Disney reported fiscal second-quarter profits that exceeded estimates of the average analysts tracked by Bloomberg and raised its full-year earnings guidance. However, shares tumbled in early trading in New York as investors focused more on the Disney+ streaming service, missing its forecast for the quarter. 

For the quarter ending March 30, the Disney+ streaming service reported 153.6 million subs, which fell short of Wall Street’s expectations of 155.66 million. This is currently overshadowing any positive news from the quarter. 

Earnings increased to $1.21 a share, excluding some items, in the quarter, beating the $1.12 average of analysts’ estimates. Revenue in the first three months of the year increased by 1.2% to $22.08 billion, compared with analysts’ forecast of $22.1 billion.

• Adjusted EPS $1.21 vs. 93c y/y, estimate $1.12 (Bloomberg Consensus)
• Revenue $22.08 billion MEET, +1.2% y/y, estimate $22.1 billion

  • Entertainment revenue MISS $9.80 billion, estimate $10.31 billion 

  • Direct-to-Consumer revenue MEET $5.64 billion, estimate $5.64 billion

  • Sports revenue MISS $4.31 billion, estimate $4.33 billion

  • Experiences revenue BEAT $8.39 billion, estimate $8.18 billion

However, while the media giant added more than 6 million subscribers in the second quarter to its core Disney+ streaming offering, it was less than expected:

• Disney+ subscribers 153.6 million, estimate 155.66 million

And worse still, CFO Hugh Johnston said the company doesn’t expect to see core Disney+ subscriber growth in the current quarter and profitability in streaming will suffer due to due to additional expenses for cricket rights in India.

Disney bought the India business in 2019 as part of its $71.3 billion acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox.

“We are pleased with the progress we’re making in streaming, although, as we said before, the path to long-term profitability is not a linear one,” Johnston said on a call with investors.

At the start of the cash session, Disney shares slid 8.5%. The latest rebound in the stock has hit heavy resistance at the $120 handle. 

The 8.5% decline is the largest intraday tumble since May 11, 2023.

On the bright side, Disney’s theme parks saw revenue increase 10% in the second quarter and the segment posted a 12% gain in operating income.

But, once again, Johnston said he’s expecting little growth at parks in the current period, due to expenses such as a new cruise ship, before resuming growth later in the year.

Earnings in Disney’s theme-park division rose to $2.29 billion in the second quarter, driven by sharply higher results internationally, especially Hong Kong. Domestically the company’s cruise line and Disney World resort in Florida registered income growth, while California’s Disneyland saw weaker performance due to higher costs.

“While consumers continue to travel in record numbers and we are still seeing healthy demand, we are seeing some evidence of a global moderation from peak post-Covid travel,” Johnston said on the call.

The question remains, just how much can Disney put up park prices before demand literally disappears?

While McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Tyson Foods have all reported low-income consumers dialing back purchases as inflation pinches pocketbooks, the Disney CFO claimed that:

“We’re not seeing that in our portfolio of products,” adding there hasn’t been much of an impact after streaming prices were hiked earlier this year. 

However, it’s only a matter of time before Disney sees low-income or middle-of-the-road consumers pull back on streaming spending and outrageously priced park tickets amid rising stagflationary threats. 

Stormy Daniels is “likely” to testify on Tuesday in Trump’s hush money trial, his attorney Clark Brewster told the Associated Press.

In response, Trump posted to Truth Social – then deleted – an angry response, saying “I have just recently been told who the witness is today. This is unprecedented, no time for lawyers to prepare. No judge has ever run a trial in such a biased and partisan way.”

According to Politico, “Trump lawyer Susan Necheles said prosecutors told Trump’s defense that Stormy Daniels will be the second witness today. The lawyers, outside the presence of the jury, are now re-arguing about whether Daniels will be permitted to testify in detail about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump.“

Daniels was paid $130,000 by former Trump attorney and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, in the closing weeks of Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, over what she says was a sexual encounter in July 2006.

