Boris Johnson’s government is insisting that people harmed by vaccine side-effects must prove they are at least 60 per cent disabled in order to receive compensation, capped at £120,000, according to reports.
168 people were believed to have suffered blood clots following vaccination as of last week, according to a report by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), with 32 of those afflicted dying.
So far, 43 applications for compensation have been made under an official damages scheme for people harmed by government-approved vaccinations — which also covers more established vaccines for diseases such as tuberculosis — according to figures disclosed to the Telegraph, but as of the time of publication no payments have been issued, and the government is insisting that applicants “will need to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that the vaccination caused [a] disability and be assessed as being 60 per cent disabled” before they are compensated.
The harsh stance has caused disquiet among backbenchers from Boris Johnson’s own party, with Sir Christopher Chope MP, for example, stating his belief that “The Government has a moral duty to compensate people who have suffered as a result of doing the right thing by the Government of being vaccinated.”
“They were being vaccinated for the public good — it is not as though they are jay-walking across the street at their own risk,” he pointed out.
“The Government needs to look at these cases and reduce the threshold. If it is left as it is it is going to bar a lot of deserving people from any compensation.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), led by Matt Hancock MP, issued a long and unhelpful statement quoted by the Telegraph, insisting that “Vaccines are safe, effective and already saving thousands of lives.”
“More than 32 million people have now received a first dose of the vaccine, and PHE [Pulic Health England] have estimated over 10,000 lives have been saved through the vaccine programme so far,” he said.
“All vaccines being used in the UK have undergone robust clinical trials and have met the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) strict standards of safety, effectiveness and quality,” the statement droned on, wholly irrelevantly for the statistically small number of people who have in fact suffered severe side-effects — in part because the MHRA failed to take notice of adverse reactions which other national regulators caught in a more timely manner.
“The vaccine damage payments scheme provides a financial safety net to help ease the burden on individuals who have, in extremely rare circumstances, experienced harm due to receiving a government-recommended vaccine for a listed disease,” the DHSC statement concluded — signally failing to address the justness of requiring those harmed to demonstrate they are 60 per cent disabled in order to benefit from that safety net.
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