Mother paralysed from chest down by Covid vaccine handed £120,000

Mother paralysed from chest down by Covid vaccine handed £120,000

A Scots mother who suffered severe paralysis after a Covid jab has been paid £120,000 in compensation.

Clare Bowie was left unable to move from the chest down two weeks after getting the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Three years on, the 56-year-old from Dumbarton has partially recovered but can only walk about 20 steps a day.

She was awarded damages through the Government’s Vaccine Damage Payment scheme.

Ms Bowie said she felt ill a fortnight after receiving the vaccine in April 2021.

She added: ‘I was fully paralysed to chest level and it was spreading. I started to lose the ability to breathe and speak. It was scary.’ After six MRI scans, doctors diagnosed acute disseminated encephalitis complicated by transverse myelitis, a condition that causes inflammation in the brain and spinal cord.

It can follow a minor infection and it is the result of the immune system going haywire and attacking the nerves.

Eventually a combination of steroids and other drugs helped halt the deterioration. In July 2021 she was able to wiggle her toes for the first time. But, due to muscle wastage, it was a long and slow journey to recovery.

She had to medically retire from her job of 37 years as a Ministry of Defence administration worker at the Faslane submarine base on the Clyde.

Ms Bowie said: ‘I do physio every day, so I can walk. But it’s probably maybe about 20 steps.

‘But it’s actually enough to get me from my bed to the toilet and to my living room chair. If I am being perfectly honest, I am just grateful to be alive.’

Mrs Bowie’s husband Dave, 55, applied for the compensation scheme in October 2021, while she was still in hospital. But the money only arrived in her account in February 2023, a year and half after applying.

Ms Bowie described the scheme as ‘woefully inadequate’.

She added: ‘You think £120,000 is massive. I’ve been in the civil service all my life, I wasn’t used to that money. But the bottom line is it doesn’t clear your mortgage and modify your house.’

Around three billion doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were given worldwide.

AstraZeneca said: ‘From the body of evidence in clinical trials and real-world data, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has continuously been shown to have an acceptable safety profile and regulators around the world consistently state the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks of extremely rare potential side effects.’