It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord), and I am grateful to him for introducing this important subject. I am sorry that it has not attracted more attention from hon. Members on both sides of the House.
How often have we said, “There is nothing new under sun”? I will start my remarks by referring to August 1975. Tanya Price had a whooping cough vaccine at the age of six months. Shortly after, she developed convulsions, and 18 months later, she was described as a “motionless and expressionless being” in a debate in this House by her MP, the late Robert Adley, who was my predecessor but one as MP for Christchurch, although at that time the constituency was Christchurch and Lymington. Robert Adley worked tirelessly for months to try to obtain redress from the health service for Tanya’s injuries, which were caused by the whooping cough vaccine.
That was 48 years ago, under a Labour Government, but little has changed in the Government’s institutional reluctance to admit to medical failures and institute redress schemes. Robert Adley described fighting Tanya’s battle as fighting the NHS, which he described as being like
“sparring with a giant octopus.”
That was all those years ago, but I do not see that the situation has changed. In his Adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 22 March 1977, Robert Adley said:
“This fight has been going on for a long time. Certainly in the last four years a group of parents have sought to get what they see as justice for their children but they have had precious little satisfaction. The battle is in many ways a repetition of the thalidomide debate…The result is decaying confidence in all the immunisation programmes. It represents a flirtation with tragedy, particularly when most of the other vaccines appear to be safe, harmless and have little or no disadvantageous side effects.”
He rightly severely criticised
“the position adopted by the Secretary of State in his refusal to consider compensation, and until…recently, his refusal…at least…to discuss the problem openly”.
—[Official Report, 22 March 1977; Vol. 928, c. 1244.]
It would be wonderful to say that things have moved on. One of the consequences of the thalidomide scandal was the setting up of the royal commission headed by
Lord Pearson, which took some five years to report, eventually doing so in 1978. It was set up following the Robens Committee on Safety and Health at Work, and in the light of concern about thalidomide. When the Pearson report was published, it was welcomed by the then Prime Minister as a comprehensive review. It was designed to remove unnecessary litigation, time delays and all the rest when getting redress for people who had suffered medical injuries induced by vaccines or other drugs. Paragraph 1,398—it was a long report—recommended the following:
“We concluded that there is a special case for paying compensation for vaccine damage where vaccination is recommended by a public authority and is undertaken to protect the community. We had reached this conclusion when we were asked by the Government for our views.”
The Pearson Committee also recommended strict liability for vaccine damage.
Sadly, those recommendations were not implemented, although we did get the vaccine damage payments legislation of 1979. I have been campaigning to get that legislation brought up to date, so that it is relevant to the circumstances of all those who have suffered loss and damage as a result of doing the right thing and taking their covid-19 vaccine. It has been an uphill struggle. The most recent information I have is that there are so many applications under the vaccine damage payment scheme that the Government cannot cope. In three years, only 163 out of more than 9,000 claims have been successful—those were the figures as at 31 January. Of those claims, 4,000 were still awaiting a resolution; 2,000 have been outstanding for more than six months, and some for more than 18 months. That is directly damaging to all those people who are thinking of engaging in civil claims, which the Government keep advising victims to do.
Making a civil claim against a large multinational pharmaceutical company—or the Government, for that matter—is an expensive business. I have a constituent whose father has the £120,000 compensation, but for whom that is wholly inadequate because of the severity and longevity of the injuries and disabilities that he sustained as a result of the vaccine. He is finding it nigh on impossible to get access to justice, because solicitors will not take up his calls. Even starting an action will cost tens of thousands of pounds. That is an intolerable situation, and one which, all those years ago, Lord Pearson was trying to avoid.
The Government’s feeble response is, “If you think you’ve been injured by a vaccine, go and seek compensation through the courts.” It does not work quite like that, as sadly has been seen by all those people whose cases it has already been established were caused by vaccines. One would think that if the vaccine damage payment scheme has established that an individual’s damage was caused by the vaccine, as night follows day, the Government would concede liability in a civil action. Far from it; they insist that individuals must fight the case before the courts.