Python3 ValueError: Invalid initialization option when using requests package - python-3.x

Question

I have stumbled upon an error which I could not resolve. When I ran my python code, this error occurs and it only happens when I am making an API call using the requests package.
Code calling the API:
def getAccs(id):
accountid = ''
url = "{}/{}".format(acc_api, id)
req = requests.get(url, headers=head)
result = json.loads(req.text)
if result['id'] is None:
# Fetches accountid from another api call after updating
accountid = updateCorp(result['name'], id)
else:
accountid = result['id']
return accountid
if __name__ == "__main__":
### Get data from appSettings.json
with open('appSettingsStg.json') as app:
data = json.load(app)
acc_api = data['Urls']['Accounts']
# Header
head = {
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.122 Safari/537.36",
"Content-Type": "application/json"
}
Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "insert.py", line 313, in <module>
acc.append(res)
File "insert.py", line 102, in getAccs
req = requests.get(url, headers=head)
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/api.py", line 76, in get
return request('get', url, params=params, **kwargs)
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/api.py", line 61, in request
return session.request(method=method, url=url, **kwargs)
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/sessions.py", line 530, in request
resp = self.send(prep, **send_kwargs)
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/sessions.py", line 685, in send
r.content
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/models.py", line 829, in content
self._content = b''.join(self.iter_content(CONTENT_CHUNK_SIZE)) or b''
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/models.py", line 751, in generate
for chunk in self.raw.stream(chunk_size, decode_content=True):
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/urllib3/response.py", line 571, in stream
for line in self.read_chunked(amt, decode_content=decode_content):
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/urllib3/response.py", line 738, in read_chunked
self._init_decoder()
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/urllib3/response.py", line 376, in _init_decoder
self._decoder = _get_decoder(content_encoding)
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/urllib3/response.py", line 147, in _get_decoder
return GzipDecoder()
File "/home/dev/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/urllib3/response.py", line 74, in __init__
self._obj = zlib.decompressobj(16 + zlib.MAX_WBITS)
ValueError: Invalid initialization option
Some things I have tried
Importing zlib and urllib3 (As mentioned in this post)
Upgrading requests package (v2.24.0 as of 25/08/2020)
Reinstalling requests and urllib3 (Didnt work but I thought it was at least worth a try)
Any advice is much appreciated !