‘Giving People a Voice’: New Platform Hopes to Shed Light on Post-Vaccine Injuries

‘Giving People a Voice’: New Platform Hopes to Shed Light on Post-Vaccine Injuries
A person receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Antwerp, Belgium on Sept. 12, 2022. Dirk Waem/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images
Daniel Y. Teng
Updated:

Rather than get bogged down in the neverending debate on vaccine science, Matt Jordan set out to simply give people a voice when he launched Jab Injuries Global.

The platform, which has garnered 113,000 followers on its Australian Instagram account in just 10 months, has big plans globally, with local accounts in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand beginning to gain traction.

“We are offering a service. I’ve got a team of about 12 writers, and we sit on the phone with people for about one-and-a-half to two hours. We type out their whole story from beginning to end in as much detail as possible so that the community can go through and see what’s really happening,” Jordan told The Epoch Times.

“We’re not really sharing science, news, data, or any of our own opinions. We’ve allowed the people to speak about their experiences and their stories. I think we’ve got 300 now,” he said.

The platform comes as debate continues on the efficacy of vaccines and processes that governed their worldwide rollout during the pandemic years.

Stories From Post-Vaccine Recipients

The Instagram pages include testimonials from individuals reporting side effects, including pericarditis to seizures.

In one case, a Gold Coast-based woman says she was told she contracted long-COVID after receiving two vaccine doses months earlier.

She reported severe symptoms like body spasms, diarrhoea, and extreme fatigue.

A medic prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Netanya, Israel, on Jan. 5, 2022. (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
A medic prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Netanya, Israel, on Jan. 5, 2022. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

“The only real response I received from the GP was that there was no data on long-COVID in Australia, so there was nothing she could do. I found this strange as in the UK, long-COVID is a common diagnosis,” according to her testimonial.

While one volunteer stillborn photographer claimed the number of jobs she was doing a year increased from 70 a year to around 400.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Australian Department of Health both state that vaccines are safe for pregnant women.

The testimonials are signs the previous consensus around vaccine safety is beginning to unravel.

Just a week earlier, the mother of a 17-year-old Tasmanian teenager went public with her daughter’s story, telling 2GB radio young Faith was suffering severe muscle tics and spasms after receiving her second Pfizer dose.

“So we took her straight up to the local hospital. They did a lot of tests, couldn’t figure out what was going on—everything came back quite normal,” the mother, Tanya, said.

“I did actually ask the question then: ‘Could it have been the vaccine?’ And I was actually told by the surgeons to not be so, and I quote, ‘bloody stupid.’”

Dr. Paul Marik, co-founder and chief scientific officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, previously told The Epoch Times that post-vaccine symptoms include “some degree of neurological impairment.”

He also said the symptoms were harder to treat compared to long COVID.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration keep tabs on adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines.

Motivated to Help and Build a Community

Meanwhile, Jordan says it was through a personal experience that he was inspired to create Jab Injuries Global.

“I was quite confident in myself that I didn’t want it, not because I’m an anti-vaxxer, just a healthy person,” he said. “I was in a position where I had people in my close circle give me a hard time, and I was thinking, ‘What’s the best argument to defend my freedom of choice?”

He realised personal stories on localised pages would be the best way to educate the wider public on concerns around the newer vaccines.

Currently, the team has distributed 180,000 12-page booklets around the state of Victoria in Australia.

In response, Senator Gerard Rennick of the centre-right Liberal Party welcomed the move.

“Well done to Matt, who has volunteered so much of his time to give a voice to those who really needed it,” he wrote on Facebook.

Yet Jordan emphasised the creation of the platform was about building a community.

“Awareness is still important, and we will still continue to do that. But we are trying to bring the world together.”

There are plans for a new website and, eventually, a directory indexing post-vaccine conditions around the world.

Vaccine Injury Claims Process a Slow Burn

An ongoing challenge for those claiming to suffer post-vaccine injury is linking the harm to the jab itself.

It’s a process that has frustrated personal injury lawyer Clare Eves from Shine Lawyers, who has said navigating Australia’s COVID-19 Vaccine Claims Scheme was a challenge.

“The first hurdle really is, do you have one of the recognised covered conditions? If you don’t, then you’re probably not going to be eligible,” she previously told The Epoch Times.

Eves said she encountered individuals suffering ailments that fall outside of the recognised adverse reactions (eligible for compensation) to the jab, including deconditioning, headaches, fatigue, strokes, and seizures.

While this financial year, the government has paid out $937,000 in compensation, budget documents estimate that number could balloon to $77 million (US$49.35 million) in the next financial year.

However, around the world, vaccine injury compensation claims have garnered little traction with authorities.

As of late July, Japanese authorities have approved 820 vaccine injury claims from 3,680 applications. In Canada, eight claims have been approved out of 774 claims, while the United States has yet to compensate a single claim.

Daniel Y. Teng
Daniel Y. Teng
Writer
Daniel Y. Teng is based in Brisbane, Australia. He focuses on national affairs including federal politics, COVID-19 response, and Australia-China relations. Got a tip? Contact him at [email protected].
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