Transcript of interview below.
Charlet Crichton returns to UK Column after her first interview to update us on what life is like nearly two years on from being injected with a ‘vaccine’ that would change her life forever. This is her honest, measured, eloquent and humble account of the nightmare she endures on a daily basis.
As of the date of publishing, no investigation, no support or answers have been given to Charlet or the other sufferers, over 800 of them, whom she supports via UK CV Family—the organisation that she and fellow co-founder, Caroline Pover, set up in order to support the growing number of vaccine-injured individuals in the UK. The vast range of serious adverse reactions, symptoms and diagnoses that each of them receive are simply too long to list. Charlet describes how she and her members laboriously navigate a huge tangled web of systems, which include multiple government departments and agencies, on top of having to research their own symptoms to search for appropriate experts, treatment and advice.
UK Column will continue to support UK CV Family and ensure that jab victims' story is not forgotten or ignored. We will continue to support them in finding the answers and the help they need to move forward. For those who can and want to help, Charlet’s fundraising campaign is here.
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Debi Evans: My name’s Debi Evans, and I’m the nursing correspondent for UK Column. Today, although I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Charlet Chrichton back, I’m also very sad at having to welcome her back under these circumstances. For those of you that have been watching UK Column very diligently, as I know that many of you have, you’ll remember we’ve interviewed Charlet before [see first link above], and her colleague, Caroline Pover.
Charlet has suffered a vaccine injury as a result of the Covid-19 injection. She, and others, have gone to incredible lengths to start their own support group. In November 2021, the UK Covid Vaccine Family (UK CV Family) was founded by Caroline, and also by Charlet and others. Already, I think they have over 800 members. So I really am so, so happy to see Charlet today.
But before we hand over to Charlet, I just want to say get well soon to Caroline, who hasn’t been too well. We wish you a very very speedy recovery, Caroline.
So without further ado, Charlet, welcome. And my first question to you is, how are you?
Charlet Crichton: Hello, Debi. I’m getting by. That’s probably the best way to describe how I feel at the moment. I’m still undergoing a lot of tests. I still live my life day by day, hour by hour. So one minute my day can be going fairly OK, and the next minute I’m back in bed, or having to lie down or trying to compensate for some of the symptoms that I experience and have been experiencing now for nearly 20 months. So it’s very up and down.
Debi Evans: And, Charlet, I know—because we’ve spoken often—that you’re constantly having to navigate systems that you haven’t had to navigate before. Number one is the NHS: not just trying to find consultants and help and answers [there], but also having to navigate other systems like the Vaccine Damage Payment scheme, like the Department of Work and Pensions. And, you know, it’s bad enough for able-bodied people having to do all these things without feeling so ill on top of it. Give us an idea, and I know each day fluctuates for you, but what’s a kind of average Charlet day? What do you wake up to every morning?
Charlet Crichton: OK, so I can either sleep very, very well, or too well. So some days, I will sleep and not be able to wake up very well at all. I think my blood pressure drops very, very low at night. During the day, it can be very, very high, and at night it can go very, very low. It’s part of the autonomic nervous system damage that I appear to have. So I start the day either feeling very very tired still, or just completely like I haven’t slept at all; one or the other.
The minute I open my eyes, what I can guarantee is that my whole body feels like it’s buzzing. So we get these electric shocks and vibrations through our body, and that’s what I wake up to every morning. I’ve got tinnitus. It’s pulsatile tinnitus; I don’t know if you know much about that. It kind of goes in time with the beat of your heart. It almost sounds like something’s landing on your head constantly. So that’s what I wake up to.
If it’s a good day, I don’t feel nauseous. If it’s a bad day, I feel extremely nauseous as soon as I wake up. The only thing that stops that is mast cell stabilisers that I’m taking to dampen the immune system response in the gut. So that’s what I wake up to.
And then it takes me around an hour and a half to two hours, still, to be able to get out of bed, even to go to the loo, because I get Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. So if I get up too quickly in the morning, what happens is, the mechanisms that would normally pump the blood back from my feet to my heart and my brain aren’t working properly. So I get extremely dizzy. I become tachycardic [racing heart] very quickly, so my heart rate can shoot up to 150 or 160 quite quickly, and I start to feel like I’m going to faint. If it’s a really bad day, I do faint. So I have to take it very, very easy. I normally have a pint of electrolytes brought up to me in the morning and two cups of tea. That’s how much fluid I have to have before I can even get out of bed, just to kind of compensate for the autonomic nervous system dysfunction. So that’s the start of my day.
