Saturday, January 9, 2021

Building Trust for the Vaccines

 

Hi Everyone.

I’m back and Happy Holidays!

What I want to share with you this week is a Letter to the Editor that I wrote that was just published in The Virginian Pilot on January 6, 2021. The title that they gave it was Build Trust. I was commenting on an article that was in the paper entitled “Rare claims of vaccine injury steered to obscure US office.”

Here’s what I wrote:

So, government officials want us to trust them as they inject us with vaccines to stop COVID-19. However, based on the article if you suffer an injury caused by one of these vaccines, then you may be out of luck when it comes to obtaining compensation and support.

This obscure office is called the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). Its name implies getting compensation help for vaccine injuries, but the truth is very different.

CICP decisions are made in secret. Decisions denying claims can’t be appealed to a judge, and you have to pay your own attorney’s fees. Fewer than 10% of claims are paid. With the H1N1 swine flu, it awarded only 29 of 499 claimants. Its standard of proof is that drug makers can only be sued for “willful misconduct.” Nothing is paid for pain and suffering.

There is a better option available: expand the scope of the federal vaccine court, which permits claims to be filed within 3 years instead of one. It pays for lawyers and witnesses and allows appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. The vaccine court compensates 70% of the cases that come before it and it compensates for pain and suffering.

So, if government officials want us to trust them, then they need to make sure that people injured by the COVID-19 vaccines will be taken care of. The law should be to direct all COVID-19 injury cases to the federal vaccine court!

Since I was limited to 250 words, this is what I would have added: I’d suggest an ad campaign letting people know if they’re injured by the vaccines that they’re not left to fend for themselves, that the government has their back. This could make a huge difference in people’s attitudes about getting injected.

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