Actor breaks down over vaccine injury: ‘Easier to just die’

Australian actor and fitness model Barry Duffield became emotional during a recent interview when he revealed that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease following the COVID-19 injections.

Duffield, who is often chosen for roles due to his bodybuilder physique, rose to fame for his role in the hit show Spartacus. The actor’s nutritious and healthy lifestyle kept him occupied during lockdowns, when he would work out six days a week in his home gym, sometimes twice a day.

But Hollywood’s vaccine mandate did not spare the healthy. The 61-year-old actor, who says he had never been to the hospital, told FreeNZ’s Liz Gunn last month that he originally resisted the shots because he felt safe with a “98.4% chance of survival” from COVID-19. He also noted that most COVID deaths were among the elderly and infirm.

Nevertheless, Duffield was forced to take the injections. He “cruised through” his first shot.

Within a day after his second dose, Duffield was unable to rise from his seat. His legs filled up with fluid so that his skin puffed over his socks. He developed a “block gag reflex” where air would become trapped underneath his diaphragm if he performed even light cardio, and he had to move in different positions to release the air. He suffered headaches, heart palpitations, and “crawling skin” — which he describes as a sensation of ants crawling underneath his back and arms — which continues to this day.

In the midst of these symptoms, Duffield barely noticed when the tremors started. At first one finger began shaking, which he thought was connected to a motocross accident he had been in previously. But then it spread to his other fingers and traveled up his arm. Physicians immediately diagnosed him with Parkinson’s.

The tremors persist to this day, and Duffield says that when he becomes emotional, his arm “flaps like a fish”. An intense dream will trigger wild movements that wake up his wife.

Doctors told Duffield that he was simply suffering a coincidence. The condition he developed within hours of the vaccine was likely caused by recreational drugs and steroids he took many years prior, they said. When he showed his doctor that the vaccine and his condition occurred within a day of each other, his doctor laughed him off.

“I really want to believe that they’re suppressed,” Duffield said of the doctors. But the gaslighting continued.

He went in for a cardiac MRI and they had to keep packing material in the machine with Duffield to keep his arm from moving.

“There was this really great nurse,” he recalled. “And she came up and she just held me. And she started talking to me and she said, ‘Is this Parkinson’s?’ And I said ‘No’. I told her my story and I said, ‘I can’t definitively say it is, which is really making me crazy because every time I talk to someone they’re trying to tell me that it’s not. That everything I’ve gone through is not what I think it is. That everything I’ve gone through is not attached to the timeline.’

“And she looked at me straight in the eye and she said, ‘Barry, I see hundreds of people coming through these doors that have exactly the same as you, so you’re not crazy’,” the actor said as he became emotional. 

“I just feel terrified, to tell you the truth,” he told Gunn as his breath caught. “Half of my day is in terror. And I don’t know what’s coming next.”

“Sometimes, thinking about it — it’d honestly be easier to just die,” he continued before wiping his eyes.

Duffield was prescribed Sinemet for the Parkinson’s, which came with dangerous side effects. One day, he failed to recognize himself. “Who the f*ck are you?” he asked himself in the mirror. He walked past his wife, took a Sinemet and two sleeping pills, hoping he would sleep it off.

He woke up fourteen hours later in the ICU and learned that he had swallowed the entire bottle of sleeping pills and tried to hang himself.

While he has since stopped taking Sinemet and refused antidepressants, Duffield is undergoing short-dose, long-term ivermectin treatment but won’t name his doctor. “They’ll probably try to jail them and me,” he said with a smirk.

But the psychological struggle is almost too much for him to bear. “I don’t see any fear in death. I think maybe if I got hit by a bus tomorrow it would be an end to the pain,” Duffield said as he wept.

The actor and screenwriter related his story in an emotional interview last year for Truth-a-Thon. A week later, he was dropped by his agent.