And then once I’m up, I literally transfer myself from my bedroom to my sofa, and that in itself is quite a lot of work because I’ve got to get dressed, and that tires me out. And any little thing that I want to do, even just making a cup of tea, I have to sit down and rest in between and put my legs up. I’m currently talking to you lying on my bed, because I have to keep my feet up most of the day, otherwise I go very dizzy even sitting upright. So that’s how my day starts.
And then what normally happens is I check in with our support group, and I see what’s been going on overnight, if anyone’s got any problems, and talk to people, see what’s happening, what needs to be … who needs helping, really, because we quite often have a lot of members that feel worse during the evening and at nighttime. So, you know, I could wake up to a message saying that someone’s really been suffering overnight, or that they’ve been taken to hospital, or you know, they just need to talk to someone. So I check in with the support group.
And then we normally send e-mails. We’ve got emails that we have to check regularly. And as you know, we’ve had a campaign now for months, a political campaign, so we check on letters and things that are going in and out from MPs, and where that campaign’s running.
On top of that, I check in with the global support groups and see how they’re doing. There’s normally a few messages overnight from different support groups around the world telling us what’s going on with them. Any news that comes in about vaccine injury around the world, we share, so that’s quite important.
I don’t normally eat until about lunchtime, maybe a bit later, because of the nausea. The only way I can describe it is … is feeling like you’ve got the worst hangover in the world, for nearly two years. That’s the feeling that it is, every day. Depending on the severity, it can either leave you bed-bound or able to do a few things.
So I don’t eat until about lunchtime, because eating does actually make me feel worse. And I have to take medication before I eat, otherwise I react to the food. As soon as I eat, I become tachycardic. So that’s my lunchtime.
Then, after lunch, I check in with the group again. There’s work that always needs to be done with the support group. And then I have some dinner when Ian gets home. And I normally have a bath to try and relieve some of the nerve pain that I get that comes from my feet to my legs and my hands and arms. It’s a shooting nerve pain. It’s hard to describe; it’s not the normal type of nerve pain that you would imagine. It shoots up and down. So if I have a bath, it does relieve it for a little while. But a bath makes me tachycardic as well, so the heat dilates the blood vessels, and when I get out of the bath I then have to lay down for an hour. And by then, it’s normally about 6 pm, so I just go to bed, because there’s no point being up any more. So that’s my day, really.
Debi Evans: I mean, honestly, you know, Charlet, I think it’s really important for people listening and watching to realise that all of these conditions that you’re all suffering are extremely unstable and unpredictable. So you’re never going to know how you feel from one day to the next. And that is exactly how you’re living. And yet, for you, you’re not just having to deal with that, which is unthinkable and unimaginable, I don’t know how I would cope on a day-to-day basis feeling physically that ill, and with the psychological effects of the illness as well—and the frustrations, the anxiety, and the ripple effects that it brings to all of the families, but having to micromanage all of these systems and then run a support group.
And I think it’s really important that we tell people that you had an AstraZeneca injection, and you are now literally looking after over 800 people that have joined your group. And you are hearing the most traumatic stories. I know that, very sadly, you have lost one of the members of your group. Somebody committed suicide in August 2022. And I know that there are other people in your group that are struggling to make ends meet, because they’ve lost their jobs, their livelihoods, their businesses—and some may even be at risk of losing their homes.
And yet I know, Charlet, that you’re actually having to spend a huge amount of money to try and access any help for you and as other members are doing. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Charlet Crichton: Yes, so far I’ve spent just over £10,000 going to private consultants, having private tests, because the NHS pathway was too slow. My "urgent" referrals last year were three or three and a half months after it all started. So I wasn’t going to get an MRI [scan] until three months later, and I was going numb gradually from the feet up. And secondly, because I was treated quite poorly last year when I got admitted to hospital. I was treated quite poorly by a neurologist in the hospital.
