(NewsNation) — Within 20 minutes of getting his first COVID vaccine shot, Shaun Barcavage knew something was wrong. The experienced nurse practitioner felt numbness in his arm, which spread to his face. And it got worse after his second shot.
“I went from being a 100% healthy, fully functioning nurse to a complete downward spiral.”
Barcavage is one of thousands in the U.S. who have, or believe they have, suffered severe side effects from the COVID vaccines.
“It’s not a belief. It’s a fact,” he told NewsNation.
Making matters worse, Barcavage says, is a culture of denial within the health care system about just how many people have suffered from life-altering vaccine side effects.
“I thought that all my pro-vaccine colleagues … would be there to lift me up and help me. And in fact, they’re the ones who turned around, dismissed, denied and censored and buried me.”
“I think the idea that we are not listening to people who are suffering from this vaccine is awful,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, who was the White House COVID coordinator in 2022 and 2023. “We absolutely need to be listening to them.”
But he is also very clear about the benefits of the COVID vaccines: “These vaccines ended the pandemic. They saved millions of lives. Thousands of Americans were dying every day at the height of the pandemic. The vaccines totally turned it around.”
Jha, who is dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, says doctors need to take a “humble” approach to learning more about those rare but serious vaccine side effects. But he realizes that’s a big ask for many of his colleagues.
“There is a long tradition in medicine that when we as doctors don’t understand something, we actually blame the patient. This has been a problem in medicine forever.”
Barcavage says he learned that first-hand when friends refused to believe his serious illness was related to the COVID vaccine.
“They’re afraid that, by showing my face, I’ll drive vaccine hesitancy. What I have come to realize is that the censorship and the hiding of it is actually fueling vaccine hesitancy.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 270 million Americans, or 81% of the population, have been vaccinated. Of those, less than 2% reported severe or life-threatening issues.
Every vaccine produces side effects. The CDC has reported cases of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction, in just over 11 cases for every one million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and two and a half cases per million doses of the Moderna vaccine.
Other serious illnesses linked to vaccines in very rare instances include Guillain-Barré Syndrome (muscle weakness and paralysis), myocarditis and pericarditis (heart muscle inflammation), and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (blood clots in large blood vessels).
Many have applied for federal help, to little avail. The Health Resources and Services Administration is the agency charged with compensating people with injuries directly linked to “a covered countermeasure” such as a vaccine.
The HRSA says, as of April 1, it received 13,116 COVID-related claims. So far, it’s reviewed more than 10,000 of those claims and found just 47 eligible for compensation, which averages about $3,600. The rest were denied.