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Vaccine damage schemes in the US and UK reappraised: making them fit for purpose in light of COVID-19

Goldberg, Richard

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Abstract

Vaccines have continued to play a crucial global role in preventing infectious diseases in the twenty-first century. The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined their importance, with vaccines seen as the best way to protect the public from coronavirus. A longstanding problem of governments has been the extent to which they should assume responsibility for the compensation of those injured by vaccines. This paper reappraises the vaccine damage schemes currently available in the US and UK in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. It argues that any improvements to both US and UK schemes should be included in a revised national vaccine policy which takes into consideration their respective long-term national vaccine strategies to prepare for future pandemics. It supports the adoption of a UK-wide National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, similar to the one in the US, to be administered by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. To balance the need for rigorous criteria to determine causation with the need for fairness, the programme should adopt the US practice of allowing negotiated settlements between parties in circumstances where review of the evidence has not concluded that the vaccine(s) caused the alleged injury but there are close calls concerning causation.

Citation

Goldberg, R. (2022). Vaccine damage schemes in the US and UK reappraised: making them fit for purpose in light of COVID-19. Legal Studies, 42(4), 576-599. https://doi.org/10.1017/lst.2022.9

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 5, 2022
Online Publication Date Mar 7, 2022
Publication Date 2022-12
Deposit Date Feb 8, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Legal Studies
Print ISSN 0261-3875
Electronic ISSN 1748-121X
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 42
Issue 4
Pages 576-599
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/lst.2022.9

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society of Legal Scholars





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