And I just thought, "You know, I’ve got money. I’ve always been told by my family that your health is more important than money." And I just thought, "I’m going to spend my savings on my health"—which is what I have done. I’m completely broke now. And a lot of our members have done the same. So the ones that were fortunate enough to have savings have spent their savings on private appointments and tests and different consultants.
The ones that haven’t had any money, and haven’t had savings, some have still had to wait nearly a year to see a consultant, only to be told they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to help them. They’ll run a few tests, but that’s it. Vaccine damage is too new, and they don’t know what to do with people. And that’s one of the best-case scenarios.
The worst-case scenarios: an example recently—one of our members, she was having seizures. She was actually coughing up clots. She had clots coming out of her nose, and her hands were turning blue. She went to see her neurologist, and she had a seizure in his office. And he said that it was Functional Neurological Disorder, and [that] it wasn’t physiological, [that] it was a mental condition.
Later that evening, her husband sent me pictures of how she’d deteriorated. And I said, “Get her to hospital now”. They did. And she’s been diagnosed with pulmonary emboli on her lungs. She’s got pleurisy, pneumonia—she’s got multiple conditions that are life-threatening. The consultant that she eventually saw—privately, now—has said that if she hadn’t have gone to hospital, she wouldn’t be here by Christmas.
Debi Evans: Wow. I mean, just wow. There’s so much to unpack here, Charlet. But one thing that I want to go back to is the purpose of you setting up the group. And please, we need to remember this is an unfunded group: you don’t get funded by anybody, which I think, honestly, is absolutely shocking. So maybe at UK Column we can help you to raise more awareness, so that people realise that you are an unfunded group and that you’re getting very, very little support. And actually, what many of you need is psychological support, and support to be able to move forward.
But the whole purpose of you setting up the group wasn’t to apportion blame to anybody, was it? It wasn’t to get into any political wrangles, or any kind of debates; it was really just to say “Help! SOS! We are here. We are sick. It has happened after the injection. Now please help us and restore our lives back to what they were prior to us having the adverse reaction.”
Charlet, have you found it difficult to sort of stay away from the whole political arena? Because I know that there was an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) meeting with Sir Christopher Chope booked, and I think that was booked in September, but then the Queen died. And we had ... well, first of all there was a rail strike, which posed a lot of problems for people getting there, and then on top of that, the Queen died. So everything stopped.
Now, you’ve got another date for an All-Party Parliamentary Group—coming up this week, I believe—but I’m slightly concerned that the previous group was very much [something] that you’d had time to arrange, I think it was 60 people, 60 of your group that were going to attend, and plenty of people that were going to attend to support you as vaccine-injured.
However, now, because everything’s been stopped and started again, something’s been arranged at very short notice, with perhaps not you guys at the centre of attention. Can you tell us where you are with the latest All-Party Parliamentary Group and the amazing campaigning work that you’ve been doing with Sir Christopher Chope?
Charlet Crichton: Yes, of course. Back in—I think it was February this year, Caroline and I started thinking about a campaign. So Caroline spoke to Olivia Price. I don’t know if you know much about Olivia Price, but she spoke to her to see how she set up her campaign. Olivia Price was part of the overhaul of the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, so she actually campaigned twenty-odd years ago, I believe; well, that’s when she started. And she has an MBE. But if you search online for her, you won’t find much on her, funnily enough, but she’s an amazing woman.
So Caroline based a lot of our campaign on that. It comprised of writing to each member’s individual MP as a constituent—so not a template, not a leaflet, it was an individual letter written by Caroline. And these letters took around half an hour each time; very labour-intensive. We have another member that’s doing it with her, Brian, as well—Brian’s amazing.
So far, we’ve sent 216 letters to MPs individually, and we have 67 MPs now that are supportive of our cause and values. However, as you’ve rightly said, the APPG was set up for September, [but] it got postponed. In September, we had 70 members that were attending. We’d booked hotels, we had transport arranged, because obviously the train strike [was called] so we had to quickly rearrange transport, and the day before that, it all just came to a halt, obviously, because the Queen passed away.
So we were told it would be rearranged, so we took our foot off the pedal for a little while, because it’s very very hard work to organise 70 people to get that far. I mean some are coming from as far away as Scotland, Wales—you know, we’ve got a lot of travelling; very sick people, as you know, and still with unstable conditions.
