“I never heard from her again.”

By Gary Scarrabelotti

It happens.  Your interlocutor expresses concern about the fix you’re in.  They can do something to help — maybe not a lot but, still, something.  They vow to check out a few details and get back to you.  But they never do.

That was Kara Potter’s experience.

Kara lives in the rural village of Gundaroo, New South Wales, just outside the Australian Capital Territory and a short drive from Canberra.

It was after her third Pfizer dose which she took on 8 January 2022.  That “jab” had flattened her with a flood of bad reactions and she had sought help from the highest medical agencies in the land.

Kara’s GP had reported her mix of nasty symptoms to the Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) on 18 January 2022.  The TGA is Australia’s federal watch dog against dangerous pharmaceuticals.

The promptness of that report, just 10 days after Kara’s third dose of Pfizer, is notable both for the seriousness of Kara’s condition and for the timely exercise of independent professional judgement by her doctor.

The GP’s report, however, was met with silence.  There was no response from either the TGA or the New South Wales Ministry of Health with which the TGA — as with other state health departments – shared accounts of adverse vaccine reactions.

After the third of four hospital admissions made in the wake of her 8 January “booster”, Kara had decided, on further medical advice, to update the original report on her condition to the TGA – and this she did on 1 June.

Before the month was out, she received a call from NSW Health:

“The person I spoke to had received a significantly redacted version of my report to the TGA.  The TGA had only given … information about my pericarditis diagnosis.  When I told her of my many other diagnoses, she was shocked, told me that she would contact my GP for further details … and then get back to me … before her final report was submitted.  I never heard from her again.”

What had happened to Kara?

Zeal & fear

Kara is one of those deeply engaged, quiet doers that hold society together.  Before Pfizer 3 she had been a strikingly busy multi-tasker: she was helping her husband, Ben, run their 20-year plumbing business; she was looking after their three children, two of whom live with a disability; and she was running a business focused on placing disabled people in work.

Doing the right thing – the best thing – by her family and her community is what makes people like Kara Potter tick.  She admits, however, that, when Covid came, another factor entered into her decision to take the vaccination road – that was fear.

It was about this fear that she spoke from her opening remarks to a recent Canberra meeting of the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPs) held on 31 May about which I have already written here and here.

Wrestling with the formation of her words — one of the side effects to hit her after Pfizer 3 – this is how she began:

“The thing I am most afraid of as a vaccine injured person is the uncertainty about my future. … Our conditions are often chronic and our diagnosis largely unknown.

“But my fear of uncertainty is a sad irony because this was the very situation I was trying to address when I willingly had myself and my family vaccinated. …

“I thought that getting the vaccine was going to make me, my family, my employees, and the communities I was involved in, safe.  I thought this was going to return us to some kind of normality.

“What we see in the post vaccination world is that life is still anything but normal.  Fear has not gone away.  Uncertainty remains.”

It’s hard to describe the intensity of the silence that fell upon those of us present at these words shaped for us with such struggle.

Yes, fear works.  It gets people vaxed.  It can also thrust tragedy upon them.

Today, Kara can’t help her husband run their plumbing business.  She’s had to give up her driving licence. She’s had to abandon her employment and workplace training venture.  She’s no longer able to care for her own disabled children: a job taken over by NDIS support workers supervised by her sister – and, withall, at a heavier cost to the public purse.

Kara took her first and second Pfizer doses on 17 June and 8 July 2021.

The reactions she had to these were unpleasant but not at odds with anything she had understood from official vaccine advice widely broadcast.

The blow

Pfizer 3, however, delivered a blow for which no-one could have been prepared who had put their trust in our public health authorities.

“Within 24 hours of receiving the vaccine I was experiencing a vast array of symptoms – dizziness, drops in blood pressure, numbness down the right side of my body, migraines, breathlessness, joint pain and body cramping being just some.”

On Australia Day 2022, Kara was in the Queanbeyan Hospital and was diagnosed with vaccine induced pericarditis – inflammation of the sack surrounding the heart.

Take Nurofen, she was told, and you’ll be better in a fortnight.

Didn’t happen.  Hasn’t happened.

“Over the [next] three months I had multiple presentations and admissions to hospital. Doctors would tell me that they are seeing lots of vaccine patients.

“In this initial period, my symptoms were mainly around my heart and lungs, though I also had neurological and gut [problems].”

She couldn’t lift a pen to write; she’d fall into “semi-conscious sleep” when she tried to speak; she couldn’t breathe properly and panted “uncontrollably”; she couldn’t focus her eyes; there was an oppressive chest pain:

“[It] felt like someone was sitting on my chest with their hand over my mouth and nose.”

On Anzac Day 2022 she experienced an inflammation flare up and her experience of nerve disfunction intensified:

“I was unable to make my mouth say the words I wanted to say and I had left-sided weakness.”

She was admitted to the stroke ward at Calvary Hospital in Canberra and her treating neurologists told her that they were seeing a lots of vaccine patients.

There they described her condition as functional neurological disorder (FND) – a scrambling of the body’s electrical messaging system leading to loss of control over the body’s movements and to its autonomic functioning.  She was assured that she’d recover quickly.

