Tim McAdams, a 59-year-old pilot, health enthusiast, husband and father was content with his job training pilots for Airbus Helicopters — a job he held for over a decade — until Airbus mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for its employees.

Up to that point, Tim and his wife Beth McAdams had approached the vaccine as a question of “risk management,” they told The Defender in an interview. Because Tim was fit, healthy and had no family history of illness, they didn’t think he needed to get the shot, despite repeated urging by Airbus.

“But when my employer mandated it, I thought, ‘Well now all of our retirement plans, everything could be in jeopardy if I have to try to find another job,’” Tim said.

He didn’t qualify for a medical exemption and had no religious beliefs that would exempt him, so they felt he had no choice.

Tim got his first Pfizer shot on Oct. 17, 2021, and the second on Nov. 7, 2021. Three weeks later he had two cerebellar strokes, a rare stroke in the cerebellum that accounts for only 1-4% of total strokes.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, dizzy, throwing up and with difficulty moving my legs. My wife took me to an urgent care facility and they diagnosed me with vertigo,” Tim said.

The hospital sent him home with drugs for nausea. The next night, he said, it happened again. They returned to urgent care.

Although the doctors still thought he was suffering from vertigo, they wanted to observe him overnight in the hospital. But, Tim said, “They only wanted to send me to a hospital within their hospital [system], which was a two-hour ambulance ride away,” even though there were approximately 15 hospitals closer to them in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, metroplex.

“Patient care was not the priority,” Beth said.

Beth and Tim returned home instead. But the next morning when the symptoms returned, they went by ambulance to the nearest hospital. Doctors there told Tim he had suffered two strokes, one on each side of his brain.

“Cerebellar strokes, in themselves, are very rare to begin with,” Beth said. “And then to have them bilaterally was very very strange. We were just shocked. I mean shocked is all I can remember,” because Tim was such a healthy person and had never had any health issues at all.

‘You’ll never ever get a doctor in this facility to admit the vaccine had anything to do with it’

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