Virginia Fisher v. HHS - Influenza, Guillain-Barre syndrome and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (2025)

On October 23, 2024, Virginia Fisher, proceeding pro se, filed a petition alleging that an influenza vaccine administered on September 7, 2021, caused Guillain-Barre syndrome and later chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. The medical record described substantial pre-existing and intervening medical issues, including gastric bypass surgery earlier in 2021, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, hypertension, musculoskeletal complaints, and later COVID-19 infection.

In the weeks after vaccination, Ms. Fisher had right leg and knee complaints and then repeated emergency visits for nausea and vomiting.

In November 2021, she was hospitalized after weeks of gastrointestinal symptoms and about a week of diplopia and headache, with lower-extremity numbness and weakness developing during the admission. She tested positive for COVID-19.

Neurology suspected COVID-related GBS with cranial nerve involvement, lumbar puncture showed albuminocytologic dissociation, and she was treated with IVIG and then rehabilitation. Later records used CIDP diagnoses or considered other explanations including myasthenia gravis, nutritional neuropathy, hypothyroidism, and autoimmune disease.

Special Master Herbrina D.S. Young dismissed the petition as untimely.

During a September 2025 status conference, Ms. Fisher recalled nausea and vomiting beginning around a birthday event in mid-October 2021; the records also contained possible earlier October 2021 symptom references.

Even using the later recalled onset, the petition filed on October 23, 2024, was outside the Vaccine Act's 36-month limitations period. No compensation was awarded.