Family of OC man who died days after vaccination says he remains an advocate for the vaccine

The family of an Orange County man who died days after receiving a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine says he still believes in vaccination and is still waiting for better answers about his cause of death.

Tim Zook, a 60-year-old X-ray technician at the South Coast Global Medical Center in Santa Ana, received his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on January 5. A few hours later, he had trouble breathing and an upset stomach. He was hospitalized and died four days later.

His cause of death remains under investigation. The Orange County coroner’s office says that if it determines that his death is related to the vaccine, it will notify the OC Health Care Agency.

Zook’s family said he had high blood pressure and was slightly overweight, but he was an advocate for the vaccine.

Tim’s widow, Rochelle Zook, says she is not ready at this point to attribute her husband’s death to the vaccine.

“We don’t know,” said Rochelle Zook. “I’m not blaming Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company. We just want to know the truth.”

Tim Zook was an advocate of vaccination and posted his enthusiasm for receiving a dose, where he worked at South Coast Global Medical Center.

But a few hours later, says his wife, he was complaining of abdominal pain and difficulty breathing, so he went to the emergency room.

“I told him, is this a result of getting the second vaccine? And he said no, no, no, not at all. Don’t worry about it.”

His wife says a CT scan revealed congestive heart failure, but other tests showed he had no valve problems or artery blockage. The COVID-19 tests were negative and breathing continued to get worse. Eventually, he was intubated.

He was then transferred to the UCI Medical Center, where she says her kidneys started to fail.

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“He codified the blues for the fourth time and then Tim lost his life and that’s how things went,” she said.

While the coroner’s office works to determine the cause of death, which can take months, the family is intrigued.

“We don’t know if it was the vaccine or if there was another underlying disease that none of us knew about.”

Anyway, they say they still believe in the vaccine.

“If he did it all over again, I know my husband, we met Tim, he would do it again and he would like us all to do it.”

Pfizer says that “serious adverse events, including deaths that are not related to the vaccine, are unfortunately likely to occur at a rate similar to what would happen in the general population.”

Meanwhile, CDC data on the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines show that there have been about 372 reports of non-serious adverse events per million doses administered and 45 serious adverse events.

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