The family of an NHS pharmacist who took his own life after suffering paralysing complications from a COVID jab are calling for urgent reform of the government’s compensation scheme for vaccine damage.
John Cross was told by the official medical assessor for the scheme that the jab had caused his rare neurological effects, but that he wasn’t disabled enough for a payment.
Mr Cross was unable to move, blink or breathe after his first dose of the vaccine.
He spent seven months recovering in hospital but was left with chronic pain and numbness – and suffered several relapses.
After he was rejected by the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS), his mental health deteriorated and he took his own life.
Image: John Cross’s children. Pic: Family
Speaking exclusively to Sky News, Philip Cross, John’s youngest son, said the family would seek to overturn the judgment and force reform of the VDPS.
“We want some good out of this and to get the system changed in memory of dad.
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“You look at everything and it’s just wrong. It’s unjust.”
John was a staunch supporter of vaccination, eager to get his COVID jab to protect elderly relatives and help end the pandemic.
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But two weeks later, he suffered rapidly progressive paralysis that swept up his body.
He was admitted to intensive care where he was given a tracheostomy, a breathing tube in his neck. And nursing staff had to tape his eyes closed so he could sleep.
Image: John Cross and wife, Christine. Pic: Family
He slowly learned to eat, walk and talk again. But he never regained the mobility and fitness he had enjoyed before his illness.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy, nerve swelling that leads to a loss of strength or sensation.
Adam, John’s eldest son, said his father dreaded intensive dialysis-like treatment to remove rogue antibodies from his blood because it left him severely fatigued for days.
“I think he knew that without the treatment, this long-term condition would yo-yo, possibly for the rest of his life,” he said.
“And he’d have to deal with that. It’s devastating.”
John was urged by his doctors to submit a claim to the VDPS.
The scheme was set up in 1979 to make a one-off payment of £120,000 to people who have suffered rare, but significant, side effects to a range of vaccines.
But after a two-year delay, with only a review of his medical records and no face-to-face assessment, his claim was rejected.
His widow, Christine, said: “Nobody spoke to him. There was no personal contact, nothing. Just fill in this form and that was it.
Image: John Cross’s wife and children. Pic: Family
“I’m very angry. John went through enough with the illness and the recovery without going through the trauma of this bureaucracy.”
John began gathering medical evidence to have the judgment overturned.
But he became increasingly anxious and overwhelmed.
In October 2023, faced with more gruelling treatment for another flare-up, he took his own life.
Liz Whitehead, his daughter, said: “We’ve all had our vaccinations. And we continue to since we’ve lost dad.
“But now you start to question. If a rare, unusual thing were to take place, the system’s not got your back. It’s not there for you… is it worth the risk?”
Vaccination has long been seen as a social contract, with individuals taking the jab for the good of everyone.
But all vaccines have rare side effects, and the VDPS was designed to be a safety net for severe cases.
Under the VDPS, a medical examiner assesses patient records and testimony from doctors involved in the claimant’s care.
To qualify for payment, they must be deemed to be 60% disabled, a threshold with origins in compensation schemes for industrial injuries. Amputation below the knee would be sufficient for a payout.
Image: Peter Todd, the Cross family’s solicitor
But the Cross family’s solicitor, Peter Todd, of Scott-Moncrieff & Associates, said medical assessors struggle to make “apples and pears” comparisons with complex vaccine damage.
“The threshold is often misunderstood as being very high, akin to being totally paralysed,” he said.
“But it isn’t. It’s a much lower standard, and they have to take into account both the physical disablement and the psychological impact.”
Mr Todd has tracked applications to the VDPS.
Before the pandemic there were a few dozen a year.
But since the COVID vaccine rollout, 14,000 people have made claims, according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by Mr Todd to the NHS Business Services Authority.
Just over 6,000 have so far been notified of an outcome, with 180 people told they would be given a payment.
Another 350 people have been told that on the balance of probabilities the vaccine caused their complications, but that they didn’t meet the 60% disability threshold.
Mr Todd said people can struggle to explain the full impact of their vaccine damage on a complex form.
“There’s a real mismatch between what the claimant has understood about their condition and what the assessor is prepared to accept based purely on medical records that weren’t created for the purposes of this assessment,” he said.
“They rejected (John’s claim) in the most high-handed and unfair manner, which just broke him psychologically.”
