Vaccination is a crucial part of a developed
country’s public health programme, and
never more so than during a global infectious
disease pandemic. By April 2023, 146 million
Covid vaccines had been administered1
in
England alone.
Most developed countries have a system of compensation
for injury caused by adverse reaction to a vaccine.2
The
UK scheme was established by the Vaccine Damage
Payment Act 1979 and is now administered by the NHS
Business Services Authority. Covid vaccines were added
to the scheme at the beginning of 2021, just before the
NHS national Covid vaccine programme was rolled out.
The UK scheme (covering all the devolved nations of the
UK) is a non-fault scheme. Applications can be submitted
either through a web portal or on a paper application.
Once an application is received the scheme collects in all
the GP and hospital medical records and the application
is assessed for entitlement by a GP. The scheme requires
the medical assessor to be satisfied, on the balance of
probability, that the applicant has a permanent physical
and/or psychological disablement which is broadly
equivalent to the level of disablement at the level of 60%
on the industrial injuries scale. The disablement therefore
must be significant, but perhaps not as significant as many
think. So, a person deaf in one ear with mild depression
as a result of a vaccine was deemed to have the requisite
level of disablement, albeit after a fight.
1 https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2023/05/09/vaccine-damagepayment-scheme-media-fact-sheet/
2 Looker & Kelly, 2011 – a review of international no-fault
compensation following adverse events attributed to vaccination
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21556305/
So how is the scheme dealing with the fallout
from the Covid vaccines?
The latest statistics3
show that as at 2nd April 2024, an
initial decision on entitlement had been notified on about
45% (4,996) of the 11,022 applications submitted so far. Of
those 4,996 applications, 492 applicants were accepted
to be disabled because of a Covid vaccine, but 324 were
not considered “severely” disabled and therefore received
no compensation. That left 168 which were accepted to
be “severely” disabled by a Covid vaccination and each
of those have received the fixed £120k compensation
payment. A total of £20,160,000 has been paid to date.
Of the 168 severely vaccine injured, 60 were fatalities.
I have acted in a number of these fatal cases and my
experience has been that in several cases no inquest and
sometimes not even a post-mortem was undertaken.
Deaths from thrombosis and thrombocytopenia due to the
Astra Zeneca Covid vaccine in the early part of 2021 were
wrongly considered (by doctors and medical examiners)
to be natural occurrences. It was only after these incidents
were formally recognised by the Medicines Healthcare
Regulatory Authority (the Regulator of UK Medicines) in
April 2021 that doctors, medical examiners, and Coroners
began to appreciate these were non-natural deaths
necessitating an inquest. I am continuing to get inquests
opened even now in 2024, as cases overlooked in the
early stages continue to emerge. As inquests from deaths
in 2021/22 continue to be opened even now, it is likely
that there will be more than 60 cases where there are
legitimate questions which arise as to whether a death
was non-natural and vaccine-related, which would justify
an inquest being opened.
According to the recent disclosure from the NHS Business
Services Authority, the type of adverse reactions which so
far have been accepted to have led to death or severe
disablement from Covid vaccination are:
3 Freedom of information disclosure released by the NHS Business
Services Authority http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/vdps_
figures_3?nocache=incoming-2638971#incoming-2638971
PETER TODD
SCOTT-MONCRIEFF & ASSOCIATES LTD
Covid vaccine injury
compensation update,
May 2024
20 Lawyers Service Newsletter | JUNE 2024
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