Understandably, the details of what happened — who is at fault, the rollercoaster of emotions, and the sudden life-altering shift from being active to being quadriplegic — are always going to be unclear and controversial.
What was said and what was understood, especially in the devastating, rip-your-heart-out situation in which 36-year-old Kayla Pollock found herself after taking her third COVID-19 vaccine, forces us all to examine how we’d handle the same type of news. For many, it would mean clinging to the jagged edge of a mental breakdown.
As 2022 began, Pollock was a passionate animal lover, a kindergarten teaching assistant at Robert Munsch Public School in Mount Albert, ON, and the dedicated mother to Mason (then 7 years old).
Fit, energetic and engaged, Pollock was a hands-on mom. She loved to hike, train service dogs, go skating, shoot baskets and play hockey with Mason. Before she became a teaching assistant, Pollock worked full time at zoos and sanctuaries with rare and exotic animals — bobcats, lions, monkeys and lynxes.
“I worked with kids who had special needs, and I also trained service dogs, one of which I had at home, named Fynn,” Pollock says.
It was a time when the tentacles of COVID-19 still had the world in its clutches and when vaccines were mandatory in many institutions and workplaces. To continue working as a teacher’s assistant at her son’s school Pollock was required to get the COVID-19 vaccinations.
Pollock, who has a compromised immune system because of her type 1 diabetes, was overwhelmed by the flurry of news reports about the dangers of contracting COVID-19 and the risk of dying from it.
“People with diabetes were, according to the government, dropping like flies,” Pollock says. “When the World Health Organization stated that people with diabetes were at a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19, with some suffering fatal results, I was worried. In addition, my dad, who was in long- term care, was dying and I needed to be vaccinated to see him. I was a little uneasy about the whole situation but realized that taking the COVID-19 vaccination was not optional — it was mandatory.”
Pollock felt overwhelmed by the pressure from so many sources that insisted that everyone, and most especially those with compromised immune systems, should be vaccinated. And so, in January of 2022, when Statistics Canada had already reported almost 61,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in Canada, she decided to get her third vaccine.
Pollock’s first two vaccines had been made by Pfizer, but when she went to get her third vaccination the provider had run out of the Pfizer vaccine and offered her Moderna instead. Even though Pollock was uneasy about taking a different vaccine, she went ahead with it.
A short time afterwards she began to feel physically unwell, a feeling she likens to falling without tripping, and describes as being painless.
“I was unable to move my legs or stand for 20 to 40 minutes, a situation that happened on two occasions just days after the vaccine. I did not initially suspect the vaccine at all,” Pollock says.
Pollock told her doctor that she thought her condition was neurological and she needed an MRI. But before any tests could be done, on Feb. 22, 2022, Pollock woke up paralyzed from the neck down.
“MY DAD, WHO WAS IN LONG-TERM CARE, WAS DYING AND I NEEDED TO BE VACCINATED TO SEE HIM. I WAS A LITTLE UNEASY ABOUT THE WHOLE SITUATION BUT REALIZED THAT TAKING THE COVID-19 VACCINATION WAS NOT OPTIONAL — IT WAS MANDATORY”
“I had to go work that day and my boyfriend was already up and downstairs. When I tried to get out of bed, I realized that I couldn’t move. I called Fynn and told him to go get his ‘dad.’ Fynn kept running up and down the stairs until my boyfriend came up to see what was going on,” Pollock says. “I told him to call 911 and tell them that I was quadriplegic.”
Because it was at the height of COVID-19, neither her boyfriend nor a good friend of Pollock’s who also has type 1 diabetes and could advocate for her at the hospital, were allowed in.
“I was all alone in the hospital and screaming in pain,” Pollock remembers. “A doctor came in, moved my legs around and then told me that my symptoms might be psychosomatic. But once I started screaming that my neck was hurting, another young doctor came in, told me he believed me, and ordered high doses of morphine to be administered to relieve my pain. He also told me that he had a friend who was a radiologist who was willing to work late to read my X-ray and ultrasound tests if I agreed to have them.”
It was a nightmare that Pollock could not even begin to fathom — she had gotten the impression from one doctor’s reaction that she needed to be admitted to a mental institution. But then, as the days dragged on and the results of her tests came in, she was told that she had transverse myelitis, a rare neurological disorder that causes inflammation across a section of the spinal cord that creates paralysis in the arms and legs.