So last Wednesday, I believe, or Thursday—it might have been Wednesday, actually—I got a letter from Sir Christopher Chope’s office with a new invitation for this Thursday [27 October]. It’s just been too short notice for us. We can’t get that many ill people in one place at that time, in this short amount of time. We do have things that we had ready in preparation for the original meeting.
However, this APPG looks completely focused on Aseem Malhotra’s new paper, which isn’t a bad thing per se, but it does take the focus off what vaccine injured people need—and people that are bereaved from the vaccine as well. We need to be put at the forefront of this. The question of safety is a bigger question, one that could have its own APPG altogether. And it deserves its own APPG.
However, our needs need to be at the forefront when looking at the other issues around support for vaccine-injured people and adverse reactions, in general, to vaccines. So I don’t think it will be quite as productive as we first thought it would be, However, like I said, our group is absolutely amazing. I do know there is another group out there called Vaccine, Injured, Bereaved UK, and they’re amazing too. And I’m sure that between us, we have enough supportive MPs that are willing to do something with us anyway. So we’re going along. We’ve probably got about fifteen of us going now (to the APPG), so a small number.
Debi Evans: We’ve spoken about the previous APPG, where there were [meant to be] literally 70 very, very sick—and, as you’ve quite rightly said just then, unstable—all of these people have different symptoms, they have different conditions, and they could react differently on any one day. So I said to you at the time, didn’t I, the closest hospital to the Palace of Westminster is St Thomas’. And if somebody were to suggest to empty two full acute wards of St Thomas’, and wheel [those patients] all across to the Palace of Westminster, you’d think that you’d lost your marbles, quite honestly. But that is indeed what was being planned. And of course, now you can’t plan that.
And, Charlet, you have gone to … I can’t begin to tell people the amount of hours, the amount of work, the amount of research and the amount of support that you give to other people. And the pack I know you’ve developed to give to people at the APPG with the aims, the symptoms, your wants, your needs, has been done so professionally with such diligence and research, it really … I have to say, it’s exemplary.
And, you know, one of these things is that every single one of you seems to have different symptoms, and this is why the doctors are scratching their heads and saying; "Well, it’s a bit of this, it’s a bit of that, but we can’t put our finger on it." How are people coping with that? And what is the significance, Charlet, of not having a definitive diagnosis—because nobody seems to quite know what label to attach to you? How does that affect you, in everyday life, to not have a diagnosis?
Charlet Crichton: Well as I say, I’ve spent a lot of money. So I say I’m fairly lucky that I’ve got multiple diagnoses, including adverse reactions to a Covid vaccine [admitted] on my medical records, and an exemption now. However, I do know that for a lot of people in the support group, it’s awful to be this ill and not know why.
A lot of the things we’re finding is wrong with people are very specialised conditions. Things like CIDP, which is Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy; it’s very specialised. You know, we’ve got people with dysautonomia—which is when the autonomic nervous system is damaged—and gastroparesis. I mean, I’d never heard of gastroparesis until I started this support group.
And we have members whose nerves to their stomach aren’t working properly, so they have to be tube-fed. It's almost a paralysis of the stomach muscles. Neurogenic bladder: people’s bladders don’t work any more because the nerves are not working and damaged. Myocarditis, pericarditis, of course; a lot of cardiac arrhrythmias. Unfortunately, a lot of strokes and heart attacks and things like that as well.
And small fibre neuropathy. I’d never heard of small fibre neuropathy before this, but that’s damage to the small nerve fibres—they’re the sensory nerves, and it can give you pain, like burning pain, so you feel like you’re sunburned all over; or tingling, extreme pins and needles, those sorts of things. And it means that you don’t sweat properly as well, because often the autonomic nerve fibres control your sweat and where you sweat, so you sweat in very odd patches. Sometimes, you don’t sweat at all, and sometimes too much. And it can affect your stomach as well, and the heart: small fibre neuropathy.
In other countries, such as America, they’re actually being diagnosed with small fibre neuropathy from the vaccine, and they’re getting treatment for it called IVIG. But in the UK, they don’t use IVIG for it; they just give pain relief. So there’s a lot of things, and diagnoses, that people are getting that are abnormal; they’re not ones you’ve heard of before.
