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People who were severely harmed by Covid vaccines faced an “inadequate and inefficient” process for obtaining a government payout, with many rejected and others waiting years for a decision, the Covid inquiry has heard.
The vaccine damage payment scheme offers a one-off sum of £120,000 to people who have such serious adverse reactions to the vaccines that they are at least 60% disabled. But people affected by vaccine injuries told the inquiry they did not get the help and financial support they deserved.
“The scheme is inadequate and inefficient. It offers too little, too late, to too few,” said Kate Scott from Vaccine Injured and Bereaved UK. “There should be a fair compensation scheme, and the government should have planned for that, knowing that if nothing is 100% safe and effective and it’s being rolled out to so many people, there would be injuries and there would be deaths.”
Scott’s husband, Jamie, developed a rare blood clot in the brain after having 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 prevent him from ever working again.
While Jamie received a vaccine damage payment, Scott said the amount was insufficient for many people. Some in the group were using food banks and had moved homes. “That’s just extra trauma to what we’re already struggling through,” she told the inquiry.
Others missed out on payments entirely, Scott said, because they fell short of the 60% threshold for disability. As of 30 November, she said, 17,519 claims had been made to the vaccine damage payment scheme, with more than 1,000 people still waiting for a decision after a year and 126 still waiting after nearly three years.
Beyond calling for reform of the vaccine damage payment scheme, Scott said doctors and the public should have been informed about serious side-effects sooner so they could get early treatment.
The latest module of the Covid inquiry is focused on vaccines and therapeutics that are widely regarded as a rare highlight in the UK’s pandemic response. The rapid rollout of vaccines meant the UK was among the countries to benefit most in terms of lives saved by vaccines.
Speaking at the opening session on Tuesday, Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, said expert evidence commissioned by the inquiry suggested “overwhelmingly” that the UK operated “a robust and sophisticated system” for ensuring the highest levels of safety. “The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that the UK Covid vaccines successfully protected the people of the UK against a virus that was killing and liable to kill hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.
“Side-effects may be encountered in any medicine, but serious side-effects, whilst very rare, are nevertheless significant and debilitating,” he added. “For those who did suffer serious side-effects, and even worse, for the very small number of people whose loved ones died as a result, it was, of course, a complete tragedy, and nothing that is said about the rarity of those terrible consequences can be taken, or should be taken, to diminish that loss,” he said.
Keith added that references to the “obvious and well-known fact” that in very rare cases, vaccination has serious side-effects, “must not be used as a platform to seek to undermine the vital public health role that vaccination plays in keeping people safe from disease, or to try to seek to argue that at a population level, vaccination is not overwhelmingly beneficial.”
A spokesperson for the NHS Business Services Authority said: “Since taking over the vaccine damage payment scheme from the Department for Work and Pensions in November 2021, we have significantly expanded our team to speed up the progress of claims, handle the continued high volumes of new claims being received, continue personalised contact with claimants, and engage with healthcare providers to obtain medical records as quickly as possible.
“It can take significant time for some healthcare providers to send us medical records and we cannot progress claims to the independent medical assessment stage without them. This has caused delays to a number of claims, and we acknowledge this can be frustrating.”