Daniels’ testimony, even if sanitized for a courtroom setting and stripped of tell-all details, is by far the most-awaited spectacle in a trial that has toggled back and forth between tabloidesque elements and dry recordkeeping details. Her turn on the witness stand will represent a remarkable moment legally and politically, with courtroom testimony from an adult film performer about an intimidate encounter she says had with Trump adding to the long line of historic firsts in this case. -AP

Cohen paid Daniels after her previous attorney, Keith Davidson, threatened to have her make on-the-record statements to the National Enquirer or on television about the alleged sexual encounter. National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard alerted boss David Pecker – who told Cohen that Daniels was threatening to go public, after she had previously sought to sell her story to another celebrity gossip magazine in 2011, Life & Style, AP continues.

Trump’s deleted post came one day after the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, threatened to throw Trump in jail if he continued to violate a gag order in the case.

“Your continued violations of this court’s lawful order threaten to interfere with the administration of justice in constant attacks, which constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue,” Merchan said on Monday.

Trump appeared to call his bluff, telling the press outside the courtroom that “Frankly, you know what, our Constitution is much more important than jail. It’s not even close. I’ll do that sacrifice any day.”

On Monday, the jury heard from two witnesses; former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney, who explained the process that the company used to reimburse payments that were allegedly meant to suppress embarrassing stories from surfacing, which were then logged as legal expenses in a way that Manhattan prosecutors said broke the law.

That said, McConney also said that Trump did not personally ask him to log them as legal expenses. What’s more, Keith Davidson, Stormy’s former lawyer, testified that the payments weren’t “hush-money,” but was instead a “consideration.”

Trump has been found in contempt twice for a total of 10 violations of the gag order.

Trump has denied having sex with Daniels, and previously referred to her as “horseface.”

Just one week after Barry McCarthy, CEO of Peloton Interactive, announced his departure following a disastrous tenure that saw shares plummet by 92%, CNBC reports private equity firms are circling the struggling company, known for strapping iPads on fancy exercise bikes and charging wealthy consumers a hefty premium, for a potential buyout.

People familiar with the talks say Peloton has spoken with at least one private equity firm. However, the firm’s interest in acquiring the company is unclear. The people also say several other private equity firms have been interested in acquiring the company. 

Responding to the report, a Peloton spokesperson told CNBC, “We do not comment on speculation or rumors.”

“Firms have zeroed in on how to cut Peloton’s operating expenses to make a buyout more attractive,” CNBC said. 

Last week, Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy announced he would step down, while the company said it would undergo another broad restructuring plan that would save it more than $200 million by the end of 2025. 

Following the report, the company’s shares surged by as much as 18% in premarket trading in New York.

The news comes as Peloton’s float is heavily shorted, with at least 15% short, equivalent to about 50 million shares. 

Under McCarthy’s tenure, shares have plunged 92%, mainly because demand for at-home exercise bikes and treadmills has fallen since the pandemic. Consumers have returned to gyms, and or just can’t afford the overpriced equipment Peloton has to offer. 

Via SchiffGold.com,

With the eventual introduction of central bank digital currency (CBDCs) now seemingly inevitable, there are a lot of directions central banks could take with their digital currency projects that would have dramatic implications for the price of gold.

Touted for their “convenience” and “efficiency,” the endgame of digital currencies is not only achieving greater power over the currency but also a means of surveilling and micromanaging the personal finances of each individual. Owe taxes or a parking ticket? It could be automatically deducted. Does the Fed think it needs to cool inflation? Deduct money straight from people’s accounts, or impose a daily spending limit. The possibilities for control and profit are endless, and too tempting for control freak bureaucracies and amoral tech companies to ignore.

As countries like China implement their own CBDCs, buy more precious metals, and generally buck dependence on the US dollar for trade, Western central banks also feel like they have to compete in order to retain their power. That’s the essence of the other motivation for CBDCs — a currency race between East and West wherein the winner solidifies not only unprecedented control over its own citizenry but a place atop the global power structure for the next century or longer.

