Workers Compensation settlement for airline pilot who suffered retinal detachment and atrial fibrillation after required to get COVID shots.
Our client is a commercial airline pilot. In 2021, like many people in the United States, his employer required him to get COVID shots starting in August. Our client had already gotten COVID in 2020 before any of these experimental injections were available. Like most people, he had a cold for a week and that was it. As part of being a pilot, the FAA required that he undergo a physical with heart monitoring at the beginning of 2021. It was normal.
Within less than a week after getting a second mandated COVID shot in the fall of 2021, his retina detached and a surgery was required to repair it.
When his heart was monitored for his annual FAA exam at the beginning of 2022, after two COVID shots, he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. This barred him from being allowed to fly and he missed a year of work. Because pilots cannot take certain medications that are usually prescribed for atrial fibrillation, he had to undergo radiofrequency nerve ablation to burn out suspect cells in his heart. After a year of missed work, he was cleared again to fly.
We had a hard time finding a medical expert willing to say that anything bad could come of COVID shots in the Chicago area - especially in 2022 and 2023. But by the end of 2023 there was an increasing amount of peer reviewed research published that established a strong association between getting these injections and development of both detached retinas and atrial fibrillation. We found a physician and professor on the faculty of Yale University who was engaged in researching COVID and they agreed to serve as a medical expert witness in our case. The employer hired their own witness from the Chicago area who had no active medical practice and mostly writes reports for lawyers for a living.
The matter was set to go to trial in 2025 and weeks beforehand the employer agreed to pay a settlement amount our client was happy to accept.
If you were required to get these shots by your employer, it is likely that the three-year statute of limitations under the Illinois Workers Compensation Act is expired already. However, if a condition does not first manifest itself until years after the injection (like cancer, for instance), you may still be entitled to file within a number of years after you first knew, or reasonably should have known, about the condition and its potential connection to those shots.
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