From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven Am. There's a group of people who, during our most recent public health crisis, felt completely abandoned, those who suffered vaccine injuries. It's a rare event, but it happens. And during the pandemic, those that had happened to say they were deserted by their friends, health services and ultimately the government, who they say failed to deliver on its promised compensation scheme. And when a system like that fails, a vacuum is left
which can be filled by misinformation and conspiracy. Today, reporter at the ABC's background briefing Madison Conorton on the shortcomings of the COVID vaccination compensation scheme and what it means for public trust. It's Thursday, November twenty one. Madison. Hello, it's great to have you on the show.
Hey, review.
So we're talking about people who got vaccinated for COVID nineteen, as we were all asked to do during the pandemic, but for these people, something went wrong after they did that. So can you tell me more about the people that you spoke to it and what they say happened.
So a lot of.
Our reporting focuses on This woman named Michelle Michelle Fonder. She's actually really sought after a music photographer, so she's worked with Australian musicians like Rule and Amy shark Ab original traveled the world shot magazine covers, album covers, and she described herself to us as someone who'd never had issues before with vaccines.
I've taken every vaccine that has ever existed that we were able to take up until this point, you know, like it's I've traveled to different places where you've had to take stuff.
But she was pretty upfront that she had some questions around the COVID vaccines, particularly because I'm sure you remember the news that there was like this blood clotting issue that was coming up with the Astrozeneca vaccine.
There is more information tonight about the Oxford Astrozenica vaccine and therese reports about rare cases of blood clots the eused drug regulator.
So she said that that was like in her mind when she was deciding on getting vaccinated, and I remember.
Being relieved that we were eligible for PISA at the time.
She ended up getting the PHISA vaccine, which most Australians did, and she told us that a few days after that she started experiencing some heart symptoms when she was lying in bed, pretty intense chest pains as well, and she said she contacted a friend of hers who was a nurse, and the nurse was like, you know, go to hospital.
They'll check you out and let you know if anything's wrong.
They ran some tests and nothing you know, concerning was popping up, and so she was sent home. But the episodes just kept happening. You know, she couldn't even walk upstairs without the heart rate spiking, so it was really impacting her life. She went back to hospital again, nothing was showing up that was of concern, and then after she got her second dose of the fire's A vaccine, this pattern sort of happened again and then all of.
A sudden, I don't know where, heart rate spike, just this crippling chest pain.
And that's when she told us she started to think that this might be linked to the vaccine, and so the third time she went to hospital, she told hospital staff that that was her suspicion.
She was sort of pulled into a side room by a.
Nurse who told her that she should seek therapy for her anxiety.
And that was pretty shocking for Michelle.
She said she felt like she'd shown up to hospital trying to get help for these symptoms that were really scaring her, and she was just being told like, it's in your head.
I just felt like, at my lowest, most vulnerable point of my life, when I felt like I was going to die, this woman is telling me I'm crazy. Like I can't expressed you what that feels like. So I just got up and left and I just remember walking out into the street hysterically crying, going, I don't know what to do.
Where did she turn to next?
So, I mean, Michelle did what a lot of people do when it comes to health questions these days. She went online, and she kind of described going down the rabbit hole to us of read it to something on Twitter, to Facebook groups, finding other people who had quite similar
stories to her. And when she was on these groups, when she was looking online, there was also just so much conspiracy theory content, and you know, there was anti vaccine content, and Michelle said that she really had to make a choice not to engage with that stuff, not
to get sort of sucked in. The Other thing that was really interesting about what happened to Michelle is that she had a pretty big online following, and she started talking about what she was experiencing, and she said that the reaction to that was kind of totally unexpected.
People that are like really really pro vaccine would be like you are lying, where's your proof, or just like you're just a shill for the anti vaxes.
At the same time, though, she was like, I was also copying it from anti vaxeres.
And so did Michelle manage to get a diagnosis in the end, and was her condition connected to the vaccine that she received?
Yeah, So eventually she got in to see a cardiologist who determined that her condition was in line with what we're seeing with vaccine induced pericarditis. And so perricarditis is an inflammation of the part and it's a really well established side effect of mRNA COVID vaccine. So it's not a controversial diagnosis, but it's very.
Rare, okay, And so when we're talking about this group of people that Michelle is one of people who suffered a vaccine injury during COVID, how many people are we talking about here and how serious can the consequences be?
Yeah, So the big picture is like when we say rare, we do mean rare. Only sixteen people in Australia died from a COVID vaccine out of more than sixty eight million doses that were delivered, so again rare. Katie Lee's was actually one of these sixteen people. So we actually spoke to Katie's parents, Penny and e In, and Katie's parents actually have a letter from New South Wales Health that confirms that she died from the rare clotting disorder
that was caused by her ASTROZENKA vaccine. And I think the thing that was quite surprising about their story was the reaction that they got from people when speaking about what had happened to Katie.
Katie loved performance. Independent theater was a very big part of her life. The thing that gave her energy and a smile on her face was performing.
