Gareth Harris

I received the first three doses from October to November 1998, and the third dose was followed within three weeks by psoriasis, dry eyes eventually diagnosed as part of Sjogren’s Syndrome, and the early stages of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. The sixth shot in June 2000 was followed a little over three weeks later by autoimmune urethritis, arthritis, and gastrointestinal issues that sometimes involved blood. Other chronic symptoms appeared over the following years including renal inflammation, chronic bronchitis, eye and ear inflammation. It often seemed that an otherwise trivial infection morphed into chronic inflammation in the affected part of the body.

The cause of the illness was deemed a mystery until 2006 when I myself noticed the timing in relation to the shots. No doctor would discuss it.

The VHC at Portsmouth NH assessed me in 2007, and wrote an assessment in which it changed the date of my sixth shot and then claimed that the association to the illness was ‘unlikely due to timing’. It refused to correct the assessment in the face of full documentation, until a Senator’s office intervened after which it made a partial correction which claimed the vaccine to be a ‘possible’ cause of my illness, maintaining that the two rounds of autoimmune symptoms were unrelated to each other. Psoriasis followed by arthritis is classic psoriatic arthritis, dry eyes, fatigue, and arthritis are common to Sjogren’s Syndrome, and autoimmune urethritis shortly followed by arthritis is typical Reiter’s Syndrome. All of those diagnoses come under the same umbrella; but nothing would move the VHC to acknowledge the obvious truth.

The illness eventually became incapacitating. Due to the sheer lack of professionalism of the military doctors involved, combined with my then status as an activated reservist, my orders were terminated because of the illness but without disability procedures being followed. I spent more than a decade sleeping outdoors before the VA ran out of excuses for delaying and denying my claim, and I was eventually awarded 100% disability.