Covid jab injury payments must be urgently reformed, says inquiry chair

The COVID-19 vaccine programme in the UK was an “extraordinary feat” but the payment scheme for people injured by the jabs must be urgently reformed, the public inquiry on the pandemic has found.In her report, the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, praised the fact the UK was a world leader in biomedical sciences, which set it in good stead for developing and rolling out vaccines at scale. But she said the government must act urgently to reform the scheme for payments to the “small minority” of people seriously injured by the vaccines, and almost double maximum payouts to at least £200,000 from an upper limit of £120,000 at present.She said the threshold for people to be 60% disabled to receive payment should be scrapped, saying it left “those people with a significant injury that affects how they live, but does not meet the 60% threshold, with nothing”.The report adds: “This part of the scheme should be reformed as a matter of urgency, and consideration should be given to a graduated threshold scheme.”Lady Hallett also called for the government to deal with the worldwide problem of vaccine hesitancy and urged greater consideration of why some groups of people were unwilling or unable to access jabs.The UK COVID-19 public inquiry report into vaccines and therapeutics, published on Thursday, is the fourth report into the handling of the pandemic. In her foreword to 274-page study, Hallett said that even though some people were harmed by vaccines, there were effective systems in place to assess the safety and efficacy of the jabs during the pandemic.“These included rigorous trials and regulatory approval processes and the taking of prompt action when any problem was identified,” she said.By March 2023, 475,000 lives had been saved by jabs in England and Scotland, and millions of lives were saved worldwide. “On any objective analysis, the risks of the COVID-19 vaccines were carefully managed and were far outweighed by the benefits,” Hallett said.She added: “The vaccination programme was an extraordinary feat. Effective vaccines were developed, produced and delivered to the majority of the population in record time.”But Hallett said the inquiry “acknowledges the suffering of those for whom vaccines led to serious injury or death” and that “action is needed in all four nations [of the UK] to build trust within communities with lower vaccine uptake and to make vaccines more accessible to them, before the next pandemic hits”.