NHS body made 72 payments and approved further 24 claims for disablement from jabs
The UK government is set to pay out over £11.5 million in Covid-19 vaccine damages to nearly 100 claimants, according to official data released by the NHS Business Services Authority.
A freedom of information request from Research Professional News revealed that, as of May, 72 people have received a payment from the government for being severely disabled by a Covid-19 vaccine, or on behalf of someone who died from the vaccine.
In total, 96 people have been told that they are entitled to receive money via the UK’s Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, run by the NHS authority, which means 24 are still waiting on the cash.
The authority said that the scheme provides a “one-off, tax-free payment of £120,000 to successful applicants where, on very rare occasions, a vaccine has caused severe disablement”.
This means the authority has paid out just over £8.6 million, with a further £2.9m approved to pay.
Released on 13 June, the NHS authority data also reveal that 1,614 claims were rejected out of the 5,708 received, while 109 did not meet the service’s criteria for medical assessment. The data is not broken down by type of vaccine.
To claim for a payment under the scheme, people must prove on the balance of probabilities that the jab caused their illness and must be assessed as being at least 60 per cent disabled as a result of the vaccine.
The data also reveal that 3,889 claims have not yet reached an outcome. The NHS authority said that in some cases this was because it had not received medical records for the person making the claim from the healthcare providers listed on their form. They added that they could only start medical assessments once they had a person’s full medical records.
Of all the claims received, the data reveal 430 are related to someone who has died as a result of the Covid jab.
An earlier data release by the NHS authority, in April, said that the medical conditions of the claimants awarded a vaccine-damage payment until then were, in this order:
- Vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis/cerebral venous sinus thrombosis
- Guillain-Barré syndrome
- Other
According to data from the Office for National Statistics, 53 people in England and Wales have died from adverse effect to the Covid-19 vaccine, where it was noted as an underlying cause, and a further 8 deaths involved the Covid jab, meaning it was mentioned on the death certificate.
There have been fears from some members of the public about vaccine safety, 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.
A version of this article appeared in Research Fortnight