Fifteen months after submitting a claim to the federal program for vaccine injuries, a man paralyzed from the COVID-19 shot and now confined to a wheelchair was notified he has been approved for compensation.
The amount of compensation is still to be determined.
Julian Scholefield, 45, from Summerland, B.C., got a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID shot in July 2021 and 12 days later, over the course of a few hours, developed a rare neurological disorder that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Since the
Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) began accepting claims on June 1, 2021, it has received 1,299 claims and paid out close to $2.8 million in compensation as of Dec. 1, 2022, according the program’s
statistics page.
Of those claims, 1,067 were deemed admissible, 221 have been assessed by the Medical Review Board, and the board has approved 50 injury claims for which it says it has determined “there is a probable link between the injury and the vaccine, and that the injury is
serious and permanent.”
“Just yesterday, I did get documentation that states that they have approved my claim and that the next step would be to be determining the dollar value of that,” Scholefield said, according to a
Global News article published Jan. 14.
Scholefield told reporters he wanted to protect himself and his family from COVID-19. He got his first Pfizer shot in May 2021. Six months later, he got the second shot and his arm wasn’t even sore, he said.
But about 12 days later, the married father of two was boating on Okanagan Lake with his family when he started to get tingly feelings in his left leg, and then his right leg. They went back to shore, which took about two hours. By then, said Sholefield, “I was actually paralyzed from about my midsection down, and I couldn’t hold myself up,” Castanet
reported in July 2022
He spent three weeks in Kelowna General Hospital, then went to Penticton Regional Hospital for another five weeks, then spent five more weeks at GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre in Vancouver. His condition required him to stop working and go on disability, and to install a three-floor wheelchair lift.
The official diagnosis was acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, which is
inflammation in the brain and spinal cord that damages myelin, the protective covering of nerve fibres.
Scholefield, who could not be reached for comment by press time,
said a neurologist did further testing and “was able to essentially eliminate any other causes except for the COVID vaccine,” according to the recent
Global News article.
A
study published in the National Library of Medicine says this type of encephalomyelitis “has long been known to be a rare adverse event following some types of vaccinations.”
Scholefield’s wife, Angela, started a
GoFundMe fundraiser to help cover the costs of the elevator lift and wheelchair along with travel, medical supplies, and other medical costs, raising almost $73,000 over the past 14 months. Her initial goal was $50,000.
Life ‘Turned Upside Down’
“Our fight for the past 7 months has been to get him better. He spent 89 days in hospital and unfortunately, to date, is still paralyzed. Our life as we once knew it has been turned upside down,” Angela wrote on the GoFundMe page in a March 2022 update.
“We fight every day emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Our many appointments for rehab and home renovations expenses have been incurred and paid for out of pocket.”
She said the VISP program “is not adequate.”
In a June 2022 update on GoFundMe, she wrote that her husband had just had his third chemotherapy appointment, on the suggestion of a Vancouver neurologist, and that the treatment is “in theory supposed help reset Julian’s auto immune system and bring down the inflammation.”
Now, over half a year later, Scholefield
says he is “not against vaccines per se, but certainly, in my shoes, there is a downside to the COVID vaccine,” according to Global News.
He had told
Castanet in July 2022 that “getting up in the morning is probably the worst,” noting that “I wake up every day and I’m like, ‘Yep, still can’t feel my legs’, and look over and there’s the wheelchair and then it’s like, OK, yeah, this is still real, this is still true.”
“This was a government-mandated vaccine, I followed the rules, I did what I was told. And so far, I feel like the government does not have my back.”
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, up to and including Dec. 9, 2022, there had been 53,064
adverse events reported following a COVID-19 vaccine shot, with 10,519 of those being serious and 42,545 logged as not serious.
The VISP
defines a serious and permanent injury as a “severe, life-threatening or life-altering injury that may require in-person hospitalization, or a prolongation of existing hospitalization, and results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or where the outcome is a congenital malformation or death.”
Eligible individuals may receive income replacement, injury payments, death benefits, coverage for funeral expenses, and reimbursement of costs such as uncovered medical expenses. The VISP website doesn’t indicate a cap on financial support.
An average claim through the vaccine injury program can take 12 to 18 months to process, according to the
VISP.