And to get those diagnoses, you have to go to specialist consultants, you know. Your average neurologist might not have much knowledge of small fibre neuropathy or gastroparesis. And these are all specialists that you’ve got to hunt out and find, and talk to each other to try and find them [in order] to get these diagnoses, and have the money. An average appointment with a specialist costs between £250 to £500. And then, if they want you to have tests, you know, I was quoted £1,200 for one set of blood tests that someone wanted to run. So it all adds up.
And diagnoses mean a lot, because you imagine: one minute, you’re fit and healthy and life is normal, and the next minute you can’t get out of bed for months, you can’t look after your children, you can’t eat properly, you can’t sleep properly—that does a lot to your mental health if you don’t have a diagnosis, if people are telling you they can’t find anything wrong with you and don’t know what’s happening. So mentally, it has a big impact, actually having a diagnosis. It can really help people to have that.
Debi Evans: You raise such an interesting point there, and I think it’s really important that we all remember that all of you now, after two years of going through all of this nightmare, have all become experts by experience. You are the experts now.
What I want to explain to those of you listening is that there’s something called an ICD-11 code, and everybody with a vaccine injury is—from where I’m sitting anyway, Charlet, and we can talk about this—you’re effectively locked out of a system, or at least some of you are, many of you are. And I want to come on to the MHRA and the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme in a minute, but many of you are locked out because you simply don’t have a code.
For people that don’t know what ICD is, ICD is the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and related health problems. So you’ll often hear people mention ICD-10 or ICD-11, as we now have it. Now, this means that clinical terms are coded. So everything has got its own code, so that people can record it, they can analyse it, they can compare it. You look at mortality [and] morbidity statistics.
Now, what I found very interesting was that there is an ICD-11 code for "unvaccinated for Covid-19". So if you’re unvaccinated [and suffer health problems], you immediately get a code allocated to you, which is Z28.310. If you’re "partially vaccinated", you get a code as well, which is Z28.311. If you’ve got any reason for being "under-immunised", you get a further code, which is Z28.39. Now, these Z-codes are used for tracking.
What I want to explain to people is there is no code for "vaccine-injured". I know that’s one of the things, Charlet, that your group and you want to highlight to the APPG: that you don’t have a code, and as such, you’re locked out of a system, unable to get any help, especially from the NHS. Am I right in thinking that?
Charlet Crichton: Yes, I mean there’s no NICE [National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] guidelines for a vaccine adverse reaction. There’s no code. When you see a doctor or consultant, they will tap in what your diagnosis is and come up will a treatment plan, or come up with a way forward. With us, there’s nothing. So it’s managing symptoms only, and, like you say, it’s not recorded properly.
What we’re finding as well—I mean, I don’t know if any of your viewers have ever submitted a Yellow Card report, but a lot of the symptoms, they will put singularly on it. So for example, I could say that I’m "dizzy" as one of my symptoms, but if I said to you that I’m "so dizzy I haven’t been able to get out of bed for two months", that’s a different "dizzy" to just feeling a little bit dizzy. So the coding needs to be there for the safety signals to be available as well. But it’s not there.
Debi Evans: Well, you dovetailed that straight into the MHRA, which is where I want to go next, because you know that we’ve been campaigning for—well, for over 18 months now, nearly two years, for some answers from the MHRA. We’ve been obfuscated, stonewalled and ignored, although I have now had a complaint upheld by the MHRA—not to say that that helped.
The MHRA are not looking at the Yellow Cards as we believe they should be. I’m thinking that from [the perspective of] someone that submits a Yellow Card—and I haven’t myself, so [I'm saying] presumably—when you submit a Yellow Card, you think you’re going to get some kind of help. I mean, what is your expectation when you submit a Yellow Card, Charlet? What do people expect to happen after that, which now they’re finding isn’t happening? What do you need to happen?
Charlet Crichton: When I submitted my Yellow Card, I actually thought I’d get a knock at the door. I thought that someone would want to research why I’d had a reaction—and it was exactly the opposite. I got an e-mail back with a reference number, a "thank you for reporting", and that was that. Generally, that’s what happens. Very rarely—and I hate to use "rare", because they use [that word] against us all the time—but very rarely, one of our members will get an extra form to fill out, and we don’t quite know what that is. Typically, we’re told that if you suffer an adverse reaction, what you do is you submit a Yellow Card report. As if that’s going to fix everything, [as if] you’re going to get help.
