Meet one of the first people in Canada to be compensated for a vaccine injury
In the early hours after Mother's Day last year, a day he spent playing in a family baseball game, Ross Wightman, a realtor and father of two from the Okanagan of central British Columbia, woke up with unbearable back pain.
Over the next year, the pain in his body would move and morph, as he went from hitting the gym and running around with his kids to asking his four-year-old for help picking paper up off the floor. Pain in his back and hamstrings gave way to partial paralysis in his face and below the waist, which led to secondary nerve damage that left him with little connection to his hands and feet.
I can't move my toes, can't move my ankles, can't move my feet," the 40-year-old says. And just the nerve discomfort - I'm on quite a bit of pain medication."
Wightman says he feels lucky that his doctors figured out a likely diagnosis fairly early on - Guillain-Barre Syndrome, or GBS, a relatively rare condition in which you immune system turns to attack your nerves.
A deeper explanation took quite a bit longer, but in late May a letter arrived from a brand new Canadian program, the medical review board of which had concluded that the probable" cause of Wightman's condition was the single dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine he had taken 10 days before picking up a baseball bat in the family game.
It was vindicating," he says of the letter's arrival, which came after what he says was months of paperwork and pushing to get his case recognized. Just the feeling of relief and, I told you so.'"
Wightman is now among the first in this country to be financially compensated for suffering a serious and permanent" injury related to a COVID shot, as part of the Vaccine Injury Support Program. While the program - VISP, for short - is a first for Canada as a whole, no-fault compensation programs for vaccine injuries have become relatively common in recent decades, including in Quebec, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Roughly 85 million doses of COVID vaccine have been administered across Canada so far. If you look at society as a whole, there's no question that vaccination has helped reduce the pandemic's deadly toll, experts say. Recent numbers from Alberta, for example, suggest the death rate from COVID is more than four times higher among the unvaccinated than among those who have had at least two shots. Around the globe, vaccines have been a life-saving measure, a modern scientific feat in the face of the pandemic threat.
Reported side-effects have been exceptionally rare. According to Health Canada numbers, there have been almost 50,000 adverse reactions reported as of mid-May, which is about 55 reactions for every 100,000 doses. And the majority of those were nonserious, including things such as tingling or prickling, laboured breathing or hives, according to the federal website.
There has yet to be a confirmed instance of death due to COVID vaccine in Canada. (There have been a total of 339 deaths reported following vaccination, but the majority were found to be the result of something else, or there was insufficient information to make a conclusion, Health Canada says.)
About 9,500, or about 11.4 reports per 100,000 doses, resulted in a report of a serious event, meaning it resulted in a life-threatening condition, hospitalization or death. That includes myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, blood clots or conditions such as GBS.
In other words, over the past year, you were almost twice as likely to be seriously injured in a car accident than to have a serious side effect from a COVID vaccine.
Still, as unlikely as a serious reaction may be, when a new vaccine is given to the majority of the population there will be those who fall ill and, for people like Wightman, the overall safety profile is little consolation.
The rationale of an injury-compensation program is this: If vaccination is a public good, in that each person is helping to protect not just themselves, but their neighbours, too, supporting those who get hurt in the process is only fair.
There's a moral motivation for doing it. We're asking people to get vaccinated partly to protect themselves but also to protect other people in the community," says Alison Thompson, an associate professor in the pharmacy faculty at the University of Toronto.
Three's a duty to take care of those people, because they did something for the benefit of others and were injured in the process."
In order to avoid a perceived conflict of interest with Health Canada, which authorized the vaccines, the injury program has been handed over to a third party company, RCGT Consulting, which oversees claims and assessments. The program is largely based on Quebec's existing plan.
According to the official website, which has been updated to include numbers only until last November, the program has accepted 400 claims so far, three quarters of which were deemed admissible and moved forward to a more thorough medical review. Fewer than five have been approved for financial compensation.
Wightman is not disclosing how much money he received, but it is less than the total possible amount. According to an email from RCBT, the maximum potential payout for 2021 was $275,000. That amount will increase annually in accordance with the consumer price index.