How could Pollock have known more than the doctors in the hospital did? “I was confident that it was the result of the Moderna COVID-19 shot I had taken,” she says. Feeling betrayed, fearful, and mistrustful, she began to record the opinions of the different doctors who came in to see her.
“I was told that I would never walk again but at that point all I really wanted was the use of my arms so I could hug my son,” Pollock says.
Not long afterwards, Pollock says a social worker came in to speak to her about assisted dying and the MAID program. “It was something that I’d never heard of before,” Pollock says. “There was no treatment for people like me, and there was no housing. I felt that they — the doctors, medical institutions, and politicians — wanted to silence me because of my outspokenness around my condition being brought on by the vaccine.”
The biggest fear that Pollock had at that time was not being able to keep what she had, including her son, Mason. She was fearful that she would be moved to a long-term care facility an impossible distance away from her son, knowing that Premier Doug Ford’s More Beds, Better Care Act (Bill 7) stipulated that “certain hospitalized patients can be moved, without their consent, to long- term care homes not of their choosing, within a stated distance.”
While the Canadian government advised that there were risks of serious side effects connected with taking the COVID-19 vaccine, the takeaway message was that the risk was low and that these were rare occurrences. In 2020, then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the government would financially support those who had been critically impacted or experienced life-changing effects of the vaccine; the consulting firm Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton was hired to administer claims and renumeration under the Vaccine Injury Support System (VISP) for all of Canada excepting Quebec. The VISP program would be run by Oxaro Inc., a separate legal entity.
As stated on the VISP website, “the purpose of the VISP program is to ensure that all people in Canada who have experienced a serious and permanent injury as a result of receiving a Health Canada-authorized vaccine, administered in Canada on or after December 8, 2020, have fair and timely access to financial support.”1 Instead, the program has been and continues to be lambasted by critics and applicants alike for the ridiculously long time applicants must wait to have their cases looked at, never mind assessed and approved for payouts.
Jasmine Daya of Jasmine Daya & Company, a civil litigation firm specializing in personal injury law, is no stranger to the challenges of handling appeals to the VISP. One of the program’s vocal critics, Daya expresses utter frustration and empathy for those claimants who have been seriously impacted and what feels like being subsequently kicked to the curb.
“I advocated for this program before it even existed,” Daya says, and she felt that protections would be needed because drug manufacturers had immunity.
In fact, Daya said that she referred people who originally contacted her about vaccine-related issues to the VISP program. But eventually these same people contacted Daya again, saying that their claim had been denied, which she couldn’t understand.
“We are not talking about sore arms here; we are talking about debilitating injuries that render you incapable of performing day-to-day activities such as working and caring for your family and yourself,” Daya says. “It is horrific. And when I looked at some of my clients’ claims that had been denied, they came from a board that comprised doctors whose names were redacted. There was no information on their qualifications, their training, or whether they are even in Canada. The entire system is atrocious — honestly, based on how the program was awarded and how it has been administered, I think it is a sham.”
“WHEN I LOOKED AT SOME OF MY CLIENTS’ CLAIMS THAT HAD BEEN DENIED, THEY CAME FROM A BOARD THAT COMPRISED DOCTORS WHOSE NAMES WERE REDACTED.”
Indeed, a July 2, 2025, Global News article written by Andrew McIntosh and Carolyn Jarvis in which Pollock is one of the VISP claimants profiled blows the lid off what was going on behind the scenes of what was supposed to be a client-centric assistance program funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).2
According to the article, the VISP facilitator, Oxaro Inc., received $50.6 million in taxpayer money, of which $33.7 million went to administrative costs. However, in an email exchange, a VISP spokesperson cites different numbers. “Oxaro originally received $32.3 million to administer the program for a period of 5 years and to provide financial support to approved claimants. There have been over 250 claims approved and approximately 1,450 in the queue for medical board review,” the spokesperson writes. According to VISP, a total of $18,140,998 in indemnities has been paid out to claimants from the inception of the program on June 1, 2021, until June 1, 2025.3
What is shocking is how profound the underestimation of VISP claims would be, which soared from what was predicted to be 40 cases per year the currently available number of 3,000 applications filed.