Since CBDCs and the idea of a “cashless society” are mostly about increasing centralization and control on the societal and individual level, it’s easy to see how they might be accompanied by new legislation banning precious metals investing and other non-state-approved financial activities. All they need is a severe enough financial crisis to provide the justification. After all, during the Great Depression, the federal government swiftly used an Executive Order to demand that citizens submit their gold to the Federal Reserve en masse.

And with new developments in crypto-tokenization technology and a brewing global financial crisis, the Tech-Banking-Political complex is preparing for what they collectively know will be a crucial window of opportunity to force their CBDCs down the throats of the people and make opting out from their new system after the fact nearly impossible.

Once their CBDC is rolled out, central bankers will have more ability than ever to manipulate the money supply and your personal finances according to their whims. This summary from a 2023 BIS report on the promise of CBDCs to increase the scope of central bank activities describes in (cheery banker-speak) the increase in power and control that central planners will grant themselves under a unified digital currency system:

“As well as improving existing processes through the seamless integration of transactions, a unified ledger could harness programmability to enable arrangements that are currently not practicable, thereby expanding the universe of possible economic outcomes.”

Zimbabwe’s new CBDC experiment uses an interesting ”gold-backed” approach, appearing on paper to be a combination of the traditional gold standard with digital currency tech. This is a promising approach, but to avoid being corrupted by authorities, it needs a protocol that makes it nearly impossible to fake a higher gold supply with tokens for gold that doesn’t really exist. Otherwise, its claims of returning to a “gold standard” are meaningless.

I wouldn’t expect a Western CBDC to contain gold backing or the protection of any kind of restrictive protocol, but I predict that in a centralized national or international digital currency system of any kind, central banks will still hold large amounts of gold in reserve. Just as Bitcoin isn’t truly “digital gold” but only numbers on a screen, bankers know they will still have to hold real money as an insurance policy.

The difference is, that banks could be the only ones who are allowed to hold gold, while broader society will no longer have access to cash. With all other potential options to opt out of this system fully digitized and prevented from competing with CBDCs, gold, and silver will become the only way to exist and transact outside the Central Bank’s digital control grid with any semblance of true freedom or agency. Black markets will have to turn to various forms of analog money, and gold and silver will rise as the top options.

Just look at the gold chart for 1933: When Executive Order 6102 demanded that citizens give up their gold, the price skyrocketed, never again returning to pre-1933 levels. A similar effect would occur from the announcement of CBDCs, phasing out of paper cash, and restrictions on private gold ownership:

Gold vs USD Pre and Post-Executive Order 6102

Some legislators are recognizing the CBDC threat and fighting against it, declaring CBDCs a threat and empowering precious metals holders. However, I’m not sure it will be enough to fight the CBDC tide being engineered by central planners. The system may begin as optional, but with the phasing-out of cash and other incremental measures, will eventually become permanent either through direct legislation or by making it totally impractical to resist.

If the architects of CBDCs can market their new system as the solution to an epic financial crash (of their own making), it will likely appear as a sign of stability that calms global markets, possibly causing gold and silver to drop. But as precious metals emerge as the best form of physical money in a tightly controlled, micromanaged financial dystopia, they’ll become the only way to make private or off-grid transactions, making them more valuable than ever — not only as investments, but a means of survival outside the fully-digitized fiat nightmare.

By James Crombie, Bloomberg Markets Live writer and strategist

Wafer-thin spreads on corporate debt don’t matter — until they do. There are several potential triggers for risk premia to flare, denting credit portfolios.

Spreads have collapsed across the board, from investment-grade and junk bonds to collateralized loan obligations. The extra yield investors get for owning US high-grade corporate debt instead of government bonds is the lowest in two-and-a-half years.

