Melle Stewart, a successful actress in both the UK and Australia, made headlines after a life-threatening stroke left her unable to work, and she subsequently filed a lawsuit against pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, claiming that the stroke was a result of receiving the company’s COVID-19 vaccine. Stewart received her first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine on May 24, 2021. Two weeks later, she began having seizures, lost her ability to speak, and lost all movement on the right side of her body. Brain surgeons diagnosed her with Vaccine-Induced Thrombocytopenic Thrombosis (VITT), a blood-clotting condition that the manufacturer and regulators now acknowledge as a “very rare side effect” of this particular vaccine. She underwent multiple procedures, including a three-hour operation to remove a portion of her skull to reduce the pressure in her brain and keep her alive, and had it replaced with a titanium plate the size of her hand.
From the start, the doctors “were running the hypothesis that this was linked to the vaccine,” as said by Stewart’s husband, Ben Lewis. Despite this, blood tests conducted by a hematologist revealed specific markers confirming the vaccine as the cause. While Stewart received £120,000 (A$230,000) from the government as an acknowledgment of the vaccine’s damage, the amount falls short of compensating the substantial earnings lost by her and her husband, who put his work on pause to nurse his wife back to health. Although she has undergone multiple doses of the Pfizer vaccine and remains an advocate for vaccination, she and her husband have chosen to take legal action against AstraZeneca because they believe they were misled by the government’s reassurances.
The tax-free payment from the government is part of a compensation scheme set up in 1979 to maintain public confidence in all vaccinations. However, critics consider it to be woefully inadequate for those who have suffered life-changing injuries from having a COVID-19 vaccination, and the present payout amount has not been raised since 2007. In response to the legal case against the company, an AstraZeneca spokesperson stated that patient safety is their highest priority and emphasized that regulatory authorities have stringent standards to ensure the safe use of all medicines, including vaccines.