“The ‘40 cases per year’ was in the original PHAC’s estimates in the bidding documents based on the historical data from the Quebec program and adapted to Canada’s population,” the VISP spokesperson explains. “In the early days of the program the projections were increased to 400 cases for year 1 and 40 cases for each of the subsequent years, for a total of 560 over five years. As the program was set up to administer 560 claims, the biggest challenge has been to constantly adapt to the significant increase in the volume of applications. Oxaro has worked collaboratively with PHAC to evaluate how the program can remain agile to handle the workload on hand while respecting budget requirements.”
While VISP states that they have a feedback line to “handle issues and complaints, and through investigations we have found historically that 97% of escalations and complaints have been deemed to be within service standards,” Pollock states that, along with having a significant number of different people working on her claim and although she’d sent all of her documentation by registered mail, “apparently it was lost or misplaced.”
If you are semi-paralyzed, unable to work, with a family to support and escalating medical costs, a wait of three months to get an initial reply on your claim — let alone a payment schedule (VISP’s website states that they aim to contact claimants quarterly) — is inexcusable.
Firm in her belief that it was the Moderna vaccine that caused her to become an incomplete quadriplegic (she has use of her arms), Pollock had her lawyers file a $45 million lawsuit against Moderna in February of 2024 that seeks compensation for physical, emotional, and psychological damages, along with loss of past and future income, future cost of care, pain and suffering, as well as aggravated and punitive damages.
Although thanks to the generosity of donors from around the world $150,000 has been raised for Pollock (now being held in a corporation managed by an accountant and lawyer), allowing her to purchase a specialized service dog and a wheelchair-accessible vehicle, as well as to cover essential medical expenses such as rehabilitation and physio, she says donations are dwindling while other life expenses continue to arise.
“I need physiotherapy, which costs $300 a week to keep me going. I am alone most of the day and at night I am constantly awake in pain, which at times makes me feel that the only option I may eventually have will be assisted dying,” Pollock says.
To take or not to take the COVID-19 vaccine was a contentious issue from the beginning. The “yes” versus the “no” fractured friendships and caused rifts both at home and in the workplace.
Dean Rainey, founder of Rainey Media, a creative agency and production house, was far from being an anti-vaxxer when he met Michael Oesch, a fellow filmmaker, who, along with Rainey, lives in Waterford, a small community of 3,000 people in southwestern Ontario.
Although they were not close friends, Rainey kept himself updated on Oesch’s projects through social media. However, Rainey began noticing that the tone of Oesch’s social media posts sounded off, and then one day Oesch reached out to Rainey, sharing his suspicion that he had a vaccine injury, citing the same diagnosis — transverse myelitis — as Pollock’s.
“I know Michael was pro-vaccine when they first came out,” Rainey says. “But then he asked if I’d make a documentary that shared his story about becoming paralyzed — his legs aren’t functional and his fingers are barely operational — shortly after receiving a COVID-19 booster shot.”
It is a harrowing, unbearable situation for the 58-year-old Oesch, a man who one year walked all the way from Toronto to the East Coast and another year from Toronto to the West Coast but now languishes in a long-term care facility.
Rainey understood the schisms of thinking and the stigma of pushing back against the COVID-19 vaccine, but he nevertheless decided to move forward with the documentary Why Can’t We Talk About This? “My story angle became ‘Why the hell aren’t we talking about the situation?’” Rainey says. “Michael and I wanted to ask questions as to why some things just didn’t make sense. But I was met by a complete double-down pushback — a wall of silence.”
The pushback came from all sides. Rainey was accused in Facebook groups of being a grifter, an antivaxxer, a member of the far right, and several movie theatres and rental spaces refused to allow Rainey to show his documentary at their venues.
With all the contentious debates around the COVID-19 vaccines, it is critical to know all the facts and the impacts caused by the vaccine. According to Health Canada’s website, 105,016,456 COVID-19 vaccines were administered in Canada up to and including December 3, 2023. A total of 58,712 total adverse events following immunization were reported, which represents .056 per cent of all doses administered.4
But for people like Pollock, whose life was shattered on every conceivable level, facts and statistics mean nothing when they butt up against a life sentence of devastating and debilitating realities that they believe are a result of the vaccine injuries that make them part of that .056 per cent.
Former physician Christopher Shoemaker, who says he lost his licence to practice medicine in Ontario because he “dared to speak out about COVID-19 vaccine harms” and because of his statement that “Ivermectin saves lives,” says that he is driven by scientific facts. He also states that he knows that the VAERS statistics (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a surveillance system that detects adverse patterns or signals) define the number of reported vaccine injuries as being hundreds of times lower than stated.
