Dr Leigh Willoughby: Emancipation from Establishment Tyranny

In this episode of Profiles in Courage on the New Zealand Doc’s Substack channel, Dr Manny Garcia interviews Dr Leigh Willoughby, a UK trained consultant anaesthetist and former Head of Department at Gisborne Hospital. She reflects on her role in hospital preparedness during the early covid 19 response and shares her experience of a serious adverse reaction following her Pfizer vaccination, which resulted in a life threatening superior mesenteric vein thrombosis.

In this interview Dr Willoughby details the severity of her vaccine injury and the professional consequences that followed. After surviving a near fatal event and later recurrence, she found herself fighting on two fronts, with her ongoing health challenges and also a workplace environment that, she says offered little support. When she raised concerns about her own case and the wider issue of adverse event recognition, she describes being dismissed and undermined rather than heard.

After speaking openly about patient safety and her own vaccine injury, Dr Willoughby was let down by colleagues and faced the threat of professional consequences. In 2023, under mounting pressure, she left her career in anaesthesia.

Now running a functional medicine clinic in Gisborne, she reflects on the personal and professional cost of speaking out, the failures of the system she once trusted, and what it takes to put patients first.

This is a conversation about vaccine injury, medical ethics, institutional pressure, and what happens when a doctor speaks out.