But it’s not; it’s just a reporting system. Nothing else happens. And what we’ve found in the group is that some people’s Yellow Card reports go missing. We’ve now actually been talking to some of the American groups, who are finding their VAERS numbers are going missing as well. So their VAERS data is also going missing. When it’s queried, sometimes it reappears again. And sometimes, a little bit of extra information appears as well. We recently had one of our members ask for their Yellow Card information, and they got back a document with a little bit of extra annotation from AstraZeneca, which was … yeah[!]
Debi Evans: I can imagine that probably it was a bit shocking, because I know that we’ve discussed this before, and it seems as though information is being received by those submitting Yellow Cards that perhaps shouldn’t have been received. And actually, that brings me on, Charlet, because your adverse reaction is as a result of AstraZeneca. There are many with adverse reactions from Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax, and all of them. Have you had any contact with AstraZeneca? Or has anybody in your group had any kind of answers from AstraZeneca at all? Because I know that some people submit a report direct to the manufacturer, as well as through to the Yellow Card [system]. So what kind of contact and help and support and advice have you had from AstraZeneca?
Charlet Crichton: AstraZeneca haven’t contacted me at all. And as far as I’m aware, no-one in the group has been contacted directly, at the first point, by AstraZeneca. I contacted AstraZeneca at the same time as my Yellow Card report, and I reported that I’d had an adverse reaction. By law, I believe they’re obliged to collect that data and process it. So I reported everything that had happened to me, and I got a form back. They send you to an internal server at that point, and the form is on there. So you fill it out, and give them permission to talk to your GP [family doctor]. So I did this, and then several months later, I got a message back saying, "Sorry, we can’t get hold of your GP. We’ve tried. We can’t get hold of your GP."
So I left it for a bit, because it’s very difficult to do all this when you’re unwell. So I left it for a bit, but then I thought, "No, no, no. I’m not going to let that stay that way." So I e-mailed them again and I said, "Look, what’s happening here? Have you managed to get hold of my GP yet?" — "No, we’ll send you another form." OK, so I go back to their internal server, I fill out their form again, and I get exactly the same message back a few weeks later: "Sorry, we were unable to contact your GP." And by now, I’m talking to other people who are contacting AstraZeneca, and they’re getting the same message. So I’m thinking, I know GPs are quite hard to get hold of at the moment, but there are ways, you know. This has happened, I believe, four times now in my case.
Debi Evans: I mean, it’s unthinkable what you guys are all having to go through. As you know, on UK Column, we exposed Dame June Raine in a recent lecture, an homage to Sir Alasdair Breckenridge, where she actually—and she didn’t even let it slip, this wasn’t even a mistake that she made in saying something that perhaps she shouldn’t have done—she actually admitted that the MHRA were expecting 100,000 serious adverse reports as a result of the Covid-19 injection. 100,000.
But then she announced, [paraphrasing:] "Oh, but we [the MHRA] have [in reality] had over 400,000, so I can’t possibly allocate somebody to each of these reports." Although we know that Alison Cave, the Chief Safety Officer, has now admitted that apparently, there are 40 scientists looking at the Yellow Cards—which Baroness Cumberlege, who wrote the Do No Harm report seemed to indicate were going in the bin. So we’re not we’re not quite sure what’s going on with the Yellow Cards.
But what we do know is that they were expecting 100,000 serious adverse reactions. And I know I’ve asked Dame June Raine, and I know you and your group have asked Dame June Raine, [but] have you had any answers, Charlet, to the question that you posed?
And I would just like to give you a quick plug here, because you’ve written the most amazing articles for Conservative Woman, and I would say to everybody, go and have a look at Conservative Woman and the articles by Charlet about the fact that 800 people are being ignored, literally ignored, and her plea to Dame June Raine. So have you had an answer to [your question], "What mechanism is in place for the 100,000 serious adverse reports that you were expecting, Dame June Raine?"