“Six-month-olds, twelve- year-olds, thirty-year-olds are continuing to die and be disabled because they are being given these toxic jabs,” Shoemaker says. It is important to state that Shoemaker is not against all vaccines, rather that he is specifically talking about the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It is not a vaccine, it never was. It is the worst immune repetitive toxin that we have ever put in our body. The United States military calls the vaccine an emergency counter-measure,” Shoemaker says. “Your body detects anything that is not of you immunologically, and it wants to fight it as it is genetically not the same as you. We were told that there was only mRNA in the vaccines but there is DNA in them as well, which can last forever in your body, assimilating into multiple organs and cells. This sets off a firestorm that mercilessly attacks trillions of cells in your body, including those of Kayla’s spinal cord.”
And while it has not been a pleasant situation financially since he lost his medical licence two and a half years ago, Shoemaker says he has seen so many tragedies like Pollock’s that he felt compelled to support her and others in her position.
It is the day-to-day intricacies of these challenges that are hard for any of us to imagine. Maryam, a woman who has been one of Pollock’s caregivers for the past two years and is used to working with people with disabilities and brain injuries, is deeply touched and saddened by Pollock’s struggles.
“When I first began working with Kayla about two years ago, she was more hopeful and she was stronger. But now she is experiencing more pain, both from a fall that she had a couple of months ago and also from the spasms she has, which interrupt her sleep,” Maryam says. “It is a very hard situation for someone so young and someone who was so active previously. It causes a lot of mental anguish for Kayla.”
Maryam’s two-hour morning visits include helping Pollock get out of bed, get dressed and transfer to her wheelchair, along with light household tasks.
“I use a transfer board to move Kayla from the bed to her chair as she can’t help with the process at all,” Maryam says. “If no one goes in to help her, Kayla is stuck in bed all day.”
Afternoon visits, which are only one hour, are when Maryam usually cooks dinner for Pollock. “You have to work fast to get everything done,” she says. “And while it is hard for all of our clients, it is especially hard for Kayla because it happened to her all of a sudden, and she is so young.”
Maryam describes Pollock’s connection with her son Mason as very strong, and says that when Mason is with his mom Pollock takes advantage of every single second.
“Kayla doesn’t complain, she tries to be very strong,” Maryam says. “But I can see she is in a lot of pain. It is hard on Kayla mentally, too; she is a very social person, but she is alone most of the day. It is a depressing situation. Kayla has a very kind heart and one of her biggest wishes is to help other disabled people in her same situation. Yet sometimes I think that Kayla’s caregivers are the only people she sees.”
For some, choosing to get vaccinated was an easy decision. For others who agreed, but unwillingly, and were tragically impacted, it has been a very tough pill to swallow.
And while much of the world has seemingly moved on from the COVID-19 pandemic, Pollock hasn’t and won’t. Period.
For a young mother still in her 30s who only gets to see her much-loved son every other weekend, it is a crushing and sometimes hopeless existence, one that came on both suddenly and completely unexpectedly. Often alone during the day, requiring expensive and highly needed medical services, Pollock spends a lot of her time worrying about how she is going to pay for it all — pay for the right to both spoil her son and live the life she’s been dealt, pay the cost despite having done her due diligence at a time when the world was compromised.
Moderna has not filed a statement of defense and the allegations in Pollock’s lawsuit against Moderna have not been tested in a court of law.
To learn how you can donate to support Kayla’s legal battle for health care justice visit
www.opkayla.ca/donate
INTERVIEW BY MARC CASTALDO
REFERENCES
1. Vaccine Injury Support Program, Home page, VaccineInjurySupport.ca, https://www.vaccineinjurysupport.ca.
2. Andrew McIntosh and Carolyn Jarvis, “COVID-19 vaccine injury program VISP, Oxxaro workplace, PHAC issues,” Global News, July 2, 2025, https://globalnews. globalnews.ca/news/11247648/covid-vaccine-injury- program-visp-oxxaro-workplace-phac-2/.
3. Vaccine Injury Support Program, Program statistics, VaccineInjurySupport.ca, https://vaccineinjurysupport.ca.
4. “COVID-19 vaccination: Doses administered,” Canada.ca, https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-administration/