The process of applying to the program was a rocky one, Wightman says. He says it felt challenging at first to get some doctors to document his issues as a vaccine injury. The actual application process was a lot of paperwork, while many of his emails to the program went unanswered, he says. He credits a new caseworker with getting the process moving earlier this year.
(A RCBT spokesperson says they can't comment on individual cases, but encourage any claimant to contact them about concerns, either through their case manager or main telephone line.)
It doesn't make things better. I'd rather be healthy and not have any money or any financial assistance coming in," he says. But it's just opening up doors to take the financial burden off of day-to-day life."
Wightman hasn't been able to work since falling sick last year.
Vaccine injury programs began emerging in recent decades because the legal system was seen as an expensive and arduous way to get compensation, says Dr. Kumanan Wilson, an internal medicine doctor at The Ottawa Hospital who provided advice at several stages of the development of the new program but who is no longer involved with it.
While he notes that getting money from VISP wouldn't take away someone's right to sue, it could be difficult to establish negligence because, at least in the case of COVID-19, the vaccines were tested in large-scale trials and, while rare incidents of complications do occur, best practices" were followed.
The burden for proving an injury is also designed to be lower in the program than in a court of law, he adds. VISP wasn't designed to determine without a doubt that an injury was caused by a vaccine, but simply to decide whether there was a reasonable other cause. Decisions are made by a tribunal of three physicians who bring in other experts as necessary, he says.
RCBT says it's aiming to have each case reviewed by the medical board in about 12 to 18 months.
Their threshold is simply a 50-plus-one test, so it's not a beyond doubt 95 per cent, like we do in medical research," Wilson says. The idea of these programs is to be permissive, and to not be as onerous as the legal system."
Injuries covered include those that are severe, life-threatening or life-altering, or that may require hospitalization or cause permanent or significant disability, Wilson says. It's a definition that can require some interpretation, but he says there will be an appeals process.
Wightman's case is a good sign that the panel is open to compensating many types of injuries, he adds, as GBS isn't always life long.
Prior to COVID, one of the most high-profile vaccination campaigns was for polio, which was eventually stamped out in most of the world thanks to a vaccine created by scientist Jonas Salk in the 1950s. The near eradication of the disease, which once paralyzed one out of every 200 people infected, is considered one of the greatest successes of public health history.
Unlike COVID, the polio vaccine was made using an actual copy of the virus that had been killed. But in a tragic event in 1955 now known as the Cutter Incident, an early batch was mistakenly made with live virus. Thousands of American children got polio from the vaccine and several died.
Many people who were injured and their families began launching lawsuits against vaccine makers.
Over the next few decades, the number of lawsuits became so onerous that the amount of vaccine makers dwindled. Despite the huge profits that vaccine makers have made in the past couple of years, vaccines are traditionally not a big money maker for pharmaceutical companies, so many left the market entirely, Wilson says.
In the 1980s, the United States introduced its first vaccine-injury program, in part, to help encourage vaccine makers to keep producing the shots necessary for public health. Other countries began to follow suit.
Canada never did, in part because vaccination programs were a relatively low priority and due to the usual issues with federalism, but also because of fears it would increase vaccine hesitancy, Wilson says.
He says there's not a lot of evidence to suggest compensation programs increase hesitancy, and, if anything, at a time when misinformation is rampant, they provide a way for vaccine injuries to be properly investigated.
Wightman points out he's not an anti-vaxxer and that his kids will continue to get their normal childhood shots.
Yet he says that conversation around vaccination has become so polarized that it's hard to talk about what happened to him, given that everyone who raises concerns about the shots gets painted by the same brush.
For now, the former gym rat is staying focused on the neighbours and friends who have called or stepped up to help and the amazing" staff at the rehab ward in nearby Kelowna.
A highlight these days is when he's able to drive down his driveway (it's too steep for him to navigate safely on foot) and then go for a short walk, unassisted except for a special set of orthotics.
My motto is I don't need to have a secondary injury and fall," he says. But I'm totally determined and convinced that I'm going to be able to do most of what I want to do."
Alex Boyd is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_n_boyd