Charlet Crichton: No, not really. In my first letter to June Raine herself, I even offered that our group work with the MHRA so that they can research us, study us, ask us where things have gone wrong so that they can improve it for the future for people. And that was completely ignored. I got a reply back from Rebecca in Customer Services from the MHRA, dated wrongly. So the e-mail I received was last week, but it was dated June, I believe. I don’t know why it was dated June, but that would seem that they’d sent it a few weeks after I’d written to June Raine, but I obviously only received it last week.
And the whole reply, which you can read in the article, is just telling me that I can report via the Yellow Card, that the Human Medicines Commission have got robust things in place for us, and blah, blah, blah, really. Nothing practical, nothing practical at all. I think the reason why I’m upset is because there we are, having gone through all of this, having had life-changing reactions, and all of our families being upturned overnight, and we’re offering to help the MHRA improve their services, and all we get back is a generic reply from someone in Customer Services. I don’t think it’s good enough.
Debi Evans: It’s certainly not good enough. And you know, it’s not just the MHRA that you seem to be having trouble getting any answers from, is it, Charlet? Because I know that we’ve both been very active in trying to locate the Patient Safety Commissioner. The Patient Safety Commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, was appointed as a result of the Cumberlege Report, Do No Harm, and she herself said that she found the report "traumatic", and having to listen to patients’ experiences going through adverse reactions was traumatic and harrowing. And [she said] that she was positioned there to do exactly what you want her to do, which is to listen to you, to listen, because clearly, the MHRA are just a shell organisation. Their conflicts of interest, we won’t even start to go into that, but their conflicts of interest are huge. But have you had any contact with the Patient Safety Commissioner—who was appointed, after all, back in July?
Charlet Crichton: No, no, we haven’t been approached by anyone from the Government.
Debi Evans: I think that pretty much says it all. And, you know, Charlet, I’m looking at the time, and I know that long interviews are not an option for you. I know we agreed to keep this as fairly brief as possible. So before I hand over to you for the last word—because I really do believe you need the last word—and [as an aside] to everybody listening, we need to keep the vaccine-injured right at the top of the news, because every single day I see something else that is just bringing you down to the bottom of the pile, even if it’s the MHRA now not publishing vaccine serious adverse reactions weekly data; they’re now publishing it monthly.
But you know, when you sent me your pack of information, a couple of things [leapt out at me]: well, all of it is amazing, I mean it’s really well produced, so congratulations and well done to everyone that’s done that, but I was struck by some of the comments that some of your group members made. And here’s just a couple to give people an idea of what you, as a vaccine-injured person, have to put up with everyday:
I feel like I’ve been robbed of myself, mentally and physically. I’ve struggled for the past 18 months. My world has got smaller. Not only has my health declined, but I’m also completely isolated.
Life is an uncontrollable descent, where I’m emotionally drained, physically exhausted, and financially broken with nowhere to turn.
I’ve spent £9,000 and counting on medical care. That doesn’t include all the private and NHS prescriptions, and I still feel like I’m dying everyday. I’ve been too unwell to fill out the forms for benefits.
Charlet, those are just three comments from three of your group. You have 800 [members]. I know that your time is precious, because you’re having to go to appointments, campaign, navigate political systems, and run a family and walk dogs as well. So for the fact that you have taken time to speak to UK Column, I’m incredibly grateful, because the information that you have and the work that you’re doing is simply phenomenal.
But I want to hand over to you, Charlet, for the last word, and to tell people and to ask people what your group needs and wants now. How can we help you today? And a message for everybody out there that’s listening; What can they do? And what message would you like to finish with? Charlet, thank you, and God bless to all of you.
Charlet Crichton: Thanks, Debi. What we really need is everyone to write to these people. So we need you all to pick up your pens and paper or e-mail and write to your MPs. Write to the MHRA. Write to all of these people that are failing us, because, as Debi says, there’s 800 people at least, that I know of, that are being failed.
And then secondly, just be kind. I think we’ve got in this mess because people are being unkind to each other. There may be a few people that are greedy and not very nice, but the majority of us are just trying to do the best in life, aren’t we? So just be kind to other people, and appreciate that their opinion might be different from yours, or it might be something that you’ve never experienced before, but that doesn’t mean you should dismiss them. So be kind.