(OPINION) Patients who were severely injured after taking mandated Covid vaccines say they feel ‘abandoned’ by the government and their doctors.
DailyMail.com has heard from dozens of healthcare workers, federal employees and military staff who claim they were left with debilitating side effects after receiving the vaccine when they were legally required to take it for their jobs.
Three of those women said while they remain ‘pro-vaccine,’ speaking out about their injuries has caused them to be accused of being ‘anti-vaxxers.’
The Covid vaccines prevented millions of deaths worldwide and serious side effects are extremely rare – affecting around one in 200,000 people, according to official US data.
But experts say the push to quell damaging anti-vax misinformation has left those with genuine post-vaccination injuries treated like outcasts.
Michelle Utter of Florida was told she had to receive the Covid vaccine in 2021 in order to visit her military sons who were at port.
Within days, the former athlete, was crawling on the floor, feeling like she was ‘on fire inside.’ Now, the mother-of-three can hardly stand long enough to cook dinner.
Danielle Baker of Ohio, meanwhile, was the ‘healthiest’ she had been when she agreed to the vaccine in order to keep her nursing job.
Within hours of her second shot, she suffered shooting back pain that left her unable to move. Now, she is in heart and lung failure, unsure ‘how much time’ she has left.
And Gina Henson of Texas got the vaccine to protect elderly residents at the care home she worked at.
Six months later, she developed inflammation in the brain, which led to a stroke and more than three months in the hospital recovering. She can no longer work.
As of September 2024, about 13,400 Covid claims have been filed with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), a government program that offers compensation for medical injuries or deaths.
But only one in four claims have been reviewed, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Of those reviewed, 58 are ‘eligible for compensation.’ In order to be eligible, a person must be able to prove their injury was directly caused by a vaccine.
Ms Baker did not plan to take the Covid vaccine. Having contracted the illness in 2020, the 42-year-old assumed she had acquired natural immunity.
However, in May 2021, the nurse of 20 years received a mass email from her employer: Take the vaccine by July or lose your job, it said.
Ms Baker, now 45, told DailyMail.com: ‘I felt that that’s what I needed to do to retain my position.’
While the first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine came with only minor side effects, ‘It was the second one that really did me in,’ she said.
Within hours, Ms Baker suffered severe pain shooting from her injected arm up to her face.
When the pain failed to go away the next day, she assumed it may have been injected incorrectly, possibly hitting a nerve.
‘Unfortunately, there was a lot more going on,’ she said.
Over the next month she started having ‘extremely bad back pain’ and lost her ability to walk and control her bladder and bowels.
‘This doesn’t happen,’ she told her husband. ‘People just don’t go from being the healthiest that they’ve been to this.’
