Claims for vaccine-related injuries are rare



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At a time when the failure of childhood immunization has been at the root of the largest measles epidemic in decades, a little-known database offers a way to measure vaccine safety.

More or less the last twelve years in the USA, people have received about 126 million doses of measles vaccine, a disease that once infected millions of American children and killed 400 to 500 people each year. During this period, 284 people have applied the damage caused by these vaccinations through a federal program created to compensate people injured by vaccines. About half of these requests were rejected, while 143 were compensated.

The data comes from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system established in 1988 after federal legislation established it as the place where claims for harm caused by vaccines must be filed and evaluated. It currently covers claims related to 15 childhood vaccines and the seasonal flu vaccine.

Over the past three decades, when billions of doses of vaccines have been administered to hundreds of millions of Americans, the program has compensated about 6,600 people for the injuries that would have been caused by the vaccines. About 70% of sentences have been settlements in cases where program managers has not found enough evidence of the vaccine's fault.

"Vaccine-related injuries are rare," said Renée Gentry, a lawyer who has been representing people who have been filing vaccine injury claims for almost 18 years. Nevertheless, she said, "These are pharmaceuticals and people can respond to them – you may have a bad reaction to aspirin. They are not magical. "

In recent years, many program payments have been linked to influenza vaccines, mainly involving adults.

A total compensation of $ 4.15 billion has been paid since the program's inception. A small proportion of claims involve deaths. In 30 years, about 520 deaths have been compensated. Nearly half of them involved an older pertussis vaccine that had not been used for two decades.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that vaccines prevented more than 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths among children over a period of 20 years.

Ms. Gentry, who co-directs the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at the George Washington University School of Law, said the vast majority of claims are made by people who are not skeptical about vaccines.

"We've been called all kinds of crazy things, including anti-vax," she said. "Were not." My legal partner's sister spent her life in a wheelchair because of polio, I would have liked that she had this vaccine.

Dr. Meissner said public health authorities are now focusing on training health care providers to administer vaccines without hurting people's shoulders.

Many shoulder injury claims involve the influenza vaccine, which the program has been covering since 2005. Influenza vaccines – recommended annually by federal authorities for adults and children – accounted for about two-thirds of claims awarded from 2006 to 2017. accounted for approximately 44% of total vaccine doses in the country.

Because of influenza vaccines, the program's claims now mostly involve adults rather than children.

The influenza vaccine has also resulted in a significant number of claims involving Guillain Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which the immune system begins to attack the body.

The tetanus vaccine is considered so vital that 576 million doses containing it (often with diphtheria and pertussis) have been eliminated. administered from 2006 to 2017 – and 719 injury claims were compensated, according to the data.

Getting tetanus can be devastating, as has shown a case in 2017 in Oregon. According to a C.D.C. report on this case, a 6-year-old boy who had not been vaccinated contracted tetanus as a result of a cut at the front and had to spend 57 days in the hospital. For much of that period he was in so much pain caused by muscle spasms that he had to be kept in a dark room, wearing earplugs. His care cost more than $ 800,000. The cost of a five-dose treatment of the tetanus vaccine, which would have prevented its suffering, is about $ 150.

In very rare cases, vaccines can cause death. A person may experience anaphylactic shock or a fatal case of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Since 1988, more than half of the 1,300 death claims have been rejected because the program found insufficient evidence of vaccine liability.

About 90 of the 520 compensated death claims were for the influenza vaccine. Almost Half of the claims for death were for DTP, an early vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (also known as whooping cough). The pertussis formulation, known as the whole cell, was replaced in the 1990s by acellular versions contained in the current DTaP and Tdap vaccines.

The vaccine compensation program was created following a flood of lawsuits, particularly from DTP, encouraging pharmaceutical companies to abandon the vaccine sector. Public health officials and Congress feared that there were not enough manufacturers providing essential vaccines.

A 1986 law created the compensation fund, funded by a tax paid by vaccine manufacturers 75 cents per dose. The law acts as a shield of responsibility for pharmaceutical companies: Individuals claiming to have suffered an injury must first seek redress from the Federal Court of Claims Program of the United States and the Ministry of Health and Social Services before they can sue a manufacturer.

There are about 2,800 pending cases to be resolved, which takes on average two to three years.

If people refuse compensation or if their claim is rejected, they may sue the vaccine manufacturer, although Ms. Gentry has stated that, as the program requires "a less burdensome burden of proof" than that required by a doctor. civil court, it would be difficult to win the case on the basis of a trial. the same claim.

"Once you've gone through this process, if you lose," she said, "you're probably not going to sue and sue."

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