The Scots living with vaccine injury and bereavement

He had his first jag - an AstraZeneca dose - on March 20 2021 and had no reason to suspect anything was wrong when he developed pain in his calves on April 1 after lifting heavy items at work.

"I thought I'd pulled a muscle," said Mitchell, from Cambuslang.

By April 3 he was struggling to walk more than 10ft without the muscles seizing up and on April 4 he woke up feeling "like I'd run a marathon".

READ MORE: The Scottish Vaccine Injured Group and the battle to be heard 

Later that day, while doing the ironing, he collapsed.

"My legs just gave way and I knew it was something serious. My wife was downstairs in the kitchen with the door closed so I had to drag myself head-first down the stairs."

Mitchell was rushed to Hairmyres hospital by ambulance where a CT scan revealed life threatening blood clots in his legs and lower abdomen.

His wife and daughters, in their 20s, were told he was unlikely to survive as he was taken into theatre for a seven and a half hour surgery.

All-cause mortality has remained consistently higher among people who have never been vaccinated against Covid compared to those who have had at least one dose (Image: Twitter/ONS)

Mitchell had suffered a rare but extremely serious reaction known as Vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT), which turns patients into a "perpetual clotting machine".

"As they were taking one clot out, three or four or five were forming," said Mitchell. "After four hours, the surgeon told me they stopped counting."

By September 2021, UK authorities estimated that it was occurring in around one in 50,000 under-50s and one in 100,000 over-50s following a first AZ vaccination.

The condition - which had never been seen before - was initially treated with heparin-based blood thinners, until medics realised this actually exacerbated the problem.

Mitchell was one of the lucky ones: his consultant haematologist was part of a worldwide taskforce which recommended trying steroids instead.

"That's what saved my life," he said.

Alex Mitchell had his left leg amputated above the knee following complications caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times)

His ordeal was not over, however. Medics were unable to save his left leg; a week later it was amputated above the knee.

After leaving hospital, Mitchell sought "help and support" online by trying to find other VITT patients in Scotland, but initially had his social media posts closed down.

In April 2022, he heard about the UK's Vaccine Damages Payment scheme (VDPS) for the first time after his daughter chanced upon information about it.

Despite having a medically-diagnosed vaccine injury, Mitchell was never signposted to the scheme which provides £120,000 lump sums to citizens severely disabled or bereaved as a result of government-backed vaccinations.

He describes the application process - which requires claimants to demonstrate both causality and lasting disability of at least 60% - as "dehumanising".

As of August 7 this year, Mitchell was one of just 137 people in the UK to have been awarded damages in relation to a Covid vaccine injury or death.

He says it is a "very dark place" for himself and others who regularly encounter hostility and ridicule instead of sympathy.

He said: "You tell people that you're vaccine injured, and those who are pro-vaccines hate us because they say we're trying to put people off.

"The anti-vaxxers say 'serves you right, you shouldn't have taken it in the first place'.

"I've had messages from people saying 'you deserved to die'. We're in this no man's land where everybody thinks it's okay to attack us and all we've got is each other."

READ MORE: Scottish Covid inquiry lawyer says vaccine injured and bereaved face 'horrific' stigma 

For 'Grace', who lost her husband as a result of VITT, one of the hardest aspects is how "insignificant" his death is considered to be compared to the thousands killed by Covid or left with debilitating long Covid symptoms.

The 50-year-old from Glasgow - who has two teenage daughters from a previous marriage and requested that her real name not be used to protect her family - is a line manager at a global pharmaceutical firm specialising in clinical trials.

She met her husband 'Daniel'* - who she describes as "widely known, like, and sorely missed" - at work, and the pair wed in 2017.

More than 150 million vaccine doses have been administered in the UK to date (Image: Getty)

The couple had been planning a family holiday to New York when he fell ill with migraine-like "visual disturbances and a headache" on April 2 2021, around a week after his first AZ dose.

Over the following days the 58-year-old - a keen runner and cyclist, who was otherwise fit and healthy - continued to suffer a "pounding" sore head, dizziness and a nosebleed.