The NHS Business Services Authority told Sky News that it did not comment on individual cases, but that it was in touch with the Cross family about their concerns over John’s assessment.
The Department of Health, which is responsible for the scheme, said the ongoing COVID Inquiry would investigate reform of the VDPS as part of its vaccination module starting in January next year.
In a statement, it said: “Assessments of VDPS claims are undertaken by qualified independent medical assessors, who use the medical records and information provided by the claimants’ healthcare providers to make their assessment.”
The Cross family are upset by the slow progress of the case.
“He was our dad, he was a really wonderful man,” said Liz.
“It’s a tragedy and the government needs to hear it. Don’t send me your condolences, don’t tell me how bad you feel for me or us.
“Do something.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
The Russian captain of the Solong container ship involved in the North Sea crash has been charged with gross negligence manslaughter.
Vladimir Motin, 59, of Primorsky, St Petersburg, has been remanded in police custody and is due to appear at Hull Magistrates Court on Saturday, Humberside Police said.
On Monday morning, about 13 miles off the coast of East Yorkshire, the Solong sailed into the US-registered oil tanker Stena Immaculate, which was carrying jet fuel for the US Navy.
One member of the Solong crew is presumed dead. He has been named by the Crown Prosecution Service as 38-year-old Filipino national Mark Angelo Pernia.
Image: The MV Solong cargo ship following Monday’s North Sea crash. Pic: AP
Five Russians had been on board the Solong, Russian state agency TASS quoted the Russian embassy in London as saying, Reuters reported.
In the immediate aftermath of the collision, dozens of people were forced to abandon the vessels as they caught fire.
The coastguard rescued 36 crew members after the alarm was raised at 9.48am on Monday.
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The Stena Immaculate, operated by US firm Crowley, was stationary and at anchor while waiting for a berth to become available at the Port of Killingholme, on the River Humber, when it was struck by the smaller Solong, causing huge fires and explosions – the smoke from which was visible from space.
The Solong had been sailing from Grangemouth in Scotland to Rotterdam in the Netherlands at the time.
It was initially feared it was carrying sodium cyanide but the German owner Ernst Russ said four containers on the vessel had previously been carrying the chemical.
Salvage companies boarded the two vessels on Thursday and were carrying out initial damage assessments. Small fires were still being reported on the Solong’s top deck, the coastguard said.
Image: The US oil tanker MV Stena Immaculate after the collision. Pic: PA
Police said extensive lines of inquiry were continuing but it was taking time given the vessels were still at sea and there were a large number of witnesses.
Frank Ferguson, from the CPS, said: “We have authorised Humberside Police to charge a Russian national in relation to a collision involving two vessels in the North Sea off the east coast of England.
“The Portuguese-registered cargo ship, the Solong, collided with the American-registered oil tanker, the Stena Immaculate, just before 10am on Monday, 10 March 2025.
“Filipino national Mark Angelo Pernia, 38, died.
“Vladimir Motin, 59, from St Petersburg, Russia, who was the vessel’s captain, is due to be charged with one count of gross negligence manslaughter.”
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
The last thing I was expecting to discover on the doorstep of a Falkirk house was a 70-year-old woman crying at the near 16% council tax rise she and tens of thousands of others face next month.
Falkirk is bracing for the UK’s biggest hike in bills as the local authority faces a crisis of costs.
One councillor responsible for the increases has called in the police after receiving beheading taunts and threats of violence.
The area is facing its most difficult period in its 30-year history, while residents feel fragile and fobbed off.
Councils oversee the running of schools and social care, maintaining roads and collecting bins. They take charge of housing, swimming pools and libraries. The list is endless.
But Britain’s local authorities are cash-strapped and there are questions about how they should be funded in the long term.
Sky News went inside one Falkirk street to get a snapshot of the mood – and it was bleak.
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Image: Catherine Mochar
We went door to door on Wilson Road and first stumbled across 70-year-old Catherine Mochar.
The unpaid carer was seemingly unaware of the upcoming changes to her bill and became visibly upset at the prospect of scraping together more cash in her already extremely stretched household budget.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said as her voice cracked.
Ms Mochar looks after her elderly sister and says her care package was revoked as the pensioner was deemed suitable to deal with the situation herself.
She says she is not entitled to a council tax exemption and worries about finding an extra 15.6%.
