Toronto senior diagnosed with rare disorder after COVID vaccine last summer still waiting for compensation

Fernando Caballero misses the way he used to be: happy-go-lucky, the life of the party and the protector of his family. The 67-year-old was active and enjoyed rollerblading in the summer, ice skating in the winter and dancing all year round.

But now, he uses a cane or walker to get around and takes several medications for nerve pain to help manage Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) — a rare neurological disorder he developed after getting the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021.

He tracks his rehabilitation progress in part by counting how many small dance steps he can do in a row.

"I've lost a lot," Caballero told CBC Toronto in Spanish as his daughter translated. "I just feel very trapped with what I can do now compared to what I was able to do before." 

Toronto Public Health conducted an investigation, which found Caballero developed GBS as a result of the vaccine. It recommended he not get another dose of the vaccine.

GBS causes the body's immune system to damage nerve cells resulting in pain, numbness and muscle weakness. While rare, it can be linked to other vaccines, such as the flu shot.

Seventy per cent of people diagnosed with GBS make a full recovery, and fewer than 15 per cent experience long-term weakness severe enough for a walking aid, according to the U.S. government's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Caballero believes he meets the requirements to receive financial support through the federal government's relatively new Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP). But he's been waiting for more than a year for his claim to be processed. He recently made the difficult decision to return to work to help support his family. 

"We just can't hold on anymore. We really can't," Caballero says he told his wife at the time.

Caballero, who was a mechanical engineer in Colombia before moving to Toronto in 2004, is now doing maintenance and custodial work with limited mobility, pain in his legs and feet and numbness in his hands. He was hospitalized for more than a month, wasn't able to work for a year and had to rely on the money he was saving for retirement.

"Any compensation that I could get would help put us back on a level where we were before," he said. "It's just so hard having to work and not being able to stop."

The VISP program, which is designed to support people seriously and permanently injured after receiving a vaccine approved by Health Canada on or after Dec. 8, 2020. It started accepting claims on June 1, 2021. Since then eight of the 774 applications it received have been approved. Those could include cases linked to vaccines other than those designed to protect against COVID-19. That number doesn't include applications from Quebec, which has its own program.

Seventy-one of the claims were rejected. That means 90 per cent of claimants are waiting while their medical records are collected, reviewed, or for the review board to make a decision.

Caballero has provided all the information and records he can. His daughter Amalia says she's inquired several times about an update, but isn't given much information.