Some families have won substantial awards from sympathetic juries, even though many public health officials have said that the claims of injuries are unfounded.
[11] Unlike most medical interventions vaccines are given to healthy people, where the risk of side effects is not as easily outweighed by the benefit of treating existing disease.
As such, the safety of immunization interventions is taken very seriously by the scientific community, with constant monitoring of a number of data sources looking for patterns of adverse events.
[13] First, some investigators suggest that a medical condition of increasing prevalence or unknown cause is due to an adverse effect of vaccination.
[13] A premature announcement is made of the alleged adverse effect, which resonates with individuals who have the condition and which underestimates the potential harm of not being vaccinated.
[13] Controversies in this area revolve around the question of whether the risks of adverse events following immunization outweigh the benefits of preventing infectious disease.
[26] As part of NVICP, a table has been created which lists various vaccines, side effects that might plausibly be caused by them, and the time within which the symptoms must present in order to be eligible to apply for compensation.
[31][32] For example, for vaccines containing tetanus toxoid (e.g., DTaP, DTP, DT, Td, or TT), anaphylaxis within four hours or brachial neuritis between two and twenty-eight days after administration, may be compensated.
[36][37] The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a passive surveillance program administered jointly by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
[40] Due to the program's open and accessible design and its allowance of unverified reports, incomplete VAERS data is often used in false claims regarding vaccine safety.
It was designed to allow for such things as comparisons between vaccinated and non-vaccinated populations, and for the identification of possible groups at risk for adverse events.
[citation needed] On the 2 December 2020, government agreed under regulation secondary to the 1979 Act the statutory £120,000 blanket payout for any person provably damaged by the vaccine, and by the same addition of COVID-19 to the list, government-approved Covax manufacturers were exempted from legal pursuit.
The authors observed that, outside of Quebec, "People suffering severe AEFIs are left to assume the costs of legal fees, lost wages, uninsured medical services and rehabilitation supports", and plumped for a no-fault system, in which "compensation is needs-based and not punitive.
While AEFIs are possible with routine immunizations, pandemic situations are unique with respect to the speed and scale with which vaccine technologies are developed and distributed.