At less than 90 bps, that’s far below the five-year average of about 120 bps. As a percentage of all-in yield, it’s the least since 2007.

Such narrow risk premia reflect booming demand for limited net new supply of corporate bonds, plus a general lack of concern about the macroeconomic outlook. And since the Federal Reserve bailed out corporate bonds during Covid, there’s a perceived central bank backstop underpinning the debt.

Buyers have been lulled into thinking this is the new normal, but such a paltry yield pickup doesn’t adequately reflect rising corporate credit risk. So when volatility returns to jolt investors from their slumber, expect credit risk premia to flare, slamming portfolios.

Credit typically tracks broad measures of volatility, with spreads widening when markets get choppy. But since December, when corporate bond buyers were bulled up on the idea of six 2024 rate cuts and a soft landing in the US, they’ve diverged.

There are eerie similarities with the period just before the global financial crisis — not least high-grade spreads and bond yields at around the same levels. After that particular bubble popped, investment-grade risk premia spiked above 600 bps.

Other credit blow-ups occurred during the 2011 European sovereign debt crisis, a 2016 rout in the banking sector and oil prices, as well as during the global economic shutdown when the coronavirus spread in 2020.

War, geopolitics and elections are reasons to believe the VIX Index will rise closer to its five-year average above 20, from less than 14 currently. That should rattle credit investors, who are increasingly exposed by accepting less cushion for rising risk.

In addition, credit’s vulnerable to a sustained exodus of funds fleeing negative returns — high-duration corporate bonds lose money when yields rise — in search of better options at more generous yield spreads. Plus there’s the threat of policy error — or even a hike — from the Fed, and a US recession can’t be ruled out. Both would throw debt portfolios for a loop.

Credit’s set up for a fall after rallying hard at the end of 2023. Investment-grade US bonds booked the best returns since 2008 in November and December, when investors raced to price in a whopping six rate cuts for this year. Barely any of that’s been given back — even as those dovish hopes have crumbled.

Ironically, the only place credit investors appear to have exercised some caution is in the very junkiest debt, which is most likely to inflict pain as rates stay high for longer. Risk premia on bonds rated CCC have tightened 60 bps this year, or 8%. That compares with a 13% contraction in high grade.

Of course, a steady US economy is good fundamental news for borrowers and a strong bid for yield provides support. But earnings are eroding — particularly at financials, which are 30% of the market — and interest-coverage ratios are creeping up as high-for-longer rates take their toll, even on better-quality borrowers.

Spreads may well grind even tighter as fat yields juice demand for limited net supply of new bonds. But that’ll only magnify the scale and pace of the inevitable flare up when volatility spikes and credit reverts to something more closely resembling long-term averages.

US natural gas prices broke their longest monthly losing streak since 2020. This comes after an El Niño winter swept across the Lower 48, causing demand to dwindle and storage levels to surge, sending prices spiraling lower in recent months. However, now there are signs a bottom is forming in NatGas markets.

April printed the first monthly gain since October, up nearly 13%, breaking the longest losing streak in more than four years. 

Between mid-February and late April, prices were floored around $1.50/MMBtu with resistance around the $2 mark. Since last week, prices have surged above $2.

One reason for the bullish price action is that the market expects warmer weather across the Lower 48. Peak summer is mid-July, and this is the point when households and businesses crank up air conditioning, which ignites power demand from NatGas-fired power plants. 

FXStreet noted the prices are also rising today due to a higher war risk premium as “Israel is starting offensive in Rafah.” 

Warmer weather will help draw down on the record NatGas storage in the US. The end of the withdrawal season was:

• 2019: 1.107 trillion cubic feet (tcf)
• 2020: 1.986 tcf
• 2021: 1.750 tcf
• 2022: 1.386 tcf
• 2023: 1.830 tcf
• 2024: 2.259 tcf

The 2.259 tcf figure is the highest inventories in years for the US, specifically due to mild winter weather.  