She said: “I am a pensioner. I don’t know where I am going to get it [the money] from. It is quite scary the thought of it.”
Image: Claire Hamilton and William Reid
Round the corner from Catherine’s house, we meet a family who feel like they are paying more and getting less.
Claire Hamilton and William Reid have a three-year-old son and regularly use the local foodbank to make ends meet.
“It is going to become a choice between heating the house or paying council tax. Or getting food in and paying the council tax,” Claire says.
“It is quite a jump for not a lot in return. The collections on the bins keep getting longer and longer.”
She continues: “You want to do the best by your child and obviously they are not aware of all these stresses going on in the background.”
Council tax differs across UK
A drop in the frequency of bin collections is a moan people across the UK share and feeds into the narrative surrounding local services.
Council tax rates have been frozen or capped for much of the last two decades in Scotland, but this year the Scottish government has granted local leaders the power to go their own way.
In England, a principle exists which usually prevents more than a 5% increase to council tax without a referendum, mostly to protect taxpayers from excessive increases.
It is thought the average increase in England will not surpass last year’s total of 5.1%. There are some exemptions including Bradford which is hiking costs by 10%.
But Falkirk surpasses everyone and is the UK’s most extreme case.
Image: Independent councillor Laura Murtagh
Independent councillor Laura Murtagh initiated the idea of the 15.6% increase which was eventually voted through by most of her colleagues.
Councillor behind 15.6% rise calls in police
She stresses anything less than the increase she proposed would have resulted in services, including education provision, being slashed.
But it has come at a personal cost.
Ms Murtagh, who stresses she does not want to incite a further pile-on, tells Sky News she has contacted police after threats of violence and taunts online depicting beheadings.
She said: “It has made me not want to go out. It has made me not want to go to events.
“I am having a conversation with the police. They are nasty threats. There are people who have said you could do with a kicking or you could do with more than that.
“People are sharing memes where they are doing beheading memes or whatever.”
Local leaders say their rates have been much lower than their neighbours for many years which is unsustainable as demand for services soars.
The leader of Falkirk Council, Cecil Meiklejohn, was asked by Sky News if she could justify the 15.6% rise.
She said: “It is quite a hike. We always knew council tax needed to go up.
“We know that we have to continue to deliver good quality services, and we can’t do that without increasing our revenue and the only way we have the opportunity to do that locally is by increasing council tax.”
She concluded: “We will work with people who are going to be impacted by the increase.”
Reform UK’s most senior woman has told Sky News the Rupert Lowe row “doesn’t look great” and she doesn’t “want to see it in the news any more days”.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who defected to Reform last year, accepted it was “clearly a big falling out” but suggested these spats do not always cut through to the public.
She insisted she was concentrating on winning as she looks to become the party’s first ever mayor in May.
In an interview with Sky News, Dame Andrea also spoke for the first time about her experience of domestic abuse, denying Reform has a “woman problem” but accepted “we need to start talking more about issues, what women are interested in”.
Having lost her seat as a Conservative in the 2024 election, Dame Andrea briefly quit politics only to return earlier this year as Reform’s newest recruit.
She is now standing as the party’s candidate to become the first Greater Lincolnshire mayor, in a race that psephologists think could be Reform’s best hope of turning itself from a party of protest into one that is governing.
That’s because Reform is on the march in Lincolnshire, which is a key battleground between the Conservatives and Reform in the local and mayoral elections in May.
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Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, took the Conservative seat of Boston and Skegness in the last election as Reform came second in a further two of the county’s eight constituencies.
Image: Dame Andrea spoke to Sky News’ Beth Rigby
This farming country has long been part of the patchwork of Conservative England and it is in these heartlands that Reform hopes it can land a significant blow to its political rivals in the coming weeks.
“It’s a worry,” admits one Labour insider who doesn’t much relish the prospect of having to deal with a newly minted Reform party mayor should Dame Andrea win in May against Labour candidate Jason Stockwood, the Conservative Rob Waltham and independent Marianne Overton.
There is also the Lincolnshire council race, which Reform is targeting. All 70 seats are up for grabs and the Conservatives, which have a 38-seat majority, are defending 53 seats. The only way is up for Reform here, while the Conservatives, who have held this council for 10 of the past 13 elections, are bracing for a drubbing.
