Patients who inexplicably become seriously unwell after a recent COVID-19 infection or vaccination may have a rare multisystem inflammatory syndrome, doctors warn. 

Immunologist Dr Jamma Li and colleagues, from the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, have reported on two of the first known cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS) in Australian adults, a condition initially only reported in children who had contracted COVID-19.

The patients — aged 35 and 24, respectively — presented to ED within a week of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, having recovered from COVID-19 a month earlier during the Delta variant wave. 

Writing in The Medical Journal of Australia, the doctors said both men presented with gastrointestinal symptoms, fever, shock and elevated inflammatory markers.