On Monday, Goldman’s Samantha Dart gave clients a snapshot of NatGas fundamentals in the US. The big takeaway is elevated storage but declining production due to ongoing maintenance. 

Dart notes that the power demand for NatGas remains elevated. 

In a separate note last week, Dart said increasing power demand for data centers “might not change much for US gas prices.” 

The good news for US NatGas prices is that LNG exporting capacity is expected to ramp up next year. 

NatGas prices have likely bottomed. 

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics,

Journalism may indeed be the first draft of history but that old chestnut can be misleading. Where it suggests a set-in-stone version of events, that first draft is really an unfolding detective story, revised and rewritten as we dig out better answers to the eternal questions of who, what, when, where, and how.

Two of my colleagues at RealClearInvestigations – Aaron Maté and Paul Sperry – recently recast one of the biggest stories of our time: America’s long, strange, and destructive entanglement with Ukraine.

As with all great investigative journalism, Maté and Sperry draw on a wide range of documents and insider accounts to reveal facts the powers-that-be have tried to conceal. While President Biden and many other leaders from both parties cast Ukraine as a bastion of democracy and a beacon of freedom, Maté and Sperry reveal how a decade of anti-democratic interference by Biden and other U.S. officials has led that country to the brink of destruction while corrupting America’s domestic politics.

Their reporting shows that Ukraine is not an independent democracy but a client state of America which has pushed Ukraine into ever-deepening conflict with Russia. It does not excuse Vladimir Putin’s illegal and murderous invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but it shows the massive escalation in a decade-long proxy war the two powers have been conducting on another nation’s soil.

Although this conflict stretches back decades and even centuries, Maté’s April 30 article starts in 2013. That’s when an uprising known as the Maidan movement was percolating in opposition to Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had delayed signing a trade pact with the European Union because he did not want to alienate Russia.

The Maidan movement was soon co-opted by ultra-nationalist groups, some of whose members “openly sported Nazi insignia.” But many American officials, including then-Vice President Biden, saw it as an opportunity to pull Ukraine from the influence of Russia and to undermine Putin.

High-ranking U.S. officials – including senior State Department official Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt – actively advised the movement, which staged a coup in 2014 by storming the Ukrainian parliament. Those same American officials were also involved in naming the new government.

Putin immediately moved to counter growing American influence on his border. Just days after the coup, Russia invaded and soon annexed Crimea. Russophile Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region followed suit. While Putin publicly told the Donbas forces to seek a diplomatic solution to their claims, American officials, including then-CIA Director John Brennan pushed Ukraine’s new government to armed conflict. As Maté wrote, Ukraine then “descended into a full-scale civil war. Thousands were killed and millions displaced in the ensuing conflict.”

As Putin issued threats that eventually turned into war, the U.S. tightened its grip on Ukraine. U.S. officials, including Biden, vetted appointments and dismissals in Kyiv, shaping, Maté reports, “the personnel and policies of subsequent Ukrainian governments, all while expanding its military and intelligence presence in Ukraine via the CIA and NATO.”

Sperry’s April 17 article changes our understanding of one of the most famous and consequential examples of U.S. meddling – Biden’s December 2015 threat to withhold $1 billion in aid if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. It has long been known that Shokin had launched multiple investigations into Burisma Holdings, the corruption-riddled energy giant that was paying Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars. After Shokin was fired, those probes went away.

After this quid pro quo came to light, the Obama administration said that Biden was just carrying out the policy wishes of our government and its European allies. Sperry’s reporting, however, indicates that the U.S. had no such concerns about Shokin in the months before Biden’s threat: “An Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee on Ukraine stated, ‘Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its [anti-corruption] reform agenda to justify a third [loan] guarantee.’”

Sperry also reports that one Biden advisor at the time was especially surprised by his boss’s action – Eric Ciaramella. On Jan. 21, 2016, Ambassador Pyatt emailed Ciaramella and other White House aides an article from the Ukrainian press – “U.S. loan guarantee conditional on Shokin’s dismissal.”

