"I couldn't hear anything...it was horrendous"
Nurse showed "no interest" in my profound hearing loss 24 hours after jab
By Andy Smith
AT 44 years old, ‘Peter’ would have been considered a lower risk of suffering serious illness from Covid-19. But with plenty of stories about unjabbed people being denied the ability to travel, he felt pressured into getting the jab.
And just 24 hours after taking a taking a single dose of Pfizer-BioNTech, he started losing his hearing in both ears.
“You can’t balance, it scrambles your head, you can’t work properly, I was properly deaf,” he says. “It was like polystyrene was pumped in it. You feel out of it.”
In October last year, Peter received his first and only jab at a temporary walk-in vaccination centre in Leeds. He was given a leaflet about possible side-effects but no one discussed his medical history and whether taking it was appropriate. “They just whizz you through,” he says.
A day later, his hearing rapidly deteriorated.
“I had very limited hearing,” he says. “If you are right up against somebody’s face and you can see their mouths moving, you can catch a proportion of it. But I had a meeting and as soon as the guy moved half a foot away from where he’d been, I couldn’t hear anything. It was horrendous.”
A scientist friend told him he thought the jab had caused it and a private hearing test confirmed he had suffered “profound” hearing loss. The tester was shocked.
“There was no interest whatsoever”
Peter took the report to his GP surgery. But they did not connect the hearing loss with the jab. He had spoken on the phone to the doctor who was “too busy” to see him, instead saying a nurse could prescribe something.
“I took the hearing test to the NHS nurse the next day and she looked at it and said, ‘I don’t know what I am looking at’. There was no interest whatsoever.”
She gave him a prescription for some over-the-counter tablets, which Peter said were “useless”. Later, a pharmacist suggest he try a nasal decongestant spray. Needless to say, it had no effect on his hearing loss.
Peter was surprised that he was not referred to a specialist but, instead of being concerned that the jab may have caused his hearing loss, he was instead told by the nurse, ‘the side effects of not having the vaccine is death’.
He says the nurse made him feel like “a naughty schoolboy” when she looked at his records and pointed out that he had he only had one jab. It seems she totally forgot he had gone to see her because his hearing had gone a day after that one jab.
“The Yellow Card thing [MHRA adverse event reporting system], they didn’t take seriously at all. The nurse said ‘oh, well if you think it’s the vaccine you should fill in a Yellow Card’.
He says the nurse should have been asking more questions such as ‘when did it start’? “They should have been really trying to work out what was going on,” he says. “They didn’t have any interest. It’s very, very strange.”
Peter, like many others with similar stories, was working six days a week as a business consultant, on his feet most of the day, visiting sites, fit and with no health problems.
But his reason for taking the jab is a familiar tale. And once again, the Government do not come out of it with any degree of dignity.
“My parents are older and I travel for business and I was concerned that, if I was abroad and had to get back quickly, I needed the two vaccines to make the passage,” he says.
“To travel without the vaccine, you need extra tests, which is more money, plus they run out of these tests and you have to drive around everywhere. You are complicating your life.”
“I wouldn’t go near it if you paid me £100million”
The latest figures from the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for the Yellow Card show 624 reports of hearing loss concerning the Pfizer jab, 883 for the AstraZeneca and 100 for the Moderna.
Peter believes his hearing was 98 per cent gone until it suddenly came back in his left ear before Christmas. His right ear remains bad, with roughly 60 to 65 per cent of his hearing recovered.
Even now he is still suffering.
“I get thumping in my head every night and, when my hearing was really bad, walking was like I had hollow legs,” he says. “It was like a massive thumping coming up through the body giving me an underwater sensation in my head.”
As the Government rolls out its second jab to 12-15 year olds and continues its campaign for adults to ‘Get Boosted’ with a third, Peter has no intention of getting his second jab and accepts he will never be classed as ‘fully vaccinated’.
“I wouldn’t go near it,” he says. “I wouldn’t go near it if you paid me a hundred million pounds. I think it’s very dangerous stuff.”
Peter is not the real name of the man in this story, which is being kept confidential at his request.