The critical difference is that there's no culpability or consequences or Erin Brockavich-style showdown with the Big Lawyers from Big Pharma.
For the "vaccine court" you're just presenting a claim that vaccine X could cause condition Y, that you developed condition Y after taking vaccine X, and that there's no other reason you'd suffer from condition Y. If the court finds it plausible, you (and your lawyers) get paid, and everyone goes about their business the same as before.
See also vaccine manufacturers for an example about how it isn't about the patients. They are legally immune from prosecution under the PREP Act for anything that unintentionally goes wrong. You also can't sue the FDA for approving any drug under Emergency Use Authorization.
As for the vaccine court created to handle payouts from harm, it has only paid out 29 times in the last decade. I might believe the vaccines are safe - but 29 payouts (<6% of all filed claims) in a decade seems way too low by any statistic. The proof of harm seems insurmountable.
There were lawsuits and they found it safest to settle, but that doesn't mean the complaints had statistical validity. According to the paper I posted, the FDA found no evidence of the vaccine causing harm.
Even if harm had occurred, it would have to be weighed against the risk of harm from Lyme disease.
It's interesting that they aren't requesting a liability waiver for the case when it doesn't have side effects, but simply doesn't do much, like the flu vaccine, due to how quickly the virus mutates. Because that could easily happen as well. Others aren't requesting that either. This sounds reassuring, in the sense that they don't try to CYA for charging billions for something that doesn't work.
Not just proof, even when it is the opinion of medical experts that the person in question did not develop adverse side effects from using the vaccine. They've set the bar so low that, should judges actually act on it, it's hard to imagine many companies being willing to supply them with vaccines.
Generally vaccines are fairly safe, however the government has created numerous incentives for their to be a lack of accountability, thus its to be expected that safety will fall over time. Specifically, they made it illegal to sue vaccine companies (making it so you must go to special vaccine court with predefined minimal damage awards).
Have you ever wondered why you see "get your vaccine shots" at every grocery you go in to? Its precisely because its almost risk free for big pharma. Those that have permanent or fatal reactions have little recourse.
Imagine trying to create a startup company whose business model was you were injecting strangers with some substance you created and your pitch was "we can just inject this into everyone at the local Walmart"...think that idea would get past the lawyers? Easy to do if you get congress to pass laws saying you will be held harmless.
It seems like you can’t make up your mind whether you’re trying to prove the government is doing a bad thing or whether the vaccines are unsafe. For the sake of argumentation, let’s say that the 4 cases of thrombosis per million is accurate, and all 4 cases are very severe. In that case, yeah, we should probably see more court settlements in favor of patients, and the government is doing a bad thing.
However, if only ~900 people in the whole country have a severe reaction to vaccines but they save millions of people annually by preventing deadly and debilitating diseases, then you’ve shot yourself in the foot! That statistic is strong evidence that vaccines are very safe and likely produce more good than harm!
"Unintentionally" is doing a lot of work there. This is to incentivize pharma makers to create vaccines without having to worry about spurious lawsuits. If they commit some kind of outright fraud, selling substances that aren't what they say or fabricating research results, they're still liable. This isn't much different from the way medical malpractice works. You can't (successfully) sue a doctor who performed open heart surgery on your husband because he died afterward, in most cases, because it's a risky procedure and that risk is something you have to accept. But if they were drunk while performing the surgery, you can absolutely sue for that.
In this specific case, though, there isn't necessarily this kind of informed consent. People can be legally mandated to get vaccines, so it would make no sense to hold the company providing the vaccines liable. The entity creating the mandate, in this case the government itself, should be the one liable, and they are.
Your number doesn't mean a whole lot, either. The most dangerous vaccines are for things like malaria and anthrax that typically only military members get, and when they end up harmed, the VA pays them disability benefits. There are way more than 29 people getting VA disability because of events like this.
In a normal trial, you give half of participants a vaccine, and half of participants a placebo. Then, you wait around and see how many people in each group catch COVID naturally and get sick. Your vaccine works if fewer people who received a vaccine get sick compared to the placebo.
In a challenge trial, you give half of participants a vaccine and half of participants a placebo, and then purposefully expose them all to COVID so you don’t have to wait around for them to catch COVID naturally. As before, your vaccine works if fewer people who received a vaccine get sick compared to the placebo.
A challenge trial gives you data which is more, not less, robust, because you’re controlling for more variables between groups. And we’ve used challenge trials to test vaccines in the past—just, never with a disease that’s remotely as deadly as COVID.
Any firestorm would result from a participant dying from the COVID we gave them (which could absolutely happen), not from the vaccine.
This seems like apples and oranges to me. Theranos was lying about having a working product and I don't think there were many patients actually hurt, since they still used other products that were already available to have the appearance of something working, but I digress. In the case of vaccines, there is a product that thousands or millions of people take, and some small minority of people have some anomalous reactions. If you are one person that has a serious reaction to a vaccine that millions of people have had just fine, should you be compensated? I can see if it affected a large percentage of people, but where to draw that line I don't know, but then it shouldn't have made it past enough red tape with the FDA to be so widely available.
If the product causes provable harm then company should be prosecuted criminally by the state to determine if the testing done was sufficeint and there was no faul play.
But letting random people sue manufacturer because they have some symptoms at later point in time than the time they took the vaccine is just recipie for what already happened on case of Lyme vaccine. Everybody looses except for lawyers and people loose the most.
"deserve a license to kill" is a crappy framing. Vaccines are different for a number of reasons; see the history of antivax (predating modern antivax).
all medicines come with risks, vaccines probably have a higher risk than aspirin, but still represent a massively overall good thing, and the public is very sensitive to hearing about extremely small numbers of adverse events.
Well you don't know the long term effects. So you can't say the trade off is worth it. It's just blind optimism on your part, not even shared by the vaccine manufacturers, that put in their government contracts clauses that they will not guarantee that it works or take liability for any side effects. Despite making billions on these drugs.
There are many countries with many different jurisdictions and drug safety requirements, and not all vaccines passed all jurisdictions’ rules.
Also, I’m no lawyer, but I would expect an act of negligence — as compared to “risks inherent in bringing forward new products to prevent severe cases of a virulent disease with known severe side effects in a significant minority of those not killed by it” — is already frowned upon by the law, and criminal misconduct already comes with prison time?
Even in the most pessimistic assumptions of vaccine safety, the disease is much worse than the cure, and yet I don’t believe anyone is seriously suggesting D Trump or B Johnson goes to The Hague for an unfriendly chat about Crimes Against Humanity.
For the "vaccine court" you're just presenting a claim that vaccine X could cause condition Y, that you developed condition Y after taking vaccine X, and that there's no other reason you'd suffer from condition Y. If the court finds it plausible, you (and your lawyers) get paid, and everyone goes about their business the same as before.
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