While health officials anxiously await a COVID-19 vaccine, questions still remain about the inevitable risk of severe side effects — which is always a possibility even if the new vaccine is declared to be “a very safe product.”
You — along with many others — may think you can pursue compensation should you or your family have a vaccine injury, but that is not necessarily the case. Manufacturers have immunity from lawsuits related to injuries caused by vaccines, with narrow exceptions, as outlined in The U.S. Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act.
In 2006, a global pharmaceutical-industry lobbying group demanded that manufacturers be granted protection from lawsuits associated with vaccine-related adverse events if they were going to participate in pandemic responses.
For most countries, offering pharmaceutical companies indemnity or complete immunity from lawsuits is constitutionally or financially impossible, while some governments think manufacturers should pay for the injuries their products cause. But drug makers have insisted that, without a no-fault compensation plan set up that leaves them virtually liability-free, they can’t — or won’t — make vaccines.
With the upcoming COVID-19 vaccine, The New England Journal of Medicine notes that “there also needs to be a mechanism for efficiently handling a high volume of claims from throughout the world.”
Source: New England Journal of Medicine October 28, 2020