“Yikes,” Ciaramella responded. “I don’t recall this [the firing] coming up in our meeting with them,” he said, referring to an earlier White House meeting he hosted with top Ukrainian prosecutors.

The backstory Sperry brought to light would take on new significance three years later, when Ciaramella sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment by complaining that the president had allegedly tried to condition Ukraine aid on an announcement that it was looking into Biden family corruption in that country – as well as Ukraine’s well documented efforts to interfere in the 2016 election in support of Hillary Clinton.

Sperry’s reporting suggests that the Trump impeachment was part of an effort to cover up Biden’s attempt to shield his family from the law. The strategy might have worked but for a strange stroke of fate, with the surfacing of a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop that detailed his family’s high-level influence peddling.

As Ukraine – a mid-sized country halfway around the world – played a key role in our 2016 and 2020 elections, so it promises to do the same in 2024. At first glance, its prominence seems amazing. Maté and Sperry, in far greater detail than I have summarized here, help us understand why.

Their dispatches are far from the last word. Future reporting will find still undiscovered facts, providing, one hopes, a clear sense of the past as it becomes history. Their work is also achingly relevant to the president as we witness the carnage in Ukraine. As Maté writes, “In claiming to defend Ukraine from Russian influence, Ukraine was subsumed by American influence” at incalculable cost.

Their reporting also reveals the tangled complexity of human affairs requires a healthy amount of cognitive dissonance. America’s support for Ukraine may be a necessary defense against Putin’s aggression. But it is also a recurrence of our long and now largely disavowed history of promoting regime change for seemingly noble reasons in far-flung corners of the world such as Guatemala, Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and other places. It is not the role of journalists to resolve this tension, but, as Maté and Sperry have, to detail it without fear or favor, so that others might.

In 2023, solar energy accounted for three-quarters of renewable capacity additions worldwide. Most of this growth occurred in Asia, the EU, and the U.S., continuing a trend observed over the past decade.

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti illustrates the rise in installed solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity in China, the EU, and the U.S. between 2010 and 2022, measured in gigawatts (GW). Bruegel compiled the data..

Chinese Dominance

As of 2022, China’s total installed capacity stands at 393 GW, nearly double that of the EU’s 205 GW and surpassing the USA’s total of 113 GW by more than threefold in absolute terms.

Since 2017, China has shown a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 25% in installed PV capacity, while the USA has seen a CAGR of 21%, and the EU of 16%.

Additionally, China dominates the production of solar power components, currently controlling around 80% of the world’s solar panel supply chain.

In 2022, China’s solar industry employed 2.76 million individuals, with manufacturing roles representing approximately 1.8 million and the remaining 918,000 jobs in construction, installation, and operations and maintenance.

The EU industry employed 648,000 individuals, while the U.S. reached 264,000 jobs.

According to the IEA, China accounts for almost 60% of new renewable capacity expected to become operational globally by 2028.

Despite the phasing out of national subsidies in 2020 and 2021, deployment of solar PV in China is accelerating. The country is expected to reach its national 2030 target for wind and solar PV installations in 2024, six years ahead of schedule.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Individuals who took COVID-19 vaccines were found to have later suffered from psychosis, with Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots linked to most of the cases.

The peer-reviewed systemic review, published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal on April 12, examined cases of new-onset psychosis among people who took the vaccines. Psychosis refers to symptoms that occur when an individual has difficulty differentiating between reality and fantasy, with hallucinations and delusions being two key types. The review looked at 21 articles describing 24 cases of psychosis symptoms following vaccination. The researchers concluded that “data suggest a potential link between young age, mRNA, and viral vector vaccines with new-onset psychosis within 7 days post-vaccination.”

“Collecting data on vaccine-related psychiatric effects is crucial for prevention, and an algorithm for monitoring and treating mental health reactions post-vaccination is necessary for comprehensive management.”

