Overcoming debilitating injuries from an adverse reaction after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine, Steve Wenger has become a powerful advocate for vaccine victims’ rights.
On May 18, 2021, Wenger received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Less than a month later, he entered the emergency room crawling on his hands and knees. He stayed there three and half months. For two of those months, he became a quadriplegic, ultimately diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), a severe form of Guillain-Barré syndrome attributed to the vaccine.
After leaving the hospital, “I had to relearn to walk I had to relearn to dress myself. I had to relearn to do everything that you do in your daily life," Wenger recalls. "It was a long brutal road.”
Shortly after leaving the hospital, Wenger became an advocate for those injured by Covid vaccines.
A face-to-face meeting with his member of Congress, Arizona Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko, led to a number of initiatives including a letter signed by eleven Republican congressmen calling for reforms in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) to include Covid-19 vaccines.
He is working to build a bipartisan coalition to address their needs. He directs those injured by Covid-19 vaccines to React19.org.The Countermeasure Injury Compensation Program CICP is designed to assist those injured by vaccines not yet recognized by the VICP, according to Wenger. However, the program has been highly unresponsive, Wenger describes, in which cases are determined by bureaucratic functionaries and victims are not allowed legal representation.
“They have paid like eight actual claims over the course of twenty years, out of 7,000,” Wenger says. “All these other claims have been denied. Now all of the sudden, the CICP is getting hit with hundreds of thousands of requests for these Covid vaccines.”
“My mission had become to get those Covid Vaccines moved over the the VICP, which is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” where “your issue actually goes before a judge and you can have a legal team to plead your case,” Wenger says. “And to get myself and everybody who has been affected by this the financial help they need.”
Another part of the problem, is fear among doctors to officially certify Covid vaccine injuries.
“My team of neurologists at Mayo Clinic was phenomenal. Those guys were straight up with me. They would say to my face, ‘What you are dealing with was definitely caused by the vaccine.” No question about it. Definitely caused by the vaccine — timeline, [inaudible], everything just tied back to my vaccine date,” Wenger recounts.
“Would they put that in writing and put their name on it?” Wenger continues, “Absolutely not.”
The result, in his experience, is that news stories on vaccine injuries simply don’t get published, because doctors are afraid to state publicly what they know and share in private. A result is that the public isn’t informed or aware of the risks.
As is typical for severely injured Covid vaccine victims, the financial effects also were devastating. Wenger's medical bills and sudden inability to work wiped out the family savings.
It has been “a financial wrecking ball,” Wenger says. “Our savings is gone. A year ago at this time, I had a ton of money in a bank account—an emergency fund. . . Thank God we had that, but that emergency fund is gone.”
Previously debt free except for mortgage and car payments, Wenger now describes tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and medical expenses owed.
Unable to afford the mortgage on their home, the Wenger’s uprooted and moved out of state, where his wife received a higher paying job as the sole earner.
Wenger counts himself lucky.
“I talk to a lot of vaccine injured and while what I went though was a horrific, miserable, nightmarish experience, I credit myself as being lucky, because I had a clear-cut diagnosis.”
For Wenger, the urgency of his work is a consequence of the enormity of the plight: "If you look at the VAERS data (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) for the last twenty years — every adverse event reporting for all those vaccines," Wenger observes, "add them all together and take that number — there were more reports of Covid vaccine adverse events reported in 2021 than every other vaccine for twenty prior years total."As with every Covid-19 vaccine victim interviewed by Broken Truth, Wenger’s injuries were anticipated by the CDC and FDA back in October 2020, well before release to the public. Guillain-Barré syndrome and CIDP figure prominently in a recovered slide from a presentation by Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, MD, the CDC’s Deputy Director of the Immunization Safety Office.
Screen shots from the FDA’s 161st meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, Oct. 22, 2020:
Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, Deputy Director of the Immunization Safety Office, CDC:
Dr. Steven Anderson, Director of the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology:
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