‘He Suffered Greatly’: Parents of Student Who Died After Pfizer Shot Speak Out

Believing it was the right thing to do, 23-year-old Trent Lieffring received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in 2022. About eight to nine months later, Trent experienced cardiac arrest and subsequent brain damage, apparently due to blood clots. He died on Aug. 24, 2023.

In 2022, 23-year-old Trent Lieffring was working toward a promising future. He was attending college in Nashville, he was in a happy relationship and, according to his parents, was “a pure, sweet, kind soul” and “extremely healthy and in great athletic shape.”

Believing it was the right thing to do, Trent received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19vaccine in 2022, two-and-a-half months apart. Initially, all seemed well — but approximately eight to nine months later, Trent experienced cardiac arrest and subsequent brain damage, apparently due to blood clots.

Trent spent the rest of his life in a vegetative state until he died on Aug. 24, 2023. His death certificate acknowledged “reaction to COVID-19 vaccination” as one of the causes of his death.

Trent’s parents, Andy Lieffring and Kimberly Aveyah, joined CHD.TV’s “The People’s Study” today to share Trent’s story.

‘There was no sign of this coming’

Kimberly told CHD.TV that Trent’s biology professor “had kind of given a speech to his class on taking the shot for the good of others.”

Although “Trent didn’t need it … he took that speech to heart and went and got the vaccine,” Kimberly said.

Trent was vaccinated despite the misgivings of his parents. Kimberly said he had asked her if he should get vaccinated.

“As a family, we suggested that he didn’t, no one else in the family took it,” she said. “We were not on board with it. We thought it was rolled out way too fast. We had our suspicions right from the beginning.”

Initially, all appeared well with Trent, with his girlfriend reporting that he had only a headache after getting his second dose.

“So far as we knew, everything was OK with him,” Andy said. “Trent was a very healthy individual.”

But “eight to nine months later,” Trent began experiencing adverse reactions.

Trent got home about 11 o’clock one night, after working as a valet in downtown Nashville, and “just didn’t feel good and was very feverish throughout the night,” according to his girlfriend, Andy recalled. “Very restless.”

He got up several times to go to the bathroom, “which was very unusual for him, and he seemed very agitated, he didn’t feel good at all,” Andy said. When he didn’t feel any better in the morning, Trent’s girlfriend decided to get him a COVID-19 test.

“She went into the bathroom … and she started getting ready and she heard him say something to her and turned around and he had passed out,” Andy said. “He had gone into cardiac arrest.”

According to Andy, it took paramedics “a very long time to revive our son.” They “actually revived him once, lost him, and then revived him again.” By the time they got him breathing, he had sustained significant brain damage because of how long his brain had been deprived of oxygen.

His parents were out of state when Trent collapsed. When they returned to Nashville late that evening, they found Trent in the hospital on a ventilator, with “tubes everywhere” and “his head wrapped up,” Kimberly recalled.

“We were just trying to understand what happened because he was completely healthy,” Kimberly said. “There was no sign of this coming.”

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