The Government has been caught shamefully playing hardball with the victims of Covid vaccine injuries, refusing to settle payouts despite devastating harms, as legal bills mount. The Telegraph has more.
Jamie Scott is nothing if not a fighter. He must be to have survived a reaction to his COVID-19 vaccine so violent that hospital doctors phoned his wife three times to tell her to get to his bedside because he was about to die. Each time he pulled through.
Fit and healthy before the jab, the 47-year-old father-of-two has suffered a permanent brain injury that prevents him from working. Or even being able to look after his children on his own for anything more than an hour.
Photographs released to the Telegraph show Mr. Scott in intensive care, a spaghetti of tubes keeping him alive. Scarring snakes all the way round his scalp, the result of an emergency craniotomy that removed part of his skull to reduce swelling on the brain that was about to kill him.
The battle to stay alive was, however, just the beginning. In the past three years, Mr. Scott and his indomitable wife Kate have waged a war to get fair compensation for themselves and other victims of the jab. They are Davids fighting the twin Goliaths of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical giant, and the might of the British Government. It is proving a daunting, frustrating and at times heartbreakingly impossible challenge.
AstraZeneca is one of the U.K.’s biggest companies, the second largest in the FTSE 100, worth a staggering £185 billion. Business is so good that Sir Pascal Soriot, its Chief Executive, is the highest paid among FTSE-100 bosses.
Yet this week, as AstraZeneca confirmed Sir Pascal’s annual salary would rise to £18.7 million, the Telegraph obtained court documents that showed the pharmaceuticals firm was admitting for the first time in legal proceedings that its vaccine can “in very rare cases” cause an illness which is fatal about 20% of the time. When its symptoms of blood clots and low blood plate counts are not deadly it leaves its victims with devastating injuries. In the same documents, AstraZeneca accepts that it has no idea why the vaccine, developed in conjunction with the University of Oxford, should do that. “The causal mechanism is not known,” the company said in correspondence with Jamie Scott’s lawyers.
It’s a legal mess made more complicated because the Government indemnified AstraZeneca and other Covid vaccine-makers ahead of the mass rollout that began to much fanfare in December 2020. In other words, though AstraZeneca is one of the U.K.’s wealthiest businesses (it generated revenue of £37bn in 2023) it will be the British taxpayer that will foot any legal bills and damages should Mr. Scott and 50 other claimants win their class action suit against the company. The details of the indemnification agreement have never been made public.
In the legal case, AstraZeneca is accused of playing hardball, but it is unclear whether behind the scenes the U.K. Treasury is baulking at any payout. For the victims, it is simply prolonging their agony. …
Even though it encouraged AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, to enter into the deal – the claim is Boris Johnson’s administration wanted the vaccine to be an all-British affair – Ministers have so far refused to intervene. They could increase the Government’s own compensation deal or else step in now and settle the class action being brought against AstraZeneca. The sums are not huge, maybe as much as £100m in total compensation. But with every day the Government refuses to intervene, the legal bills go up while the victims get nothing.
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