some things you can. You can still change your mind. You can still do the right thing. You CAN beat the pressure on you.

Because if you don't... well, here's your informed consent: your child might end up in a story like this, too. And not all the Suzanne Humphries and Del Bigtrees and RFK Jr.s of the world will raise your kid from the dead – or give a shit. They'll move on. You won't.

This is it. I hate that I had to write this down, but I'd hate it even more if that life that never got a chance to take off would have been in vain.



Our job was to make sense of things hard to make sense of. If his story had any sense, it'll have to be in maybe saving a life.

You can follow @chrisvcsefalvay.

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