by Sharon Rondeau
(Jun. 6, 2026) — On Tuesday, 39-year-old Canadian mother Kayla Pollock related the life-changing injury she sustained approximately six weeks after receiving a Moderna COVID-19 booster shot in 2022.
Titled “The Cost of Compliance” and introduced by Livio Sanchez, the two-hour program was made possible by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF) founded by internet entrepreneur Steve Kirsch.
After appearing on camera, Kirsch told Sanchez his right eye had just undergone surgery.
Since the surgery his vision has improved, he said, while indicating it is not perfect and likely will not be.
Since 2021 on his Substack, Kirsch has consistently questioned government narratives claiming the COVID-19 “vaccines” are “safe and effective” in light of the many reports of serious injuries and follow-on studies conducted by researchers and some governments around the world.
Kirsch has been highly critical of former NAIAD Director Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s managing of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as of Stanford University, which Kirsch accused of “spreading misinformation.”
Kirsch himself has been termed a “misinformation superspreader” stemming from his disagreement with public health authorities on the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines and vaccines in general.
Sanchez asked Kirsch about a recent email he sent to a professor at Stanford University asking for a “conversation” with “a panel between Stanford medicine professors and people who disagree with them so that the Stanford community could hear both sides of the issue.”
His request to Stanford, Kirsch said, stemmed from a reference Fauci reportedly made to “anti-vaxers.”
One such statement of Fauci’s appears in an undated interview with The Atlantic.
“How did they respond?” Sanchez asked.
“They ignored me, completely, just as you’d expect them to do,” Kirsch replied. “Anyone who challenges authority is ignored…They didn’t even give me the courtesy of a reply.”
“That’s why the VSRF continues to do what we do, because so few of us are talking…” Sanchez replied.
At that point Kayla was introduced, resulting in a three-way split screen for a short time. Sanchez acknowledged that due to her physical challenges, the interview hour was relatively late for her.
Sanchez read Kayla’s bio encompassing her injury and subsequent advocacy for the disabled.
Kirsch explained he learned of Kayla through her X posts (formerly Twitter). On her website she announced a lawsuit against Moderna demanding $45 million in damages.
She explained to Kirsch that as an “incomplete quadriplegic,” she has partial use of her hands and arms but is completely paralyzed below her chest.
Background
As a Type 1 diabetic, Kayla was considered high-risk for COVID-19 complications, she said. Consequently, to maintain her two jobs and be able to visit her ailing father in long-term care, she was required to be undergo daily testing and receive the vaccines.
She had no complications following her two initial Pfizer shots.
“We couldn’t travel; we couldn’t eat at restaurants,” she told Kirsch of the early days of the pandemic. “We had police that were allowed to arrest us in Ontario for having public gatherings with family, but meanwhile, our premier of Ontario was caught having a big Easter bash at his cottage with all his family while telling the police to — call the police on your neighbors if you saw them having gatherings.”
“I did not have any idea that being paralyzed from your vaccine would be a side effect,” she said of her compliance with the vaccine mandate. “It wasn’t listed, that’s for sure.”
“Paralyzed from the Neck Down”
After receiving the Moderna booster in early 2022, she said, she had “a few episodes within a few days” wherein she temporarily lost the use of her legs. “At first I’m thinking, ‘Well, maybe I have a nerve injury…'” she told Kirsch.
Her physician, she said, told her there was a two-year waiting period to get in to a neurologist due to the pandemic, and going to a hospital would be fruitless since she was still able to walk.
“A little while later…I woke up on February 22, 2022 paralyzed from the neck down completely,” she said.
At the time she did not suspect the Moderna shot was the cause, she said. “I thought it would be reversible…I get taken to the hospital by ambulance that day, and the first doctor comes in, and he takes the board off and the neck collar off, and he says, ‘Well, the good news is that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you; I think it’s all in your head, and I’m going to order a psych consult…”
Interpreting the doctor’s words as “not real,” Kayla was “put in the hallway” and overcome by sudden pain in her neck, she said, and she began screaming. “Then one of the nurses came over” with a bag containing morphine, she recalled. “Right away, I knew you do not give a psych patient morphine; you’d be giving them some kind of sedative or some sort of anti-psychotic; you wouldn’t give a psych patient morphine…’This isn’t adding up,’ she remembered thinking to herself.
From that point on, she said, she summoned her boyfriend, who recorded everything medical personnel said to her for the remainder of the visit.
An Admission — and Diagnosis
Later she was seen by another physician who offered tangible help to her, Kayla said. He asked for her consent to have an MRI done immediately and a radiologist acquaintance interpret them. “There were MRIs with and without contrast” which “took quite a long time,” Kayla said. After they were completed and read, the physician who ordered it told her, “I would say this is a direct result of your COVID vaccine,” Kayla said.
“It’s not unusual; it’s a rare diagnosis,” Kayla said he told her, of transverse myelitis, “but it is a known vaccine reaction.”
“Have you seen this before?” Kayla said she asked him. “Oh, many, many times,” he told her, which the ongoing recording captured.
According to a Health Canada webpage dated June 13, 2025, “serious” side effects from COVID-19 vaccination include “Bell’s Palsy,” “blood clots with low platelets,” “capillary leak syndrome,” “Guillain Barré syndrome,” and “myocarditis and pericarditis.”
A Nov. 4, 2025 webpage at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports “febrile seizures” and “myocarditis and periocarditis” as serious side effects from COVID-19 vaccination.
“Not Infrequent”
A January 2026 paper in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders states that transverse myelitis occurring following COVID-19 infection was observed in a study as producing “more severe disability than post-COVID-19 vaccination transverse myelitis (PVTM) and idiopathic transverse myelitis (ITM) at onset and follow-up.”
However, a 2022 paper published by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that “Transverse myelitis as a complication of SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations is not infrequent. It has been previously reported in at least 16 patients as a complication of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccination (Table 1). Age of these ranged between 23 and 85y. Eight were males. Latency between vaccination and onset of myelitis ranged from 1d to 21d (Table 1).”
Further, the author wrote, “…In a recent review about the neurological side effects of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination almost 4000 patients with neurological complications have been reported as per the end of September 2021.19“
See the interview here.