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United States diplomats and intelligence officers said to be suffering from the mysterious Havana Syndrome will receive six-figure payouts from the federal government, it has been revealed.
The payouts for the stricken officials, ordered by the Biden Administration will range between $100,000 and $200,000 to each recipient, according to a Washington Post report that outlined the compensation plan.
Symptoms for the mysterious condition – which first surfaced among staffers at the US embassy in Havana in 2016 and has since afflicted hundreds of Americans around the world – include headaches, tinnitus, memory loss and nausea.
The vast majority of those stricken have been US diplomats, spies, and other officials employed by the government – spurring many to believe the disease is the work of a foreign entity, putting further pressure on the government to address the surge.
With that said, the payment scheme comes as the result of a six-year effort by Congress to help address the rash of cases – which the government has labeled Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHIs.
The syndrome first surfaced at the US embassy in Havana, when government employees suddenly found themselves afflicted with the mysterious malady
Late last year, President Joe Biden took the first steps to creating a compensation plan for current and former officials suffering from the mysterious illness, signing into law a bill dubbed the Havana Act.
The guidance allowed diplomats and other federal officials suffering from traumatic neurological or brain injuries to be compensated by the government agencies such as the State Department and the CIA.
The six-figure payouts come as the culmination of that law – and will go to those determined to have suffered the most significant setbacks, such as job loss or career derailment, as a result of the illness.
The news likely comes as a welcome reprieve for sufferers like Tina Onefur, Kate Husband, and Husband’s partner Doug Ferguson, all former workers at the US embassy in Havana.
All three started to experience symptoms synonymous with the disease shortly after it surfaced in the State Department building in late 2016.
Husband, who was forced to retire from the State Department after she and her partner fell ill with the disease in the winter of 2016, suffered from violent bouts of nausea, and a fogginess that makes even the most basic tasks difficult.
After experiencing those symptoms in the coming months, the couple was later examined by neurologists at the University of Pennsylvania.
In early 2017, Ferguson – whose symptoms were markedly more mild than Husband’s – was cleared to go back to work, but Husband was found to have experienced brain damage as a result of the illness.
Husband told Mitchell that during the diagnosis, a doctor told her, after analyzing scans of her brain, ‘it’s like you aged 20, 25 years all at once.’
She was then forced to retire from her work for the State Department later that year, on the grounds of a medical disability.
Both say they still experience symptoms to this day.
‘I have verified physical injuries,’ Husband asserted in an interview with NBC late last year.
‘I spent about nine months trying to do my old job – little pieces of it a few hours a day,’ Husband, who worked as a diplomat, said, visibly emotional. ‘I feel sick all the time.’
Ferguson further insisted: ‘I want the viewers to understand that this is real.
‘This happened. This is happening.’
Onefur, meanwhile, a career foreign service officer who was stricken with symptoms while stationed at the embassy at the time, is still employed by the state department – but can now only work two hours a day, from home, due to doctor-diagnosed brain damage.
She says she was washing dishes one night in March 2017 at her home in Havana when she suddenly found herself overcome with pain.
‘The kids were upstairs playing, and I was standing at the kitchen window, and all of a sudden I felt like I was being struck with something.’
When asked what the sensation felt like, Onefur said the pain was like nothing she had ever felt before in her life, and explained, ‘It was gripping – it was like I’d been seized by some invisible hand, and I couldn’t move.’
When asked by NBC how her health is today, Onefur, choking back tears, said that her symptoms were still as strong and prevalent nearly five years later.
‘It’s not easy to talk about our health because it’s an invisible injury,’ Onefur said.
‘It’s four-and-a-half years of of excruciating headaches, it’s four-and-a-half years of stumbling losing my balance, four-and-a-half years of vision degradation,’ Onefur said, breaking down in tears.
‘People don’t understand what this kind of brain damage can do to you.’
‘I work two hours a day if I’m lucky, remotely, here in our house.’
The leading theory behind the cause of the suddenly surfaced syndrome starts with a device that scientists say Russia could have invented during the Cold War, which was later used to spy on US embassies by collecting data from laptops and cell phones.
However, experts now theorize that a hostile country – like Russia or China – may have turned this microwave technology into a weapon.
Both countries deny any involvement in any of the incidents relating to the mysterious syndrome.
Alleged Havana Syndrome attacks on American spies and diplomats continue to grow across the world
Following the original cluster of cases in Cuba, US diplomats and spies around the world have been struck by the strange affliction, which is characterized by the sudden onset of headaches, nausea, and vertigo, sometimes followed by lingering symptoms and documented brain injury.
The White House has only just recently taken measures to help Havana Syndrome sufferers, after previous president chalked up the emerging cases as mass psychosis.
This past week, President Biden took a different approach to dealing with the effects of the mysterious illness, and signed a new law into effect – the Havana Act – that will allow diplomats and other federal officials suffering from traumatic neurological or brain injuries to be compensated by the government.
According to the Biden Administration, this new program will foot the bill for medical costs dealing with conditions that the intelligence community has yet to figure out, and launched by assailants it may not yet be able to identify.
Sufferers will also be offered blood tests to try and establish a baseline, and see if there is any pattern in how the condition affects sufferers.
The emergence of the new program comes as hard evidence for the strange syndrome has been incredibly hard to come by – causing many to be skeptical.
One medical sociology expert, Dr Robert Bartholomew, is so convinced the illness is a case of mass delusion, he co-authored a book titled Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.
‘There is more evidence for Bigfoot than there is for Havana Syndrome,’ the US expatriate who is based at the University of Auckland, told Daily Mail Australia.
‘The evidence overwhelmingly points to mass hysteria, or as it is commonly referred to by scientists – mass psychogenic illness. Havana Syndrome is a result of incompetent government officials and bad science. I would go so far as to rename it Havana Syndrome Delusion – the absurd belief, in the wake of persistent evidence to the contrary, that diplomats are being targeted with an energy weapon.’
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