‘I feared Covid jab could kill my disabled son’
Mother was treated like a fanatic, but has won court fight to stop vulnerable man receiving vaccine
‘I went from being a loving mother and Tom’s sole carer to a near criminal’
THE mother of a disabled son with a rare heart condition has won a landmark case to prevent the state from injecting him with the Covid-19 vaccine she feared could kill him.
After a three-year court battle, the mother, who can only be named as Sarah, said she had endured a “Kafkaesque nightmare” to protect her son, Tom, who has severe learning difficulties as well as a range of life-threatening conditions.
Mr Justice Hayden, sitting in the Court of Protection, has now ruled it is “no longer in Tom’s best interests to receive the jab” because the virus “landscape” had changed so much since the peak of the pandemic.
He made the ruling after an American professor of paediatrics said Tom was more likely to suffer heart complications – such as myocarditis and pericarditis – if given an mRNA vaccine.
But Sarah says the battle has eroded her trust in social services, doctors and the courts, and accused the government of introducing a policy that ignores individual circumstances.
Tom’s conditions include a chromosome abnormality that causes severe learning difficulties, meaning he has the mental age of an 18-month-old child despite being 24. His mother feared the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, which tells cells how to trigger an immune response to Covid, could cause an adverse reaction in his heart and resisted doctors’ and social workers’ demands that he be injected for the “greater good of society”.
Because Tom was over 18 when the then government ruled that the most vulnerable should be injected during the pandemic, the Court of Protection assigned him a lawyer to act in his “best interests”. That lawyer, along with the local integrated care board, backed calls for him to be jabbed.
Sarah raised £60,000 through crowdfunding and spent her £25,000 life savings to fight the case.
She claims she was threatened with arrest, jail, seizure of her assets and the possibility of her son being removed from their home to be “forcibly jabbed”.
Sarah, 60, who lives in north west England, fought back tears as she told The Telegraph: “It has felt like a Kafkaesque nightmare because I was taking on the state that wouldn’t budge.
“I went from being a loving mother and Tom’s sole carer to a near criminal. I have been made to feel like a liar, a bad person and a fanatic.
“I was wrongly accused of being an anti-vaxxer just for questioning whether this new gene therapy was right for my son and his complex conditions. To me, it was the state that was fanatical about its policy by bringing its might to bear down upon me.
“Doctors, cardiologists, lawyers and social workers hid behind government guidance, which is just that – guidance.”
Two years ago, Judge Burrows, sitting in the Court of Protection, in Preston, ruled Tom was in an at-risk group and so should have the jab, adding that the court was “ill-equipped” to say whether the vaccine was safe or not but taking it was “altruistic” and required of every citizen.
But now Mr Justice Hayden has ruled that Tom need not have the jab. He heard evidence from Prof Martin McCaffrey, a US academic, who wrote that because Tom has partial trisomy 13 – meaning he has an extra chromosome – he was more likely to suffer heart complications from the mRNA vaccine.
Adam Finn, the professor of paediatrics at Bristol University who advised the then government during the pandemic, agreed with Prof McCaffrey. However, he stressed that the possibility of such adverse side-effects would not have changed public policy at the height of the pandemic.
In his ruling, the judge said the “changing landscape of the virus and increasing immunity within the community” had created a “wholly changed situation” and he was “genuinely pleased” to conclude it was “no longer in Tom’s best interests to receive the Covid vaccination”.
He added: “This must come as joyous news to his mother for whom this issue has percolated very many minutes of every day… Proceedings such as this are corrosive on people’s morale. Here it has probably been unavoidable given the different perceptions on both sides of this changing argument and the changing landscape of the argument itself.”
Paul Diamond, Sarah’s barrister, told the court she was simply a “mother who loves her child”, suggesting that future parties involved in similar legal disputes should adopt a “more cooperative” rather than “aggressive” approach.
Stephen Jackson, of Jackson Osborne Solicitors, Sarah’s solicitor, said after the ruling that the judge’s reliance on the virus’s “changing landscape” meant he had not tackled “uncomfortable issues”.
“Prof McCaffrey’s findings were that the working assumption should be that individuals with trisomy – those who have 47 instead of 46 chromosomes – may be less able to cope with mRNA gene therapy technology in the vaccine,” he said. “More investigation is needed. But anyone caring for those with trisomy conditions, such as Down’s syndrome and Edwards’ Syndrome, should be made aware of Prof McCaffrey’s warning.”
Mr Jackson added that while many with trisomy 13 die in infancy, Tom’s mother’s “love and good decision-making meant he is now 24 years old”.
He added: “Yet the court and state and lawyers and medics who’ve never met Tom decided they should make decisions for him and denied his mother had any rights at all. State overreach and attack on the family unit could not be clearer. This situation is being faced by many families up and down the land.”