IRELAND: Settlement Reached in Swine Flu Case
Updated
RTE.IE is reporting:
“A High Court action for damages by a student who claimed she developed the sleep disorder narcolepsy after receiving the swine flu vaccine has been settled.
the reporting goes on to state,
“Details of the settlement in the case…have not been made public. However, she is to receive compensation and the High Court was told all her costs are to be paid by the Minister for Health and the Health Service Executive.“
It was seen as a test case for up to 100 more and the court had been asked to determine if any or all of the defendants, including the vaccine maker and the State, were liable for damages.
The defendants in the case were GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, the Health Service Executive, the Minister for Health and the Health Products Regulatory Authority, formerly the Irish Medicines Board.
All claims made in the case were denied and the settlement was made without admission of liability. No orders were made against the HPRA or GSK.
The mother of Aoife Bennett, the woman at the center of the court case, described it as a “landmark” case and said it was extremely difficult for a 26-year-old “to take on the might of the State and a large multinational company GSK” while also coping with her illness.
In 2014 the International Business Times U.K. Edition ran the headline Brain-Damaged UK Victims of Swine Flu Vaccine to Get £60 Million Compensation. At the time, IBTimes wrote each of the victims is “expected to receive £1 million each.” Peter Todd, a lawyer who represented many of the claimants, told the Sunday Times (U.K.): “There has never been a case like this before. The victims of this vaccine have an incurable and lifelong condition and will require extensive medication.”
Unfortunately for Peter Todd and the countless others who had been injured, there has been and will continue to be, cases like this. Neurological damage from vaccines is not a rare occurrence. In fact, in the broken and underreported Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, the U.S. government has paid out over $4 billion and counting to families of vaccine-injured children. Countless cases were due to direct neurological injury from vaccination or conditions arising from such injuries.
In 2018 Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the journal BMJ, wrote about unearthed internal reports suggesting problems with the safety of GSK’s vaccine Pandemrix. Doshi details in his article that as the swine flu vaccination program was being rolled out across the world, joint statements from prominent health organizations and regulatory bodies supported the shot and assured “The vaccine has been thoroughly tested.” “Except it hadn’t ” writes Doshi.
Reviewing internal GSK documents in Ms. Bennett’s case, The BMJ conducted its own analysis of the adverse events, most of which seem to have been reported spontaneously to GSK. The BMJ reports,
“For a range of concerning adverse events, reports were coming in for Pandemrix at a consistently higher rate than for the other two GSK pandemic vaccines–four times the rate of facial palsy, eight times the rate of serious adverse events, nine times the rate of convulsions. Overall, Pandemrix had, proportionally, five times more adverse events reported than Arepanrix and the unadjuvanted vaccine.“
The BMJ continues
“One month after the various vaccines were rolled out to the public, by late November, GSK had received 1138 serious adverse event reports for Pandemrix—a rate of 76 per million doses administered. By mid-December, there had been 3280 serious adverse event reports (68/million doses). The last report seen by The BMJ, dated 31 March 2010, shows 5069 serious adverse events for Pandemrix (72/million doses), seven times the rate for Arepanrix and the unadjuvanted vaccine combined.“