In Great Britain, around 14,000 people are said to have demanded compensation from the government, citing side effects of the corona vaccinations as the reason. reported the British daily newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
The report also states that payments have already been made to people who suffered from conditions such as stroke, heart attack, dangerous blood clots, inflammation of the spinal cord, excessive swelling at the vaccination sites or facial paralysis after vaccination.
The Telegraph received new figures through a Freedom of Information request. About 97 percent of approved claims are for the AstraZeneca vaccine, while the remaining payments are for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
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In the UK, those affected can turn to a government agency called the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS), which was established in 1979. Since then, it is said to have received 16,000 applications, with Covid vaccines making up the majority with 14,000 applications. The number of applications has increased so much that last year the number of administrative staff was increased from four to 80 in order to be able to process the cases. According to the Telegraph, more than 700 people have been waiting for a decision for over a year.
“Not sufficiently hindered” for compensation
It is apparently difficult to obtain compensation. Thousands of applications have been rejected by medical experts because there is no concrete evidence that the vaccine caused harm. Hundreds of applications have been rejected because the applicants were deemed “insufficiently disabled,” the conservative newspaper reports. According to the regulations, those affected must have a disability of at least 60 percent to be entitled to a payment.
Successful applicants will receive a one-off payment of £120,000 – but so far only 175 payments have been made, representing less than two per cent of applications. More than 5,500 cases have been refused and a further 519 have been rejected before medical assessment. A review of the decision has been requested in almost 1,000 cases, but in only 12 cases the original decision has been reversed.
Last year, AstraZeneca officially acknowledged that in some cases the vaccine can cause VITT (Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia), a specific form of thrombosis in which the body’s immune response to the vaccine leads to dangerous blood clots.
In May, the company withdrew the vaccine worldwide, arguing that newer vaccines were more effective because they had been adapted to variants of the Covid-19 virus.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, like other vaccine manufacturers, was granted legal immunity. Even in the event of successful civil lawsuits for vaccine damage, taxpayers would have to bear the cost of compensation.