Tories say Jenkyns is from Yorkshire
The Conservatives make the point that they have a “strong local candidate who is born and bred in Lincolnshire, whereas Dame Andrea is from Yorkshire” when I ask them about the race.
“We are fighting hard, we have a proven track record of delivery in charge of local services whereas Reform aren’t tried and tested,” the Conservatives said.
“And if they’re anything like Reform nationally, who don’t turn up on important votes, then they won’t show up for people locally.”
Dame Andrea is still based in Yorkshire where she used to be an MP, as this is where her son attends school. But she rents a place in Lincolnshire and has vowed to move to the county should she win the mayoralty.
She also points out that she grew up in Lincolnshire and was a local councillor before moving to Yorkshire after her shock victory over Ed Balls in the 2015 general election.
Image: Dame Andrea is hoping to become Reform’s first mayor
‘Fed up’ farmers eyeing Reform
When we meet her on the road in Lincolnshire, she takes us to meet some farmers whose livelihoods are under intense pressure – be it over local flooding and flood defences or changes to inheritance tax and farming subsidies that are affecting their farms.
There is little love for Labour in the gathering of farmers, who in the main seem to be lapsed Conservative voters that are now eyeing Reform, as a number of them tell me how they are fed up with how the Environment Agency and local politicians are running their area.
“We’re fed up with all of them,” said one farmer.
“We just want some action. As farmers we know drainage is so important, we just want to get it sorted.”
They are also alarmed and anxious about the inheritance tax changes introduced by Labour and are pressing for carve-outs for small farms handed down from generation to generation amid fears they will have to sell up to pay the inheritance tax bills.
But the troubles at the top of Reform hadn’t gone unnoticed by this group. Unprompted, one of the farmers raised the row between the suspended Reform MP Rupert Lowe and the party leadership, telling Dame Andrea that while he “really likes Reform” he doesn’t much like what he’s seeing at the moment.
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Reform UK row explained
‘Spat looks worse because Reform is small’
The farmer said: “I don’t follow politics avidly. But I just look and say [Rupert Lowe] is full of common sense and I really like him and I don’t know what’s happened, but it looks from outside [he has been] chucked under the bus.
“And I’m like, am I getting second thoughts about Reform? I don’t know what’s gone on, but it concerns me about what’s going on with Reform.”
Dame Andrea tries to downplay it and says the “spat” looks worse because it’s a smaller party.
“To me it’s about the movement, the right policies, to carry on. What is the alternative? This will blow over and Reform will keep getting strong,” she said.
Can Jenkyns and Farage co-exist?
Dame Andrea would clearly like the infighting to stop, but it raises questions for me about how she will fit into this very male-dominated party, in which all four MPs are male, with Dame Andrea the only senior woman beyond the former Conservative minister Ann Widdicombe.
She is, like Nigel Farage, a disrupter – Dame Andrea was one of the first Tories to call for Theresa May and Rishi Sunak to stand down, and a conviction politician who fervently backed Boris Johnson and Brexit.
If she does win this mayoral race she will be a big personality in Reform alongside Farage, which leaves me wondering if they can co-exist in a party already at war.
Image: Dame Andrea says she doesn’t think the party has a ‘woman problem’
Jenkyns was in an abusive relationship
Reform does struggle with female voters, with fewer women voting for the party against all age cohorts, young to old. Dame Andrea tells me she doesn’t think the party has a “woman problem”, but she does think it needs to talk about more issues that she thinks women are interested in, citing education, special educational needs and mental health.
When I raise the matter of violence against women and how the party has handled revelations that one of its own MPs was jailed in a youth detention centre as a teenager for assaulting his girlfriend, Dame Andrea reveals to me she has been in an abusive relationship.
“I know how it can break you. I know how you sort of start losing your identity. So I’ve been on that side,” she said.
“And I’ve also helped constituents to fight against this, so it matters, we need to do more in society because whether it’s men or women, one is too much in my view.”
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Out on the campaign trail, even in the Labour territory of Lincoln where Hamish Falconer is the local MP, Dame Andrea gets a warm welcome. She tells me she thinks she can win it: “I might be living in blind hope here. But I’ve got that feeling.”
This corner of England has become a test bed for Reform to see if it can turn from a party of protest into one that has a shot at governing in the form of a regional mayor.
If Reform can succeed in that – what might come next? It would be a remarkable comeback for Dame Andrea and a remarkable victory for Reform too.