By Steve Watson
An NHS nurse in the UK has been denied compensation despite being permanently harmed by a COVID vaccine during a trial.
Marie-Claire Hoyle, who volunteered for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine trial in 2020, contracted transverse myelitis two weeks after her second dose, temporarily suspending the global trial.
The qualified nurse and NHS England network manager for infectious diseases with serious consequences lost the usability of her hands, felt numbness from collarbone to thigh and still carries permanent spinal cord damage that is visible on MRI. The Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, while acknowledging that the vaccine had caused her illness, rejected the one-off payment of £120,000 because her degree of disability had improved below the strict 60% threshold for lifelong disability.
Translation of “X”: Nurse affected by rare disease related to Covid vaccination, “not disabled enough” for compensation
Hoyle shared that she was on duty when she felt pain in her neck and spine that spread to her shoulders and hands within an hour. “I couldn’t use my hands anymore, I couldn’t hold a pen or a toothbrush. From my collarbone to thigh height, I was completely numb because the signaling pathways between my spine and my brain were damaged.”
An MRI scan confirmed transverse myelitis. The study was interrupted worldwide while her case was being examined; She survived and recovered enough to participate again. Permanent damage has remained. “I’ve had an MRI scan since then, and there’s still damage to my spinal cord that will never heal. I have a very weak grip in my fingertips, so things are constantly falling out of my hand. I still have nerve pain along the left side of my arm and numbness in the middle of my chest, and that’s never going to happen,” she continued.
She received a high five-figure out-of-court settlement from the University of Oxford. However, the VDPS ruled that she was no longer eligible. “They acknowledged that the vaccine caused my transverse myelitis — based on the evidence I presented along with all my medical records — and that I was up to 60% severely damaged at the time. However, they said, ‘That’s not the case now, so you don’t need the payment.'”
Hoyle, a mother of three who later had her youngest child vaccinated and says she continues to advocate vaccines in principle, wants a scalable system that takes into account actual, ongoing damage rather than drawing an “all-or-nothing” line.
AstraZeneca later withdrew its Vaxzevria vaccine from the market globally in 2024, officially citing economic reasons and switching to updated formulations. The company had already admitted in court documents that the vaccine can cause thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (VITT). Kate Scott, whose husband has suffered permanent brain damage, said the decision seemed less commercial and more like an admission that the product was no longer “within acceptable safety parameters” with 445 confirmed VITT cases and 81 deaths in the UK alone. The company insisted that the vaccine saved over 6.5 million lives in the first year.
The report on Module 4 of Baroness Hallett’s COVID-19 inquiry, published in April 2026, described the system as “not sufficiently supportive” and called for urgent reforms: to increase the payment of £120,000 at least in line with the inflation rate (suggesting over £200,000), to introduce staggered payments depending on the severity of the breach, and to abolish or relax the 60% threshold that leads to: that people with significant neurological damage are left empty-handed.
The government published its response on 16 October 2026, acknowledging the need for reforms and committing to a review to make the programme “fit for purpose and effectively implementable”, but at the same time citing concerns about administrative costs.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Welfare expressed his “deepest sympathy” and said officials would carefully consider the recommendations.
As of June 30, 2026, the program had received more than 24,260 COVID-related claims, but only 264 resulted in compensation — just over 1%. In about 580 to 603 applications, the causal relationship was recognized by medical experts, but the 60 percent threshold for disability was not reached.
The running costs since April 2022 amounted to £83 million, more than double the approximately £32 million paid out to the victims. Transverse myelitis was later listed as one of the extremely rare side effects of the vaccine, and vaccination intervals were extended after cases like Hoyle’s.
Authorities insisted that the benefits outweighed the risks, but the design of the system – designed for older injuries occurring in industrial environments – does not fit well with the neurological, fluctuating and sometimes partially reversible damage that occurs with these products.
The patterns of damage were gradually recognized. Last year, a Yale University study on post-vaccination syndrome was published, documenting high rates of brain fog, exercise intolerance, extreme fatigue, sleep disturbances, tingling or numbness, as well as confirmed signs of myocarditis, tinnitus, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia, and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
A Taiwanese study of 467 healthcare workers, all of whom had received at least three doses of vaccine, found neurological and psychiatric symptoms equivalent to those of “Long COVID” in a group that had never been infected.