On April 5 he returned home from work, feeling ill, and spent most of the next two days in bed.

Grace said: "On Wednesday morning [April 7], I begged him to go to the doctor, he mumbled and went to sleep.

"When I came home from work that night I sensed something wasn’t right as the curtains were drawn and the dog hadn’t been taken out.

"I ran upstairs to find that he was in bed, hadn’t gone to doctors and said he tried to shower, but was dizzy so got out. He took a while to come downstairs and told me he felt ‘odd’, that something wasn’t right.

"He started losing his fine motor skills when trying to pick up a pen and before I knew it his right hand cramped up and he fell.

"I caught him before he hit the radiator – he bit his tongue and was unconscious."

Scans revealed a brain bleed on one side of Daniel's brain and a blood clot on the other. He was transferred to intensive care at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary but declared brain dead on April 9, when his life support was turned off.

Following a post-mortem and subsequent tests ordered by the procurator fiscal, Daniel's cause of death was eventually certified as VITT in May 2022.

In May 2022 - having heard of the VDPS through a Facebook group - Grace applied for damages and was finally awarded £120,000 for her bereavement last month.

She stresses that she is "not antivax" and continued with her own vaccinations despite breaking down in tears at the clinic.

She added: "Nothing can make this right, nothing makes it easy to accept. Daniel was the small insignificant, overlooked percentage of the population that was affected by this rare blood clot – for me and my family, the benefits certainly didn’t outweigh the risks."

In Aberdeen, Steve Bowie is still fighting for damages.

The 50-year-old father of five was driving to his work as a supervisor for an offshore container company on May 3 2021 when he suddenly felt ill with "a funny feeling across my body".

READ MORE: Vaccine injured are not the same as antivaxxers

He turned the car around and drove straight to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Within minutes of arriving he could no longer stand and was rushed into A&E where doctors diagnosed a spinal stroke caused by a blood clot on the vertebrae in his neck.

For two weeks he remained in hospital, paralysed from the neck down, before spending nearly three months in rehabilitation.

Spinal strokes are rare - accounting for fewer than 1% of all strokes - but Bowie, who had received his first AZ dose on April 7, had never considered any potential link to the vaccine until it was mentioned by his doctor.

Steve Bowie has been knocked back for damages as the VDPS is not convinced there is 'probable cause' that the vaccine caused his spinal stroke (Image: Michael Traill Photography)

He said: "The doctor who saw me in A&E came up to the room, shut the curtain, and asked if I had had my vaccine. I said 'yes', and said 'can I ask why you're asking?'.

"The doctor told me that someone else had been admitted with a spinal stroke two weeks after myself and he said the odds of that happening were millions to one, so he thought it could be the vaccine that had caused it.

"They must have had the vaccine as well, so that's why he was putting two and two together."

Although Covid has been linked to an increased risk of blood clots up to six months after infection, Bowie's first case of Covid did not occur until December 2021.

The VDPS scheme - which uses a balance of probability test for causality - has paid out in cases of stroke, blood clots, and spinal inflammation, but not spinal stroke specifically.

Bowie is among the 2,375 claimants rejected on grounds of causality because it is considered more probable that his injury occurred by chance. Roughly 1000 people a year in the UK suffer spinal strokes.

Bowie has lodged an application for a "mandatory reconsideration" and is awaiting the outcome.

One difficulty is that he has nothing in writing from the doctor who mentioned the vaccine coincidence - something his solicitor believes might help his case.

If his claim is knocked back a second time, Bowie says he would consider legal action to potentially compel the medic to testify.

READ MORE: Vaccine damages systems around the world

Two and a half years on, he has been let go from his job and the family now rely on his wife's income as a part-time hairdresser.

He said: "I was fit, working 12 hour shifts and going on two holidays a year. I was living a good life.

"Now I've got constant chronic pain in my back and my left leg. I can't work, I've lost the use of my left arm.

"I can walk maybe 10 minutes at most before I have to rest. I rely on crutches outside because if I fall I won't be able to get back up without help.

"I'm going to have to live with this disability for the rest of my life."

*not his real name