On 29 April 2021, Lisa Shaw, a clever, sensible, creative, mischievous, award-winning presenter at BBC Radio Newcastle, had her first Covid vaccination. Like millions of us, Lisa was delighted and relieved to get her jab. Not only did the 44-year-old mother of one feel she was doing her bit to keep her community safe (Lisa had been astonished a few weeks earlier when a girlfriend had said she wasn’t getting jabbed), she was excited “to give her mam a hug”.

A few days later, Lisa developed a headache and stabbing pains behind her eyes which wouldn’t go away. By May 16, she was taken by ambulance to University Hospital of North Durham. Tests revealed blood clots in Lisa’s brain and she was moved to a specialist neurology unit in Newcastle. By now, she had difficulty speaking. Scans showed she had suffered a haemorrhage in the brain and part of her skull was removed to try and relieve the pressure. Her husband Gareth Eve remained by his wife’s bedside, but Lisa told him to go home because she was worried about Zachary, their six-year-old. One final kiss. The last time Gareth heard her voice. Lisa Shaw died on May 21 from complications arising from the AstraZeneca Covid vaccination.

The coroner said: “Ms Shaw was previously fit and well” but it was “clearly established” that her death was due to a very rare “vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT)”, a new condition which leads to swelling and bleeding of the brain.

As this newspaper reported yesterday, the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has been branded “defective” in a multi-million pound landmark legal action which will suggest that claims over its efficacy were “vastly overstated”. The pharmaceutical giant is being sued in a test case by Jamie Scott, a father-of-two who suffered a significant permanent brain injury, and by the widower and two young children of 35-year-old Alpa Tailor. Both damages claims relate to VITT, the condition that killed Lisa Shaw.

We were all given the impression that the jab could prevent both infection and transmission (why else would they make it mandatory for care home workers?) It sounded brilliant. But the legal claim states, “the absolute risk reduction concerning Covid-19 prevention was only 1.2 per cent”.

“Lisa thought getting the jab was the right thing to do as everybody did,” Gareth recalls, “The Government kept saying it was safe and effective. We didn’t know there were other countries that were withdrawing the AstraZeneca.”

Ah, yes, “safe and effective”. How many times did we hear Cabinet ministers intone that reassuring mantra? Yet, use of the word “safe” by any pharmaceutical company advertising a product had been banned for years for exactly that reason – it is misleadingly reassuring. (The Government seems to think the rules didn’t prevent it saying “safe and effective” because it wasn’t advertising a specific product: a Mandy Rice Davis if ever I heard one.)

Where, you might well ask, was the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency)? Ben Kingsley, a lawyer and co-author of a brilliant and damning new book, The Accountability Deficit, says: “For good reason, the MHRA’s rules did not allow AstraZeneca to promote its vaccine as ‘safe’. Yet, astonishingly, while a raft of other countries were pulling the AZ jab for safety reasons the British regulator stood aside with tragic consequences for Lisa and her family while ministers and the NHS continued to insist that it remained unequivocally safe and effective.”

It is almost too painful to consider that, 15 days before Lisa Shaw went eagerly to get her Covid jab so she could “hug my mam”, Denmark stopped the use of AstraZeneca in its vaccination rollout after reports of rare but serious cases of blood clots. Finland also announced that it would continue to limit the AstraZeneca vaccine to people aged 65 and over following similar health concerns. Was the MHRA unaware of growing international doubts (AZ was never licensed in the US) or was it, perhaps, rather reluctant to tarnish a great British success story?

Telegraph — 9th November 2023.