Didn’t happen. Hasn’t happened.

On top of this, another specialist said her symptoms resembled multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS) – which, according to the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) is caused by Covid.  Strange that, since the only ‘Covid’ that Kara had at the time was the re-engineered SARS-COV‑2 spike protein injected into her body by three Pfizer vaccines.

The only ‘Covid’ that Kara had was the re-engineered SARS-COV‑2 spike protein injected into her body by three Pfizer vaccines.

In all, Kara spent two weeks at Calvary Hospital where she began a rehabilitation program.  Then she was transferred to the University of Canberra Hospital for a further 15 days of inpatient rehab. After discharge, she spent another three months as a rehab outpatient at the same hospital.

“Over the following months, I moved from being acutely unwell to being chronically unwell.”

Beside the diagnoses of pericarditis, of FND and of something resembling MIS, Kara continues to suffer from

“… chronic migraines … pins and needles, numbness and burning.  I have vertigo and tinnitus.  My heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturations continue to be dysregulated. I have [developed] sensitivities to a vast array of food, drinks and medications which cause IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] and flare up my neurological symptoms. My brain does not accurately send messages to my body which means I have difficulties with things like walking and … speech…

“I spend most of my day on the couch.”

The Professionals

Notable about Kara’s case is that her diagnosing doctors, unusually, did not flinch from attributing her illness to the vaccine.  Perhaps because her symptoms were so striking, no-one could pretend — as has happened in other instances — that nothing was wrong or that she was faking it.

On the contrary, both a consulting psychiatrist and a neurologist went out of their way, separately, to make clear that her FND symptoms, sometimes attributed to a psychiatric condition, was not of that kind, but was strictly neurological in character and was a reaction to the vaccine.

It was, then, to her treating doctors, a clear-cut case.  While the medical profession has proved widely supine before the public health authorities, Kara was lucky enough to land in the care of people prepared to call her case as they saw it.  Yes, they misjudged how long her suffering would last.  All credit to them, nonetheless, for making the connection between the vaccine and the condition of their patient.

So, when Kara made her 1 June 2022 update report to the TGA, it was backed by hospital discharge summaries which laid out the history of her illness and diagnoses by a succession of doctors over four hospitalisations: pericarditis; pneumonitis; Functional Neurological Disorder; expressive aphasia; and migraine.

Kara’s condition was further specified, late in 2022, as her doctors continued to piece together her jig-saw of pathologies.  They diagnosed her with an additional suite of vaccine-related disorders including Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, paraesthesia, and ataxia.

Well, there we have it: Kara Potter seriously injured by the Pfizer vaccine.  But who will admit it?  Certainly not our apex health institutions. When, in June 2022, it came to reporting Kara’s case to NSW Health, from the five reported conditions linked to her vaccination, the TGA cherrypicked pericarditis.

Why was that?

Dark matter

The answer is, in part, because the TGA has bestowed upon pericarditis (and myocarditis) official status as adverse events.  It did so in a document dated 8 July 2021.

To the bureaucratic mind, other ‘events’ lacking this official categorisation, are just that: events and nothing more – perhaps, faulty diagnoses; perhaps peripheral phenomena unconnected with vaccination as such – in either case, matters unworthy of attention.

How the TGA makes such judgements – classifying one event as “adverse” and another not – is a dark business because, out of its own mouth, the TGA does not follow-up reported AEs, either with the patients or with their reporting doctors.

The “dark business” of how the TGA decides such questions is a matter for other days.  In the meantime, the pretence of “Nothing to see here …” that the TGA adopted when reporting Kara’s matter to NSW Health, reducing her diagnosis to pericarditis, cannot stand.

What we are looking at here is subterfuge: an attempt to hide, by diverting attention from, a reaction (or, rather, a series of reactions) to the vaccine that, as it happens, is not unusual.

If you search the TGA’s own Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN), it is not hard to find, between the launch of the Pfizer vaccine in Australia and 7 January 2022 — the day before Kara took Pfizer 3 – many cases of people who have suffered a wide range of apparently interlocked vaccine reactions similar to those suffered by Kara.

Let’s not beat about the bush then.  Case Kara makes it clear.  The TGA knew well what damage the Pfizer vaccine was doing among the “jabbed” and sought to hide it rather than call for a halt to the vaccination program.

Given that the TGA is the agent of our Federal Government, it is as plain as day who, ultimately, is responsible for the injuries (and deaths) suffered by many (but, as yet, not fully counted) vaccine victims.

Why the TGA tried to hide what it knew is among the great questions of our day.

Was it an agency out of control?  Was it acting under government instruction?  Was it under duress from outside forces?  Was it subject to “corporate capture”?

Big questions.

We certainly won’t get to the bottom of them, however, with Prime Minister Albanese’s announced enquiry into Australia’s “response to the Covid pandemic” – a fake enquiry recently described by The Australian’s Paul Kelly as “an insult to the Australian public.”

Insult, indeed.  And it needs be expunged: by investigation, by prosecutions where criminal or civil proceedings are called for and, ultimately, by just retribution.