An Idaho man who received a COVID-19 vaccine when his employer “strongly implied” he should get the shot was left paralyzed 10 days later from a blood clot.
Doug Cameron, who previously avoided getting a COVID-19 vaccine, was 64 and healthy when he received his first and only Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine on April 5, 2021.
He was a manager at TLK Dairy Farms in Mountain Home, Idaho, where he had worked for 15 years.
COVID-19 vaccines had been available for months at local pharmacies when TLK Dairy Farms hosted an on-site vaccination clinic to encourage vaccination.
“They were seeing that a lot of people weren’t getting the shot, and they decided to bring the shot to the farm,” Cameron told The Defender. His company’s leadership team didn’t mandate that he get the shot. “They just strongly implied” that they expected it, he said.
Cameron said the “intimidation” to get a COVID-19 shot “was extremely strong all the way around” for him and his co-workers.
“People can deny it all they want,” he said, “but the fact of the matter is that if they had never brought it and never pushed it on people, I know a lot of people would’ve never got it — I am one of those people.”
Cameron told them he didn’t want a COVID-19 shot. “They said, ‘Well, you’re a manager and it’d be good if your name was first on the list of people’” who signed up to receive a shot.
Cameron said, “Well, OK,” and got the shot. He sat for 15 minutes as instructed by the clinic workers, then hopped back in his pickup truck to continue working around the 10,000-acre farm.
That was Monday. The next day, he didn’t feel quite right. His hips hurt a lot. Sitting or lying down was uncomfortable. “That just kept getting worse,” he said.
More symptoms occurred, including urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction. Cameron wanted to finish his workweek. He told his wife, Carla, he would go to a clinic on Saturday to get checked out.
Hellbound and Down 