People seriously harmed by Covid vaccines faced an “inadequate and inefficient” process to obtain government benefits, with many turned away and others waiting years for a decision, the Covid report has found. research.
The Vaccine Injury Payment Scheme offers a one-off payment of £120,000 to people who have such severe side effects from the vaccines that they are at least 60% disabled. But people affected by vaccine injuries told the survey they were not receiving the help and financial support they deserved.
“The system is inadequate and inefficient. It offers too little, too late, too little,” says Kate Scott of Vaccine Injured and Bereaved UK. “There should be a fair compensation scheme, and the government should have taken that into account, knowing that if nothing is 100% safe and effective and it is rolled out to so many people, there would be injuries and deaths.”
Scott’s husband Jamie developed a rare blood clot in the brain after the AstraZeneca Covid jab. He survived despite being in a coma for a month, but is now partially blind and has cognitive problems that Scott said would never allow him to work again.
While Jamie received a vaccine injury payment, Scott said the amount was insufficient for many people. Some in the group were using food banks and had moved. “That’s just added trauma to what we’re already struggling through,” she told the inquiry.
Others missed payments entirely, Scott said, because they fell below the 60% disability threshold. As of November 30, she said, 17,519 claims had been made to the Vaccination Compensation Scheme, with more than 1,000 people still waiting for a decision after a year and 126 still waiting after almost three years.
As well as calling for reform of the vaccine injury payment system, Scott said doctors and the public should have been told about serious side effects earlier so they could receive treatment early.
The latest module of the Covid inquiry focuses on vaccines and therapies widely seen as a rare highlight in the UK’s pandemic response. The rapid rollout of vaccines saw Britain among the countries that benefited most in terms of lives saved by vaccines.
At the opening session on Tuesday, Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, said expert evidence commissioned by the inquiry “overwhelmingly” suggested that Britain had “a robust and sophisticated system” in place to ensure the highest level of safety. “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Britain’s Covid vaccines have successfully protected the people of Britain against a virus that has killed and is likely to kill hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.
“Side effects can occur with any medicine, but serious side effects, although very rare, are still significant and disabling,” he added. “For those who did suffer serious side effects, and worse, for the very small number of people whose loved ones died as a result, it was of course a complete tragedy, and nothing is said about the rarity of those terrible cases.” Consequences can be taken, or should be taken, to reduce that loss,” he said.
Keith added that references to the “obvious and well-known fact” that vaccination has serious side effects in very rare cases “should not be used as a platform to undermine the critical public health role that vaccination plays in protecting of people against disease, or trying to argue that vaccination at the population level is not overwhelmingly beneficial.”
A spokesperson for the NHS Business Services Authority said: “Since taking over the Vaccination Claims Payment Scheme from the Department for Work and Pensions in November 2021, we have significantly expanded our team to accelerate claims progress and deal with persistently high claim volumes. act. new claims are received, continue personal contact with claimants and engage with healthcare providers to obtain medical records as quickly as possible.
“It can take a lot of time for some healthcare providers to send us medical records, and without these we cannot progress claims to the independent medical review stage. This has led to delays in a number of claims and we recognize that this can be frustrating.”