A series of government documents has exposed a compensation strategy for COVID-19 vaccine injuries that was fundamentally built on speculative and unreliable data from a previous H1N1 outbreak.
The 2020 impact assessment for the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) candidly acknowledged the fundamental uncertainty of predicting vaccine adverse effects. Officials explicitly stated that 'very rare adverse effects of a COVID-19 vaccine will only be observable when there has been a large-scale roll-out' - yet proceeded to construct a claims management framework using H1N1 vaccine data.
The documents reveal a remarkable admission of methodological weakness: rates of potential claims were 'assumed to be twice the levels seen from H1N1v' - an approach the government itself described as an 'unevidenced assumption'. Despite this acknowledged lack of scientific rigour, these speculative figures formed the basis for determining potential compensation rates.
Freedom of information
A recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request supported by citizen-empowerment website WhatDoTheyKnow exposed the practical outcomes of this approach. Of 15,804 claims received, only 188 claimants have been notified of payment - a 1.2% success rate that aligns suspiciously closely with the original mathematically modeled scenarios.
The original impact assessment even included a 2.5x multiplier to account for potential future vaccination rounds, while simultaneously expressing concern about the 'risks to capacity' of the scheme and arm's-length bodies if 'large numbers of claims' were received.
On November 12, 2024, Andrew Gwynne, Labour's Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department of Health and Social Care, revealed that over £25 million has been spent reviewing these claims - a sum that significantly exceeds the total compensation paid out.
This approach represents more than administrative caution and could be viewed as a calculated strategy of financial risk management that prioritizes government exposure protection over genuine support for potentially injured citizens.