Of the 222 people without a proven infection and with negative nucleoprotein antibodies, more than 30% reported mild fatigue, almost 10% reported difficulty concentrating, and 11.7% reported memory deterioration.
The authors did not find a statistically significant difference in symptom severity between individuals with confirmed infection, asymptomatic infection, and those without infection, but did not examine vaccination as a possible cause.
A South Korean cohort study of more than 8.4 million participants, published in September 2025 in the journal Biomarker Research, reported associations between COVID-19 vaccination and an increased risk of six types of cancer.
Booster shots have been linked to a 125% increased risk of pancreatic cancer. The risk of prostate cancer increased by 69%, lung cancer by 53%, thyroid cancer by 35%, stomach cancer by 34%, colorectal cancer by 28%, and breast cancer by 20%.
The authors noted that “COVID-19 vaccination may be associated with an increased risk of six specific cancers,” noting that booster shots significantly impacted the risk of stomach and pancreatic cancer.
In the United States, the picture is similarly unbalanced. The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which also covers COVID vaccines, had received 14,250 applications as of October 1, 2026, with the majority claiming vaccine damage. Of 8,369 decisions, only 66 were compensated and 120 were classified as eligible.
At an April 2026 hearing of the Senate Standing Subcommittee of Inquiry, VAERS data was examined, showing that COVID vaccines are associated with more adverse events and deaths than all other vaccines combined in the entire history of the system, including a mortality rate 55 times higher than the flu shot. FDA employees had pointed out the obfuscation of safety signals and were instructed to stop certain analyses.
In Israel, signs of myocarditis and pericarditis began to appear within a month of the introduction of the mRNA vaccines in early 2021. Israel shared the data with the CDC and EMA in February, but warnings to the public and doctors did not follow until months later, after most young people eligible for vaccination had already received two doses.
An analysis from Oxford found an eight-fold increased risk of myocarditis in people under 40 years of age within a week of the second Pfizer dose and a 44-fold increased risk after the Moderna vaccination. Hong Kong reported a risk of 1 in 3,000 in adolescent boys after the second dose and then switched to a single-dose strategy.
A Thai study in teenagers found that 29% showed signs of heart disorders after a second dose of Pfizer. The belated disclosure was not followed by a comparable evaluation.
In Australia, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) showed that 35 people died on the same day they received their COVID shot. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) conducted a causality check on only 24 of them and did not refer a single case to its vaccine safety investigation group.
Of the more than 1,000 deaths reported in the TGA’s database, only 14 have been officially linked to the vaccines. As far as time data were available, one in four deaths occurred within three days and 39% within a week.
Dr. Suzanne Niblett called the claim of a thorough review “very misleading” because most cases had not been properly analyzed. Dr. Rado Faleti noted that in the community of vaccine victims, “not a single person says they have been tracked or examined by the TGA.”
Meanwhile, new Moderna formulations for the 2026–2027 season received FDA approval at the end of August 2026, 81 days before the planned start of the Phase 3b/4 human safety and immunogenicity trial.
A bill introduced in September 2026 would further distort the process: S. 3323 would require the director of the CDC to adopt the ACIP’s recommendations unless they are refuted by a vast amount of peer-reviewed scientific evidence, while raising the hurdles for withdrawing recommendations or removing entries from the vaccine injury table.
Hoyle’s case is not an isolated case. Hundreds of people whose health problems have been linked to the vaccines by medical experts are below the arbitrary 60 percent limit and do not receive benefits from the state program – even though administrative costs are higher than disbursements.
The investigation has led to an official admission that the current rules do not correspond to the damage to health that has actually occurred. It remains to be seen whether the promised review will lead to real, graduated support or merely to even more bureaucracy.
People who have been vaccinated on official assurances of safety and necessity now face the same bureaucratic hurdles that have already characterized the vaccination campaign.
Accountability for the damage to health and the freedom to weigh risks without coercion or denial still lag behind the volume of applications.