Penny told us about the fact that they set up this fellowship in Katie's memory that was to help other young women who loved theater. But the local council that was helping with some of the funding for the fellowship pushed back really hard on including Katie's cause of death on the website.
They said, because we're a pro vaccine organization, we don't want you to to actually put that Katie died from the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Which Penny found really hard to hear.
It sort of made her feel like she was being cast as an anti vaxxer just for talking about what
had happened to her daughter. And they applied through the compensation scheme that the government had set up for COVID nineteen vaccines, and through that scheme they were awarded seventy thousand dollars for Katie's death, and Penny told us that that figure was really galling for them, and she felt like it just reflected that the government had absolutely no understanding of the impact that Katie's death had on their family.
That was the most insulting thing that was very hard to accept. We felt really really angry, really let down and deserted.
After the break, how Australia's vaccine compensation scheme fell short of its promises, Madison, I want to talk more about the COVID nineteen vaccine compensation scheme. What was promised and how does that compare in terms of what played out and what was actually offered in the end.
Yeah, So this compensation scheme is really interesting. Was set up by the federal government for the COVID vaccines during the pandemic, and it's actually the first time Australia has ever had a compensation scheme like this for vaccines, despite the fact that experts have been asking for one since the nineteen eighties. Is what we were told. But when we were doing these interviews with people, we found that a lot of people were not eligible for the scheme.
So it looks like about eight percent of claims have been approved at this point. I mean, take Michelle, right, So a cardiologist determined that what she was likely dealing with was vaccine induced pericarditist, so that's one of the recognized conditions you can apply to the scheme under. But when Michelle went to look online and see if she was eligible, she found out that she couldn't apply because she'd never been hospitalized.
Right, but she'd gone to hospital, they just hadn't admitted her.
Yeah, so she'd gone to hospital three times, she showed up to emergency, but she'd never been admitted to hospital and therefore she's not eligible. The other eligibility element for the compensation scheme is much more controversial. There are ten conditions that are eligible under the scheme. People that are experiencing other things are not eligible, so sometimes these are
referred to as like gray area symptoms. They're things that people started experiencing after their vaccine, but research has not linked them to a COVID nineteen side effect. Those people can't apply for the compensation scheme. We spoke to a lot of experts for this story, and one that sort of spoke quite instructively about the compensation scheme is a guy called Marco Rizzi who's an associate professor of law
at the University of Western Australia. He said that best practice around the world doesn't sort of knit causation and eligibility together in the way that Australia's scheme did. Instead, they take what he described as like a most probable cause approach, which means that people don't necessarily have to prove causality for their claim. It helps people feel heard. But he also said that a functioning compensation scheme can steer people away from litigation, you know, thrashing out in
court whether a vaccine caused XYZ. That can actually have ripple effects for public trust in vaccination, which you.
Don't want to do.
But in Australia there has been litigation that's been launched. So there's a class action that was launched last year. According to the lawyers that are running it, more than nineteen hundred people have signed on their interest to take part in the action.
Right and Madison. Do you get the sense that the reason that these people were overlooked or not listened to is because to talk too much about the possibility of harm being caused by a vaccine that was seen as dangerous, particularly during the peak of COVID. So was there this element of, you know, let's not give this too much attention because we need everyone to focus on the greater good.
Yeah.
From Nick Coatsworth's perspective, you know, serving as Deputy Chief Medical Officer during the pandemic, he certainly felt that because the focus was the role out and there was a fear of, you know, scaring people off getting vaccinated, that there were people that weren't listened to when they should have been.
I don't think that there were hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of deaths caused by the vaccine. I want to make that absolutely clear, but I do think that there were significant numbers of people who were likely dismissed when they should have been heard.
From Michelle's perspective as someone who went through this, she definitely felt like that was the case, that she was being ignored because it wasn't convenient.
We were collateral damaged for the greater good. That's the part that's really hard to swallow, is that there's a human toll that they know about that is not acknowledged.
This is a relatively small group of people that's important to keep in mind, but it does seem like there are wider ramifications for trust, and I think it's interesting that that is one thing that the COVID inquiry found. So the government did a long COVID inquiry which just dropped.
And it found that because of a number.
Of policy choices that had been made, from lockdowns to mandates to transparency of communication, there had been sort of quite a significant loss of trust within the community in government and that that would have an impact on the levers that the government was able to pull in a future pandemic.
Madison, thank you so much for via Tad, Thanks so much for having me. You can hear more of Madison's reporting on this story with her co reporter Taynan King on the ABC's background briefing program Also in the news today, legislation aiming to ban Australians under the age of sixteen from social media is set to be introduced to Parliament today,
with a cross bench already briefed overnight. It comes as a wide ranging parliamentary inquiry predominantly focused on the impact of social media on young people handed down its recommendations, which did not include backing a social media ban for under sixteens, and in his first public remarks since the re election of Donald Trump, Australian Ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd says he's ready to work with the incoming
US administration. Kevin Rudd has previously been highly critical of Trump, calling the President elect a village idiot.
I'm Ruby Jones.
This is seven am. See you tomorrow.
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