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UK pays out around £4m in Covid-19 vaccine damages

  

Over 30 claims have been successful, while ONS reports 52 deaths caused by Covid-19 vaccine

The UK government has paid out around £4 million in Covid-19 vaccine damages, according to official data released by the NHS Business Services Authority.

The data show that 31 people have successfully made claims for being severely disabled by a Covid-19 vaccine, or on behalf of someone who died from the vaccine as of December 2022.

Fewer than five other claims have been approved since then via the UK’s Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme run by the NHS authority.

The authority told Research Professional News that the scheme provides a “one-off, tax-free payment to successful applicants where, on very rare occasions, a vaccine has caused severe disablement.

“The payment is currently £120,000 and is the same for each claim paid.”

This means that at least £3,840,000 has been approved for payouts to people severely disabled by, or to representatives of those killed by, Covid-19 vaccines in the UK. The data is not broken down by type of vaccine.

The NHS BSA data also reveal that 491 claims have been rejected out of 524 for which a medical assessment has been completed as of 10 January.

Of the rejected claims, 469 were turned down because the medical assessor did not find causation, while others were rejected for not meeting the eligibility criteria for the scheme.

In total, 3,393 claims have been received and 1,348 are in the process of being looked at by a medical assessor.

There have been fears from some members of the public about vaccine safety—with some also worrying about the unexplained trend of extra non-Covid mortality. But available evidence from clinical trials and subsequent evaluations consistently shows that, overall, Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective in reducing Covid-19 deaths—despite extremely rare severe side effects in some individuals.

According to data from the Office for National Statistics, 52 people in England and Wales have died from the Covid-19 vaccine, whereas around 160,000 have died from Covid-19 between March 2020 and December 2022.