Christopher Brenner, a healthy 25-year-old from Ohio, was hospitalized with severe heart inflammation after receiving his first dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Christopher’s mother, Deborah Brenner, said she was frustrated when cardiologists initially pretended everything with her son was fine, and later refused to acknowledge his heart inflammation was caused by the vaccine.

After receiving his first Moderna vaccine on July 22, Christopher developed a fever. Within five days he was experiencing chest pain so intense he was unable to sleep, his mother said.

“He was concerned,” Brenner said. “He thought maybe he had something that could be contagious at that point.”

Brenner said her son wanted to go to the doctor to make sure he wasn’t going to get anyone else sick, so he went to the Defiance Mercy Clinic. “As soon as they found out what was going on they took him to the hospital attached to the clinic,” she said.

When Christopher was in the ER, doctors ran some tests and found his troponin levels were high. “I was alarmed at that point,” Brenner said.

According to Dr. Hooman Noorchasm, a cardiothoracic surgeon and patient safety advocate, doctors can detect evidence of heart damage, or tell if someone has suffered a heart attack, by measuring the patient’s blood troponin level.

Troponin, a protein, is normally undetectable in healthy persons who are not having a heart attack or are not experiencing myocarditis, Noorchasm said.

But when the heart muscle is attacked by the immune system, the damaged cells release troponin into the bloodstream. The more damage there is, the greater the concentration in the blood.

Brenner said she heard on the news some young men were having heart problems after getting vaccinated, so she asked the nurse if her son could be experiencing heart problems from his vaccine.