Out of the 24 cases, 13 were female. The median age of participants was 36 years. Twenty-two patients (91.2 percent) had no specific history of somatic illness and comorbidities.

In 33.3 percent of the cases, administration of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine “potentially induced adverse psychiatric events,” the study said. The viral vector AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to psychotic symptoms in 25 percent of cases.

In 45.8 percent of incidences, psychotic symptoms were reported after the first shot and in fifty percent after the second dose.

“Almost all reviewed cases (95.8 percent) presented with psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations (visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile) and delusions (mostly persecutory and delusions of reference).”

The most common form of hallucination was auditory, experienced in 54.2 percent of the cases, while visual hallucinations were experienced by 12.5 percent of patients.

“Motor disturbances, such as increased or decreased motor activity and bizarre behavior, were mentioned in 83.3 percent of cases. In 3 (12.5 percent) cases, a suicidal attempt was described.”

The psychotic symptoms mostly lasted for a period of one and two months.

The patients were treated using various methods including antipsychotics and steroids, but only 12 out of the 24 made a full recovery. The remaining suffered from “residual symptoms such as decreased emotional expressions, low affect, or residual psychotic symptoms.”

In one case, the patient reported a positive COVID-19 test result. “Previous studies have shown that individuals with documented comorbidities and a history of COVID-19 infection exhibit a statistically significant increase in adverse events following vaccination,” the study noted.

Researchers speculated that inflammatory conditions following vaccination may be a reason behind the psychosis. The study found elevated C-reactive protein levels and mild to moderate leukocytosis—high white blood cell count—as the most common blood abnormalities. Both conditions have links with inflammation.

Another hypothesis suggested in the study was that post-vaccination psychosis could suggest a manifestation of autoimmune anti-NMDA encephalitis, a condition in which the immune system targets the brain neurons by mistake and causes inflammation.

Researchers noted that instances of anti-NMDA encephalitis have been repeatedly reported after vaccinations against infections like influenza, pertussis, yellow fever, and typhus.

“Considering the potential link between post-vaccination psychosis and autoimmune anti-NMDA encephalitis, it is advisable to consider immunological screening in individuals presenting psychiatric symptoms post-COVID-19 vaccination.”

A third possible reason suggested in the study is that the various speculations and uncertainties regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines could lead to people experiencing “significant stress,” which could end up triggering the development of psychiatric reactions.

The authors received financial support for the review, with the article-processing charge funded by Riga Stradins University, Latvia. Researchers declared no conflicts of interest in the study.

Post-Vax Psychosis Cases

Episodes of psychosis after taking COVID-19 shots have been detailed in several case studies. In one instance, a 15-year-old boy from Taiwan was sent to hospital two days after taking the second Pfizer shot. He was screaming and exhibiting agitation and uncontrollable limb stretching.

Other bizarre behaviors included sitting up and lying down frequently. The child was prescribed antipsychotics yet his behaviors continued to persist after being discharged for more than a month.

The doctors then put the boy under a steroid regimen, which is anti-inflammatory and helps calm down an overactive immune system. His symptoms then improved.

In another case from Brazil, a woman in her 30s, who was previously healthy, developed refractory psychosis within 24 hours of taking an mRNA COVID-19 shot. The woman had disorganized thoughts, was aggressive, and believed she was being persecuted at the hospital.

Even though she was treated with mood stabilizers and antipsychotics, her behavior showed improvements only after four months of hospitalization. However, her psychosis continued.

A May 2022 review described the case of an 18-year-old woman who developed psychotic symptoms on the same day she took the first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine.

“Symptoms started few hours after the vaccination with irrelevant talk. Over the next three days, it progressed to irritability, delusions of persecution and reference, and visual hallucinations.”

Another case study detailed the situation of a 45-year-old woman with no family history or personal history of mental disorders who ended up developing psychosis a month after she received a COVID vaccine. She quit her 18-year-old job abruptly and displayed erratic behaviors.